(This Chapter of the Autobiography of Methuselah is made up
entirely of fragments. The manuscript of the preceding
chapters was found in fine condition, and entirely
unobliterated by the passage of the centuries since it was
written, but beginning at this point cracks appear, and in
some places such complete fractures as make the continuity of
the narrative impossible. The fragments have been as
carefully deciphered as the complete chapters, however, and
are here presented for what they are worth.)
AS TO WOMEN
The position of woman among us will doubtless prove of interest to
posterity. Our matrimonial laws are not all that they should be, in
my judgment, though there are men who consider them as nearly perfect
as they can be made. The idea that the best way for a young man to
declare his love for a young girl is to hit her on the head with a
wooden club and then run off with her before she regains consciousness
has never received my approval, and never will. Something should be
left for the post-nuptial life, and I cannot see how after it has been
used as an instrument of courtship a club can take its place as it
ought to as an instrument of discipline in the household. My own wives
I have invariably caught in a trap, so that later on in life, when I
have found it desirable to emphasize my authority in my home by means
of a stout stick, that emblem of power has had no glamor about it to
weaken its force as an argument.... Then as to the number of wives
that a man should be permitted to have, I am in distinct disagreement
with the majority of my neighbors, who maintain that it is entirely a
matter of individual choice as to whether a man should have five, ten
or a thousand. I should not advocate the limitation to an arbitrary
number, but I believe that the question of one's actual needs should
rule. If a man's possessions enable him to maintain a large
establishment requiring the services of a cook, a laundress, two
waitresses and four upstairs girls, eight wives would be sufficient;
but on the other hand, for a young man beginning his career who needs
only a general house-worker, one is enough. Individual cases should
regulate the law as applied to the individual, and those who claim
that they may marry any number of women, whether they need them or
not, entirely regardless of whether or not they can keep them
occupied, should be told that no man is entitled to more of the good
things of this life than he can avail himself of in his daily
procedure. Any other course than this will sooner or later result in a
great scarcity of nuptial raw material, and it is not impossible to
conceive of a day when all the women in the land will become the
property of a select, privileged few. A monopoly of this sort would
enable a few men to control posterity and build up a Trust in the
Matrimonial Industry that would engender not only a great deal of
bitter feeling between the masses and the classes, but enforce a
system of compulsory bachelorhood which ... Nevertheless, if woman
wants to vote let her do so. In spite of all that I have just said
about the subtle quality of her intellect, I still say let her vote.
What harm can come from permitting her to go to the polls and drop a
ballot in the box for this or that man, or for this or that measure?
It will please her to be allowed to do this, and by granting her
petition for the suffrage we shall put an end to an otherwise endless
disputation. I am quite sure that as long as her votes are kept
separate from the men's votes, and are _not_ counted, no possible harm
can come from a little complacency in the face of ... Personally I
have no objection to divorce. If a man marries a woman under the
impression that she is a good cook, and after the waning of the
honeymoon finds that she does not know the difference between
sponge-cake and a plain common garden sponge, why should he be forced
forevermore to court dyspepsia on her account? I fail to see either
justice or reason in this, though as to the method of divorce I
cannot agree with those who claim that as the man has married the
woman by hitting her with a club, as I have already shown, the proper
method of divorce is for the woman to return the blow with a
rolling-pin. The proper way to do is for the husband to be permitted
to return the girl to her parents as not up to the specifications, or
if she have no parents to dispose of her at the best bargain possible
to one of his neighbors who may happen to be in need of a girl of that
sort at that particular time.... But these Newport separations, as I
believe they are called, are apt to prove embarrassing, particularly
when the divorcées all happen to be present at the same dinner-table.
A lady whose hostess is the wife of her former husband, finding
herself sitting opposite the divorced wife of her present husband, who
has at one time or another been married to two or three other ladies
at the board, is not likely to be able to comport herself with that
degree of _savoir faire_ that is the ear-mark of the refined....
As for the mother-in-law, for certain reasons of a private nature I
was not going to speak of her in these memoirs, but after mature
reflection upon the subject I deem it my duty to posterity to say
that....
SOME LONG-FELT WANTS
I have often wished that in my youth I had studied science a little
more carefully. It is growing very obvious to me the longer I live
that there are a number of little things that we need in this world to
make life more comfortable. It does not seem to me beyond reason to
think that by the use of a proper mechanism these thunderbolts that
play about the heavens can be made to do errands for us. It angers me
to see so much light going to waste in the heavens from the flash of
the lightning, when it might be stored up for use instead of these
intolerable axle-grease dips that we are forced to use to light us on
our way to bed. I don't see why some one cannot entrap one of these
bolts on a wire, just as we catch a rat in a trap, and keep it running
round and round a loop, giving out its light until it is exhausted....
It would be pleasant, too, to have a kind of carriage that would go of
its own power. I cannot quite reason the thing out, but I believe that
the time will come when there will be something of the sort. I
remember back in my four-hundred-and-fifty-second year finding one of
my father's farm wagons on the top of the hill back of the cow
pasture. I wheeled it to the edge of the descent, and was much
delighted to see it go speeding down to the base of the hill,
gathering momentum at every turn of the wheels, and ending up by
hitting the back door of Uncle Zibb's cottage with such force that it
came out of the front parlor window before stopping. This seemed to
indicate that under certain circumstances a wheeled vehicle could be
made to go without a horse, but in what precise way it can be brought
about the limitations of my mechanical training prevent me from
determi ... I was watching the heated vapor rising from our tea-kettle
the other night, and was much diverted to notice that it made a
whistling sort of sound as it emerged from the nozzle of the pot. It
ran from B sharp to high C, and was loud enough to be heard on the
other side of the room. It has occurred to me that there may be in
this some hidden principle that will some day enable man to make this
vapor do his work for him, especially along musical lines. Surely if
this misty substance can make a tea-kettle squeak, why should it not,
if multiplied in volume and run through a trombone, afford us a
capable substitute for Bill Watkins, who plays second base on our
Village Band?
AS TO PROPHECIES
If our Prophets would only confine themselves to probabilities I am
inclined to think we should take more stock in the things they
foretell. I am impelled to the making of this reflection by the
presence in our town of an Astrologer who is setting all the women by
the ears by prophesying a day when they will not have to do their own
housework, and will thrive in many lines of endeavor now open solely
to men. He is an interesting old fellow, in spite of the foolishness
of his predictions; but when he tells the women's clubs that in some
far off century women will be found writing novels, and adorning
themselves with rich fabrics, and surrounded by a class of paid
toilers who will do nothing but minister to their ease and comfort, I
lose all patience with him. It is filling their minds with socialistic
notions that are impairing their usefulness, and I have had to
chastise seven of my own fair helpmeets this past week for neglecting
their duties and treating my instructions with contempt. A curious
thing about his prophecies is their confirmation of Adam's fears as to
the ultimate result of these new-fangled ideas as to dress, and, what
interested me more than anything else, he predicted a machine called a
Moh-Thor-Cah, that not only runs along without outside assistance,
but is propelled entirely by the same vapor that I have spoken of
before as striking the high C in the nozzle of my tea-kettle. He goes
too far with this, as well as with his other prophecies, for he says
that there will be a time when ships larger than Noah's Ark will be
forced across great bodies of water by this same power. The idea of
anybody, after Noah's experience, being foolish enough to build a
craft of that kind, to say nothing of working it with a tea-kettle, is
preposterously abs ... In one of his visions he claims to have seen a
gathering of people, called a city, in which there are to be more than
four million souls, and governed not by the virtuous, as in our own
day, but by the most desperate political malefactors that ever banded
together for plunder, and this at the direct request of the people
themselves! I am perfectly aware that human nature is weak, and given
over at times to strange delusions, but that any body of
self-respecting persons should deliberately and of their own free will
turn the management of their affairs over to those who would more
properly grace a jail than a City Hall, surpasses belie ...
MISCELLANEOUS FRAGMENTS
... cannot be denied that a daily newspaper would be an interesting
thing, if it were possible to print it, but I doubt its real value. I
dislike gossip, and I do not see how the newspaper could fill up
without it. What advantage is it to me to know that Hiram
Wigglesworth, of Ararat Corners, who is unknown to me, was arrested on
Thursday evening for beating his wife? Why should I be called upon to
impair the value of my eyes by reading in small type all the
scandalous details of the separation proceedings between two people I
never saw and would not permit to enter my front door if they came to
call? It is nothing to me that Mrs. Zebulon Zebedee, of Enochsville,
has spent thirty thousand clam-shells a year on bottled grape-juice,
and run up bills against her husband's account at the diamond-quarries
for two or three hundred thousand tons of wampum, and if she chooses
to go joy-riding on a Diplodocus with a gentleman from the Circus, it
is Zebulon Zebedee's business, not mine, and a newspaper that insisted
upon dumping this unsavory mess on my breakfast-table every morning
would sooner or later become an unmitigated nuis ...
* * * * *
... but he pays no attention to my protestations. I think the oldtime
method of walloping them every Sunday morning, on the principle that
they deserved it for something they had done during the past week, was
a good one. Shem and Japhet are not so bad, but since Ham came back
from the Ararat Academy of Higher Learning he has been about as
useless a member of the community as we have ever had. What he doesn't
know would fill six hundred volumes of the Triassic Cyclopædia. I
caught him only the other night trying to teach his grandmother to
suck eggs, although my estimable wife was a past-mistress of that art
four hundred years before he was born. He has absolutely no respect
for age, and frequently refers to me as "the old boy," criticizes my
clothes, and remarks apropos of my patriarchal garments that
night-shirts as an article of dress for a five o'clock tea went out a
thousand years ago. Indeed, so disrespectful is he that I sometimes
wonder if he is not a foundling. I note two suspicious things in
respect to him. The first is that he is getting blacker in the face
every day, which suggests that there is in him somewhere a strain of
the Æthiopian, none of which he gets from me or his grandmother, who
was an Albino. And the second is that his father will not allow him to
be spanked, a very strange inhibition, I think, unless that operation
would disclose the boy's possession of the Missing Link. Indeed, I
should not be at all surprised to discover that the lad is either an
Æthiopian, or a direct descendant of Adam's old friend and neighbor,
Col. Darwin J. Simian, of Coacoa-on-Nut. In all of my reflections on
the subject of the training of the young, manual training has always
seemed to me the most efficacious, especially if in applying the hand
you do not restrain its force, and are not loath to use the hair-brush
or a good leathern trunk-strap as an auxiliary. And in order to
ensure their freedom from evil associations, and to keep them from
making the night hideous by their raucous yells, I have never heard of
anything better than the method of Doctor Magog Rodd, of the
Enochsville Military Academy, who kept his students in cages and
corked them up every night before they retir ...
[Illustration: The Head Nurse of the Adam Family.]
* * * * *
... so no more at present. My manuscript already weighs three hundred
and forty tons, and every word of it has been gouged out with my own
hands--a difficult operation for a man of my years. I am painfully
aware of its shortcomings, but such as it is it is, and so it must
remain. There is no time left for its revision, and, indeed, a man
who has just celebrated his nine hundred and sixty-ninth birthday can
hardly be expected ...