The Man with the Megaphone.
“We’re off,” sang out Noah, using a huge megaphone which could be heard
throughout the length of the train. “Perhaps it was not necessary to
tell you that we had started, but the megaphone man on all ‘Seeing New
York’ trips is expected to begin his lecture with that observation, and
as we’re going to the earth, we must do as mortals do.
“Due notice of our return will be published in the newspapers, but as
our stay in the metropolis is indefinite, our address has been left
with the constable, and the maid has been instructed to accept service.
“Speaking of maids reminds me that the dear women are rather hotter
under their lace collars just now than usual and are saying things
quite horrid. You see King Henry the Eighth insisted upon leaving the
women at home. To this Cæsar was opposed.
“‘Your wife may be above suspicion,’ said Henry, ‘but I’m not so sure
about mine. Six women tagging after a man are just about half a dozen
too many.’
“Sir Walter Raleigh joined forces with Cæsar and they brought the
matter to the attention of His Satanic Majesty. The metropolitan stores
have just announced a bargain sale of dress goods, so Lucifer knew he
would have an insurrection on his hands if he didn’t let the woman go
shopping. You will notice that the ladies are with us.”
“If Lucifer had not been a fallen angel,” whispered King Henry in my
ear, “he would not have known women so well!”
“Have you noticed the charming costume of Mother Eve, who is
chaperoning the party?” asked Ward McAllister. “Her hat is made up of
a little basket turned upside down, with trailing plants hanging from
the top, kept from falling by a tangled mass of ribbon, tickled by a
feather that like the ostrich from which it was taken, hides its head
in a mound of lace and—but how can a mere man describe a woman’s bonnet
adequately unless he has paid the bill for it? Adam says he would get a
divorce if he could name anybody but a snake as co-respondent.”
The megaphone continued to assault our ear drums.
“We are still in the region regarded as mythical by Robert Ingersoll,”
went on Noah, “and I am pleased to say that that gentleman is returning
to haunt the famous city which is assessed for one of our largest
avenues paved with good intentions. This resolution business begins
January first with a bracing against booze and a curtailing of the
smoke luxury, but it’s bones to nickels that it ends on the third day
of grace with a general retreat all along the line and the devil in
full pursuit. Most men proceed to lay a whole sidewalk before the grade
is fixed.”
The train started up hill with a jolt, but disdaining to notice the
inconvenience of his passengers—it was a personally-conducted tour,—the
Grand Sir Knight of the Hand Car continued:
“This road is inclined to take you to your destination, and I trust the
gravity of the situation appeals to you. Passengers are permitted to do
one of three things: They may remain seated on the up grade provided
they ply their fans vigorously enough to keep the engine from getting
a hot box; or they may get out and walk up hill, or if they need
exercise, they may get out and push. This is a free country where pull
doesn’t count.
“We always look out for the comfort of our patrons. No passenger ever
got a cinder in his eye from a locomotive on this road. Electricity is
the motive power and it may interest the scientists present to learn
that I have discovered the composition of electricity and with it the
secret of life. Its power is derived from the action of its principal
element, oxygen, in the process of uniting with the other element,
hydrogen, with which it compounds in varying proportions up to seven
parts by weight of oxygen to one of hydrogen, beyond which point the
product becomes water. Up on earth, they need coal or its equivalent
to furnish power to produce electricity. Down here we make it from the
decomposition of water and permitting the oxygen and the hydrogen to
re-unite. As a result of this friction we get a fire many times hotter
than that produced by coal, emitting oxygen instead of carbonic acid
gas. That explains the exhilaration of the air of Hades and is one
reason for its popularity as a health resort.
“No charge is ever made on this line for excessive baggage. You may
carry as much as you please, provided you carry it yourself. The only
live stock taken in the baggage cars are camels. These ‘water wagons’
might be useful if the assembled company gets dry before New York is
reached, and if the train should break down, the camel can always be
depended upon to get a hump on itself.
“The Stygian subway, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest scenic route
in the world—on a clear day. From the observation cars one gets a view
of all that is to be seen—earth and darkness. This road is a great feat
of engineering from the fact that it has no tunnels, no bridges and no
curves. It is the only double tracked line in Hades and each rail is so
widely separated from its fellow that they are not on speaking terms.
“A third rail was added for safety and rapid progress, movement having
been the order of things since the earth began to revolve upon its
axis. It was found that a single track would not fit the rolling stock
and an attempt to propel a two-wheel car over a single-rail road by
Ananias provoked much cussing. The road-bed did not lie so well as the
engineer who laid it!
“This is the only line in the world where the time-tables are made
solely to suit the public and where a man never loses his train nor his
temper. If the schedule as formulated by the general manager, Myself,
does not suit you, application to the division superintendent, Myself,
will be all that is necessary. Complaints to the general passenger,
agent, Myself, are at once referred to Me in My capacity of president
and thus no time is lost in red tape. I hold every office within the
gift of the road, the only practical solution to labor difficulties.
“We are now nearing Hellgate, which is at the entrance to New York.
Never having been to America, I asked Benedict Arnold to write
the remainder of the lecture. You may therefore depend upon this
description of the Great Republic as being strictly impartial and
without prejudice. As an aside, I may as well tell you that before
starting for New York, Arnold took the precaution to put an iron band
around his pocketbook.
“America, according to the man who sold it, is the land where preachers
are paid from $500 to $20,000 according to their ability to dodge
Satan and tickle the ears of the wealthy; where no clergyman writes a
sermon without a concordance in one hand and a popular novel in the
other; where the deacons conduct an auction for the best pews, and
where there is a daily round of theatricals by the Sunday School and
chicken suppers by the Ladies’ Aid, with collections and religion
thrown in for a change on Sunday.
“This is the land where the politician shakes poverty by the hand
before election and later altogether; where they have a congress of
four hundred men to make laws for a supreme court of nine to set aside;
where they have prayers on the floor of the national capitol and
whiskey in the basement; where men vote for what they do not want for
fear they will get what they want by voting for it; where other men
stay away from the polls one day and swear about the result the other
three-hundred and sixty-four days in the year.
“American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear
November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can
deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing
it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody
but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up
his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could
gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start an agitation
to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in.
“The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward
were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New
Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before
he knew it himself!
“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis,
Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of
Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences
that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy
one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis
of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every
second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly
peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in
his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking
up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware
to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep
and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be
demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated
to the twentieth story.
“This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets
so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not
large enough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a
god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers
and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be
a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit
on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of
energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach.
“The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who
tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the
reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention
between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning
the day with an orange phosphate at ten A.M., and finishing it and
the pocketbook of her steady company at twelve P.M. with a menu of
soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of
conscience or a disordered stomach!
“America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is
statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy;
where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests
of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept
in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after
election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make
clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets the aphorism
that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds
a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and
wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual
challenge to the world.
“America is a nation whose goddess of Liberty was foreign born,
baptized in blood, then sent into exile, where, serene and indifferent,
she turns her back on the land of her adoption and looks out to sea, a
heartless statue! This is a country without a language of its own, with
a national hymn that sings only of New England and is set to stolen
music, whose only national dance is the cakewalk and most popular tune
a rag-time coon song; a land whose people never allow the voice of
conscience to speak louder than the bell of the cash register.”
“Despite his century of banishment, Benedict Arnold is still a traitor
to his country,” I observed.
“Not at all,” answered Washington. “Why, he doesn’t know the meaning
of the word ‘traitor’ when separated from its Websterian environment.
His so-called betrayal of his country was but an incident to his
winning a woman, and where there’s a woman, man will make a way. Before
the organization of the Asbestos Society of Sinners, the historians
conspired with Pluto to fry us in our own fat, but now, immune in our
asbestos attire, it’s Siberia for Satan, and there’s always something
doing in the Douma of the Dead. As for me, I’m tired of being called
‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s
feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth
when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”
Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New
York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had
ceased. It was not until the car shot out of the darkness that the
letter dropped from my hand. I gasped in astonishment.
“The Battery! All change!” sang out the voice in the megaphone. But the
car did not stop. As if shot from a catapult it leaped over the trees
and vaulted the aquarium. It fluttered in the air and then settled down
in the waters of the bay like a bird with a broken wing.
When I opened my eyes I was being rolled over a barrel, and an
ambulance surgeon was forcing some very bad whiskey down my throat.
Whether it was the liquor or the water I had swallowed I know not, but
my surroundings seemed those of the Twenty-third Street water front,
west, rather than of the Battery. Was I being rescued from the sinking
of a ferry boat or from Noah’s Ark? Had my trip to Hades consumed only
the flash of the grain of sand in Time’s hour-glass which had seen me
sink to the bottom of the river and rise again, or had I been the
guest of the shades of the Styx for a day, a month, a year? A man who
had taken a whiskey straight might have solved the problem, but to a
man whose brain was befuddled by mixed drinks, coherent thought was
impossible. I fell asleep, content to drift and drift and dream—of
devils.
THE END.
THE LAND OF FULFILLED DESIRE.
EPILOGUE.
The Land of Fulfilled Desire.
MY DEAR MR. BANGS:
I have been to Hades in search of a sensation, but even the devil
couldn’t keep a newspaper man down and so once more I am in the
territory of the tired—New York. It may interest you to know that I am
holding down the city desk of the Universe, the former incumbent having
disappeared shortly before my return from the domain of the departed.
He left a letter addressed to his successor and I feel that I am
violating no confidence in divulging its contents:
“What impels me to record the experiences of this, my last night on
earth, I do not know. Perhaps it is to counterfeit courage, for when a
man receives a ‘ticket to the hereafter’ he feels the need of something
to brace his backbone, just as a boy will whistle in make-believe
bravery on rounding a dark corner.
“I felt more than ordinarily weary, for I seemed to be losing my grip
on my work and on—life! For several minutes I had been idly toying
with a pearl-handled revolver which I used as a paper weight, when a
rustling of paper made me turn. On the floor was a letter.
“‘That’s odd,’ I muttered. ‘The shades who deliver letters from
our Stygian correspondent usually lay them upon my desk like any
well-regulated ghost would do.’
“As I stooped to pick up the epistle, I noticed that my blue pencil lay
upon my pen, the two forming a cross. Then I knew what had exorcised
the shade and frightened it away. To an imaginative man, the episode
was uncanny. And it was night!
“Using the penholder as a paper cutter, I tore open the envelope and
took out the letter. It began without formalities:
“‘I suppose my interviews with Cimmerian citizens were pronounced
the most sensational fakes of the year. Did you state whether the
manuscript from the domain of the departed had a sulphurous tinge or
was redolent with spices and perfumes? The wireless correspondence from
Hades-on-Styx must have created much excitement on earth. People may
doubt the genuineness of my description of Hades, but they will have
a hot time proving me wrong, although nowadays not even the parson
believes in a scorch for every sin. Don’t you want to come and take my
place as scribe to Satan? I have been fighting down a desire to have
you visit this subterranean resort, for did one but express the wish,
it would be gratified in this, the Land of Fulfilled Desire. If Pluto
says “Come”—’
“Obeying a sudden impulse, I struck a match and held the letter in
the flame. Instantly it was snatched from my hand, though I could see
no one. At the same moment every electric light in the building went
out, leaving the place in darkness. On the air was a pungent odor of
brimstone.
“‘The devil!’ I ejaculated. That invocation sealed my fate: it was the
Styx and the Simple Life for mine, via the Jersey ferry. And it was
night!”
In the lore of Longfellow, “All the rest is mystery.”
LAWRENCE DANIEL FOGG.