lassoed, as you might say, your argument is all right; but if you are
merely going to sit down and wait for it to ring you up on the
telephone, and ask you when and where you wish your barrels of gold
delivered, I think it will be your creditors, and not fortune, who will
be found knocking at your door. How are you going about this business,
provided you do retire from Wall Street?"
"Choose my field and work it," replied the Idiot. "For the present I
should choose the home. That is the field I am most interested in just
now. I should study its necessities, and endeavor to meet whatever these
might demand with an adequate supply. Any man who stays around home all
day will find lots of room for the employment of his talents along
inventive lines."
"You've tried it, have you?" asked Mr. Brief.
"Certainly I have," said the Idiot, "though I haven't invented anything
yet. Why, only last week I stayed home on Monday--wash-day--and a
thousand things that might be invented suggested themselves to me."
"As, for instance?" asked Mrs. Idiot, who was anxious to know of any
possible thing that could mitigate the horrors of wash-day.
[Illustration: "'A NICE LITTLE BASKET-HAT ON HER HEAD TO HOLD THE PINS
IN'"]
"Well, it wouldn't help _you_ much, my dear," said the Idiot, "but the
wash-lady would hail with unmixed delight a substitute for her mouth to
hold clothes-pins in while she is hanging out the clothes. I watched
Ellen in the yard for ten minutes that day, and it was pathetic. There
she was, standing on her tiptoes, hanging innumerable garments on the
line, her mouth full of clothes-pins, and Jimpsonberry's hired man
leaning over the fence trying to shout sweet nothings in her ear. If she
had had a nice little basket-hat on her head to hold the pins in she
could have answered back without stopping her work every other minute
to take them out of her mouth in order to retort to his honeyed
sentiments."
Mrs. Idiot laughed. "Ellen finds time enough to talk and do the washing,
too," she said. "I sometimes think she does more talking than washing."
"No doubt of it; she's only human, like the rest of us," said the Idiot.
"But she might save time to do something else for us if she could do the
washing and the talking at the same time. She may give up the washing,
but she'll never give up the talking. Therefore, why not make the
talking easier?"
"What you need most, I think," put in Mr. Brief, "is an instrument to
keep hired men from leaning over the fence and distracting the attention
of the laundress from her work. That would be a great boon."
"Not unless idleness is a great boon," retorted the Idiot. "Half the
hired men I know would be utterly out of employment if they couldn't
lean over a fence and talk to somebody. Leaning over a fence and talking
to somebody forms seventy-five per cent. of the hired man's daily labor.
He seems to think that is what he is paid for. Still, any one who
objects could very easily remedy the conversational detail in so far as
it goes on over the fence."
"By the use of barbed wire, I presume," suggested Mr. Pedagog.
"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the
Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them
when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how
to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all.
Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the
small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from
climbing over for a short cut home."
"With what result?" asked Mr. Brief.
[Illustration: "'AN ELECTRIC NOTICE TO QUIT'"]
"With the result that I had to buy a new pair of pruning-shears," said
the Idiot. "My Anti-Over-the-Fence-Gabber," he continued, "would involve
certain complex details, but it would work. I should have an electric
battery connected with the upper cable of the fence, and an operator
stationed inside of the house, close to a key which would send some
six hundred or seven hundred volts through the cable whenever needed.
Then if I felt that Jimpsonberry's man was interfering with my
laundress, as soon as he leaned over the fence I'd have the operator
send him an electric notice to quit."
"A message?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"No, a plain shock. Two hundred volts as a starter, three hundred as a
reminder, and the full seven hundred if necessary to make the hint
plainer."
"That would be cruel," observed Mrs. Pedagog.
"Not wholly," said the Idiot. "It would be an advantage to the man
himself in one way. Hired men have too little electricity in their
systems, Mrs. Pedagog. If Jimpsonberry's man, for instance, would take
all the electricity I'd give him and apply it to his work,
Jimpsonberry's unpulled dandelions would not be such a constant menace
to my lawn. I compel Mike to weed out my lawn every spring and autumn,
but Jimpsonberry doesn't attend to his at all. He doesn't sleep on it,
and so doesn't bother about it. Consequently, when his dandelions go to
seed the seed is blown over into my grass, and every year I get an
uninvited crop, which at a dollar a thousand would make me a
millionaire."
"Why don't you apply your inventive genius to the discovery of a
seedless dandelion?" asked the Lawyer. "It seems to me that would be the
best solution of the dandelion problem."
"Because Jimpsonberry wouldn't have 'em if I discovered 'em," said the
Idiot. "I judge from the millions he raises every year that he is
satisfied with dandelions as they are. He's got enough for himself, and
never makes any charge for those he gives to his neighbors."
"I think a furnace-feeder would be a good thing, too," the Idiot
continued, in a moment. "My furnace is a chronic sufferer from
indigestion because on some days it is gorged with coal and on others
with ashes. Seems to me if I could get a month's time in which to
concentrate my attention upon a furnace-feeder, I could devise some kind
of a contraption that would invoke the enthusiastic love of the suburban
resident in Arctic latitudes the world over."
"I have often thought of that possibility myself," observed Mr. Pedagog,
his eyes fondly resting upon a steaming plate of griddle-cakes that
had just been brought in. "But coal is a rebellious quantity. A
furnace-feeder would need to be delicately adjusted, and coal cannot be
handled with delicacy. It requires a chute rather than a tube. It must
be manipulated with the shovel, not the sugar-tongs."
"Correct," said the Idiot. "Therefore, _you_ would experiment on a chute
or a shovel, abandoning all idea of refining the coal. I, on the other
hand, would experiment with the coal itself, Mr. Pedagog. Why not
liquefy it, and let it drop automatically into the furnace through a
self-acting spigot?"
"Liquefy coal?" asked Mr. Pedagog.
"Certainly," replied the Idiot. "We liquefy pretty nearly everything
else. If liquid air, why not liquid coal? Everything we have in nature
in these days apparently can be liquefied, and while I am not familiar
with the process, I see no reason why a ton of coal should not be
reduced to such a shape that it can be bottled. Once bottled and
provided with an automatic dropper, it could easily be adjusted so as to
flow in proper quantities into the furnace at proper intervals."
"It would be very expensive. Do you know what a pint of liquid air
costs?" demanded the Doctor.
"No," said the Idiot. "I neither breathe nor drink it. The plain old
stuff is good enough for me, and cheap if you don't have to go to the
mountains or the sea-shore to get your supply."
"Granting coal could be liquefied," the Doctor assented, "I venture to
say that a ton of it would cost as much as five hundred dollars."
"I've no doubt it would," said the Idiot; "but I could afford a ton of
coal at five hundred dollars if my scheme worked. A successful invention
would make bread seem cheap at ten dollars a loaf. There's another thing
I should put my mind on, and that is a method of cooking a cauliflower
so that everybody in the house, as well as the neighbors, should not
know that you are doing so," he continued. "I am particularly fond of
cauliflower, but it is undeniable that in the process of cooking it
becomes obtrusive, almost to the point of ostentation. I've spoken about
it many times. Mike, the gardener, to whom I've spoken on the subject,
thinks the cauliflower itself, if sprinkled with _eau de Cologne_ while
growing, would cease to be obnoxious in the cooking; but that is too
expensive a process. It would take a dozen cases of _eau de Cologne_ to
bring a single cauliflower to maturity. My son, Tommy, has stated that
he thinks it might be boiled in Florida-water instead of in the simple
variety that comes from the pipes. A good suggestion for a small boy,
but also expensive. Hired men and small boys do not think of the
exchequer of the principal in their plans. They don't have to. Their
allowance and wages are usually all velvet--an elegant vulgarism for
surplus--and for my own part I have constantly to veto their little
schemes for the betterment of my condition in order to have any
condition at all left. But as far as the arrangement of an odorless
cauliflower-cooker is concerned, it is as simple as A B C, barring one
or two complications."
"I wish you'd hurry up and invent it," cried Mrs. Idiot, with
enthusiasm. "What are the main features of this simple contrivance?"
"I'd have a boiler, in the first place, in which to boil the animal,"
said the Idiot. "When the water was ready I'd clap the creature into it,
and before it had time to remonstrate I'd fasten a hermetically sealed
cover over the top."
"But when you took it off the results would still be overpowering," said
Mr. Pedagog.
[Illustration: "'FINDING OUT WHAT IS BEING COOKED FOR DINNER'"]
"No, my dear sir," said the Idiot, "for the simple reason that I should
affix a cold-air box and a flue to the hermetically sealed boiler.
Through the cold-air box fresh air would constantly flow into the
boiler. Through the flue all the aromatic drawbacks of the cauliflower
would be carried off through the chimney into the upper air. Anybody who
wished to know whether we were going to have cauliflower for dinner or
not would have to climb up to the roof and sniff at the chimney-top to
find out."
"It _is_ simple, isn't it, Mrs. Idiot?" Mrs. Pedagog said.
"Very," replied Mrs. Idiot. "Indeed, it seems so extremely simple that I
should like to know where the complications lie."
"Where all the complications in cooking lie, my dear," said the
Idiot, "in the cook. The chief complication would lie in getting a cook
who could, or if she could, would, use the thing intelligently."
"I don't see," said Mr. Brief, dryly--"I don't see but that what you
ought to devote your time to, my dear Idiot, is the invention of an
intelligent cook."
"Humph!" laughed the Idiot. "I may be an idiot, Mr. Brief, but I'm not
an ass. There are some things that man may reasonably hope to
accomplish--such as setting fire to the Hudson River, or growing
butternuts on the summit of Mont Blanc--but as for trying to invent an
intelligent cook who would stay in the country for more than two weeks
for less than ten thousand dollars a year, that, sir, is beyond all the
conceptions of the human mind."
"Ain't Bridget intelligent, pa?" asked Tommy.
Here was a complication, for Tommy liked to retail to Bridget the gossip
of the day, and especially what "pa said."
"H'm--ah--oh yes, indeed, she is, Tommy," the Idiot replied, with some
embarrassment. "Very; she's been with us three months."
"How much do you pay her, pa?" asked the boy.
"Well," said the Idiot, "not more than fifteen hundred dollars a month.
Just take another griddle-cake, my son, and remember that there are some
things little boys should not talk about."
"Like tumpany's bald heads?" lisped Mollie, complacently, her eye fixed
upon Mr. Pedagog's shining dome.
"Precisely," observed Mr. Pedagog, appreciating the situation.
And while everybody else laughed the Idiot looked upon his children with
a sternly affectionate face.
"My dear," said he to Mrs. Idiot, "I think it is time the babies got
ready for Sunday-school."
XIII
A SUBURBAN COMPLICATION
"Well, old chap," said the Poet some weeks later, when he happened to be
spending the night off in the suburbs with his old friend, "how goes the
noble art of inventing? Has your horseless cauliflower bloomed as yet?"
"Horseless cauliflower is good, but tautological," said the Idiot. "The
cauliflower is an automobile in itself, without the intervention of man.
Who told you I was inventing instead of broking these days?"
"Mr. Pedagog said something about it the last time I met him," said the
Poet. "He's a mighty good friend of yours. He says you are the most
perfect Idiot he ever met."
"He's a bully good fellow," said the Idiot, affectionately. "You know I
used to think Pedagog wasn't of any earthly use except to teach people
things, but as I look back upon my experience with him he has never
taught me anything that was worth forgetting. So he told you I was going
into invention, did he?"
"Yes; and he said he thought you were going about it in the right way,"
rejoined the Poet. "You weren't spending ten thousand dollars to get a
four-dollar invention on the market, he said, but were inventing things
that you knew at the outset weren't worth risking your money on."
The Idiot smiled broadly.
"He said that, did he? Well, he doesn't know what he is talking about,"
he retorted. "I am spending money on my inventions. I have already
invested fifty cents in my patent Clothes-Pin-Holding Laundry-Bonnet,
and I have strung the wires along my fence to be used in my electric
Hired-Man-Discourager; and when I have managed to save up a few dollars
more I'm going to get a battery to attach to it, when woe betide that
man of Jimpsonberry's if he tries to talk to Maria while she is at work!
Furthermore, I have extended the operations of that same useful
invention so that it will meet a long-felt want in all suburban
communities as a discourager of promiscuous wooing. You never lived
in the country, did you?"
"Not permanently," said the Poet.
[Illustration: "'COURTING HIS BEST GIRL ON SOME OTHER FELLOW'S STONE
WALL'"]
"Then you are not aware of a singular habit the young country swain has
of courting his best girl on some other fellow's stone wall after the
sun goes down," said the Idiot. "Some balmy evening next spring, if
you'll come up here I'll show you one of the features of suburban life
that will give you an idea for a poem. That stone wall that runs along
the front of my place has been the scene of more engagements than I can
tell you of. Many a time when I have come home late at night I have
counted as many as ten couples sitting on the cold coping of that wall
telling each other how beautiful the world is, and holding each other on
with loving arms."
"Rather an affecting scene, that," said the Poet.
"It was at first," rejoined the Idiot, "and I rather liked to see it.
Indeed, I once suggested to Mrs. Idiot that we should have the coping
upholstered, so that they might sit more comfortably. I even wanted to
put a back along the inner side of it for them to lean against, but
after a while it palled. We couldn't sit out on our own front porch on
a summer evening and talk without sentimental interruptions that were
demoralizing to a sustained conversation. We'd try to talk, for
instance, about Browning, or Tennyson, or Le Gallienne, or some other
poet of their class, when we'd be interrupted by such sentiments as,
'Ess I is,' and 'I's oo ducky,' and 'Ain't de moon boofer?' Then when we
had guests we never dared to take them out-of-doors, but remained cooped
up inside the house, because Mrs. Idiot feared to intrude upon the
sacred right of those ten couples to do their courting comparatively
unobserved."
"It must have been a nuisance," said the Poet.
"It grew to be so; but I hadn't the heart to stop it, even if I could
have done so, so I put up a hedge to hide them from view and soften the
sound of their voices; but it didn't work very long. They didn't seem to
appreciate my motive, and it so happened that the hedge which I put up
with the most innocent of intentions was a Japanese quince that blossoms
out in thorns half an inch long, to an extent which suggests the fretful
porcupine. These, for some reason or other, excited the animosity of
my twenty young friends on the wall, and at the end of the season there
were not two consecutive feet of the hedge that had not been hacked and
cut to pieces by my indignant but uninvited guests."
"What impudence!" cried the Poet.
"Only the ardor of youth," observed the Idiot, calmly. "Put yourself in
the same place. Suppose that you, just as you were about to declare your
undying love for the girl of your choice, and while gently stealing your
arm about her waist, were to have the back of your hand ripped off by a
brutal hedge?"
"I see," laughed the Poet. "I dare say I should be indignant."
"They were properly so," said the Idiot, "properly so; and neither Mrs.
Idiot nor I really blamed them."
[Illustration: "'HOLDING UP A GREAT OSAGE ORANGE'"]
"We let the matter rest, and made no complaint," he continued. "Time
went on, and the courters became a trifle more assertive. One of them
came into the house one evening and demanded to know what I meant by
assaulting him and his lady friend, holding up a great Osage orange
which he alleged to have been the murderous weapon I had used; and I
really had to apologize, for I was guilty. It happened that while
walking about my small preserves I had picked up this orange, which had
fallen onto my lawn from a tree on Jimpsonberry's place, and had
unthinkingly tried to see how far I could throw it. It went just over
the hedge, and had unceremoniously knocked Strephon's hat into the
middle of next week and frightened Phyllis into hysterics. I was placed
on the defensive, but for the life of me I couldn't help laughing, with
the result that Strephon stalked angrily away, alleging that I should
hear from him further in the matter."
"And did you?" asked the Poet.
"No," said the Idiot, "I never did; but the incident rather soured me
towards the people who seemed to regard my stone wall as their property.
I even came to feel like purchasing a gatling-gun and loading it with
Osage oranges for the purpose of repelling them, but even under this
provocation I still continued to ignore the matter."
"You are too easy-going," suggested the Poet.
"I was," said the Idiot, "until they began to use the sidewalk that runs
parallel with the wall as a tablet upon which to inscribe in letters
of flame their undying affection. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Idiot and
I started for church, we were horrified to find our flagstones scribbled
all over with poetry, done in chalk, after the order of
"Roses is pink, and violets is blue,
Sugar is sweet, and so be you.
[Illustration: "'THE PICTURE OF A HEART WITH AN ARROW DRAWN THROUGH
IT'"]
"Further along was the picture of a heart with an arrow drawn through
it, and the two names 'Larry' and 'Mame' written on either side. And one
unusually affectionate youth had actually cut the initials of his young
lady and himself in the top of the coping, with a cold-chisel, I
suspect. It's there yet. It was then my spirit rose up into fierce
denunciation. That night, when the clans had gathered and were going
through the initial stages I marched out in front of them, cleared my
throat ostentatiously, and made a speech. It was the most nervous speech
I ever made; worse than after-dinner speaking by a good deal. I called
their attention to how I had suffered: referred pathetically to the
destruction of the hedge; inveighed sarcastically against the
Osage-orange man; told them in highly original fashion that worms, if
taken at the ebb that leads on to fortune, would surely turn and rend
their persecutors, and that I'd had enough. I forgave them the hedge; I
forgave them the annoyance they had cost me, but I asserted that I'd see
them all condemned to eternal celibacy before I would permit my sidewalk
to be turned into an anthology of love, and my coping into an intaglio
of eternal blessedness. I requested them if they wished to write poetry
to write it upon their own hearths, and if they had any inscriptions to
cut to chip in and buy an obelisk of their own and hieroglyph to their
hearts' content. I even offered to buy them each a slate and pencil,
which they might bring with them when they came, upon which to send
their sentiments down to posterity, and I finished with what I consider
to be a pleasing perversion of Longfellow's poem on the Woodman, with a
few lines beginning:
"Scribbler, spare that sidewalk.
"Then I departed, threatening to have them all arrested."
"Good!" said the Poet. "I didn't think you'd ever do it. You have nerve
enough, but you are too good-natured."
"I wasn't good-natured then," said the Idiot, regretfully; "and when I
got through I stalked back into the house, scolded Mollie, sent Tommy to
bed, and behaved like a bear for the rest of the evening."
"And the people on the wall? They slunk away in despair, I suppose,"
said the Poet.
[Illustration: "'IT TOOK MY HIRED MAN TWO WEEKS TO SCRUB IT OUT'"]
"Not they," said the Idiot; "not by a long shot. They combined against
me, and next morning when I started for town I found my sidewalk in
worse shape than ever. One flag had written upon it the pleasing mandate
'Go drown yourself.' Another bore the mystic word 'Chump' in great
capital letters, and at the end of my walk was a pastel portrait of
myself, of rough and awkward composition, labelled with my name in full.
It took my hired man two weeks to scrub it out. And on the following
Hallowe'en they strung a huge banner on my telephone wires, inscribed
'The Idiot Asylum,' and every blessed gate I have to my name had been
removed from the premises."
"What an outrage!" cried the Poet.
"Not a bit of it. Merely a suburban ebullition," said the Idiot. "They
don't mean anything by it. They are mere children, after all, and from
their point of view I have interfered with their rights."
"And you propose to stand all this?" asked the Poet. "If I were you I'd
get a pile of broken bottles, as they do in England, and place them
along the top of that wall so that they couldn't possibly use it."
"Brutal custom, that," said the Idiot. "May do for Englishmen; won't do
here at all. In the first place, it spoils the appearance of the wall;
in the second place, it is not efficacious; in the third place, it would
place me in a false position. Everybody'd soon be asking where I got all
those bottles. An Englishman drinks enough beer in the course of a week
to keep his walls covered with broken bottles for a century. I don't,
and I'm not going to buy bottles. I've got a better scheme."
"Ah!" cried the Poet. "Now we are coming to the invention."
"Merely an extension of my 'Hired-Man-Discourager,'" said the Idiot.
"Simple, and I trust efficacious. I am going to put a live wire along
the coping of my wall. Broken bottles are cheap, my dear Poet, but
they don't work. If I put broken bottles on my wall the Amalgamated
Brotherhood of Wooers would meet on my lawn and pass resolutions against
me, and ultimately they would demand the use of my parlor, unless I
misunderstand their nature.
"The lovers' rights must be respected always, and I'm truly thankful
that they have stopped short at my frontage. When they operate along my
frontier-line they are harmless, interesting, even amusing. If they
carry their principles through and penetrate beyond the edge, why, then
Mrs. Idiot and I will have to give it up.
"My scheme is to make them feel that they are welcome to the wall, but
to make the wall--well, to give an element of surprise to the wall. Just
as Jimpsonberry's man is soon to be surprised electrically, which is
legitimately, so do I propose to surprise these inconsiderate persons
who cut down my hedges, who scribble up my sidewalk with their poems,
and who hang Hallowe'en banners on my telephone wires. I wish them all
well, but next spring when they attempt to revive the customs of the
past they will find that even I am resentful."
"But how?"
"I shall have a wire running along the coping, as I have already said,
that between the hours of eight and twelve p.m. will be so full of
shocking things that my uninvited guests will cease to bother me. Can
you imagine the effect of a live wire upon ten loving couples engaged in
looking at the moon while sitting on it?"
"Yet you claim to insist upon their rights as lovers," said the Poet,
deprecatingly.