After my interview with Xanthippe, I hesitated to approach the
type-writer for a week or two. It did a great deal of clicking after the
midnight hour had struck, and I was consumed with curiosity to know what
was going on, but I did not wish to meet Mrs. Socrates again, so I held
aloof until Boswell should have served his sentence. I was no longer
afraid of the woman, but I do fear the good fellow of the weaker sex,
and I deemed it just as well to keep out of any and all disputes that
might arise from a casual conversation with a creature of that sort. An
agreement with a real good fellow, even when it ends in a row, is more
or less diverting; but a disputation with a female good fellow places
a man at a disadvantage. The argumentum ad hominem is not an easy thing
with men, but with women it is impossible. Hence, I let the type-writer
click and ring for a fortnight.
Finally, to my relief, I recognized Boswell's touch upon the keys and
sauntered up to the side of the machine.
“Is this Boswell--Jim Boswell?” I inquired.
“All that's left of him,” was the answer. “How have you been?”
“Very well,” said I. And then it seemed to me that tact required that I
should not seem to know that he had been in the superheated jail of the
Stygian country. So I observed, “You've been off on a vacation, eh?”
“How do you know that?” was the immediate response.
“Well,” I put in, “you've been absent for a fortnight, and you look more
or less--ah--burned.”
“Yes, I am,” replied the deceitful editor. “Very much burned, in fact.
I've been--er--I've been playing golf with a friend down in Cimmeria.”
“I envy you,” I observed, with an inward chuckle.
“You wouldn't if you knew the links,” replied Boswell, sadly. “They're
awfully hard. I don't know any harder course than the Cimmerian.”
And then I became conscious of a mistrustful gaze fastened upon me.
“See here,” clicked the machine. “I thought I was invisible to you? If
so, how do you know I look burned?”
I was cornered, and there was only one way out of it, and that was by
telling the truth. “Well, you are invisible, old chap,” I said. “The
fact is, I've been told of your trouble, and I know what you have
undergone.”
“And who told you?” queried Boswell.
“Your successor on the Gazette, Madame Socrates, nee Xanthippe,” I
replied.
“Oh, that woman--that woman!” moaned Boswell, through the medium of the
keys. “Has she been here, using this machine too? Why didn't you stop
her before she ruined me completely?”
“Ruined you?” I cried.
“Well, next thing to it,” replied Boswell. “She's run my paper so far
into the ground that it will take an almighty powerful grip to pull
it out again. Why, my dear boy, when I went to--to the ovens, I had a
circulation of a million, and when I came back that woman had brought it
down to eight copies, seven of which have already been returned. All in
ten days, too.”
“How do you account for it?” I asked.
“'Side Talks with Men' helped, and 'The Man's Corner' did a little, but
the editorial page did the most of it. It was given over wholly to the
advancement of certain Xanthippian ideas, which were very offensive to
my women readers, and which found no favor among the men. She wants to
change the whole social structure. She thinks men and women are the same
kind of animal, and that both need to be educated on precisely the same
lines--the girls to be taught business, the boys to go through a course
of domestic training. She called for subscriptions for a cooking-school
for boys, and demanded the endowment of a commercial college for girls,
and wound up by insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell
you, if you'd worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper
the way I have, it would have broken your heart to see the suggested
fashion-plates that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror.
It was a combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers
were to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were
discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted.
Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes cropped
up everywhere. Imagine it if you can--and everybody in all Hades was to
be forced into garments of that sort!”
“I should enjoy seeing it,” I said.
“Possibly--but you wouldn't enjoy wearing it,” retorted the machine.
“And then that woman's funny column--it was frightful. You never saw
such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a covert attack
upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that was a bit of
verse called 'Fair Play for the Little Girls.' It went like this:
“'If little boys, when they are young,
Can go about in skirts,
And wear upon their little backs
Small broidered girlish shirts,
Pray why cannot the little girls,
When infants, have a chance
To toddle on their little ways
In little pairs of pants?'”
“That isn't at all bad,” said I, smiling in spite of poor Boswell's woe.
“If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I don't see why the
circulation fell off.”
“Well, she took liberties, that's all,” said Boswell. “For instance, in
her 'Side Talks with Men' she had something like this: 'Napoleon--It
is rather difficult to say just what you can do with your last season's
cocked-hat. If you were to purchase five yards of one-inch blue ribbon,
cut it into three strips of equal length, and fasten one end to each
of the three corners of the hat, tying the other ends into a choux, it
would make a very acceptable work-basket to send to your grandmother
at Christmas.' Now Napoleon never asked that woman for advice on the
subject. Then there was an answer to a purely fictitious inquiry from
Solomon which read: 'It all depends on local custom. In Salt Lake City,
and in London at the time of Henry the Eighth, it was not considered
necessary to be off with the old love before being on with the new, but
latterly the growth of monopolistic ideas tends towards the uniform rate
of one at a time.' A purely gratuitous fling, that was, at one of my
most eminent patrons, or rather two of them, for latterly both Solomon
and Henry the Eighth have yielded to the tendency of the times and gone
into business, which they have paid me well to advertise. Solomon has
established an 'Information Bureau,' where advice can always be had from
the 'Wise-man,' as he calls himself, on payment of a small fee; while
Henry, taking advantage of his superior equipment over any English king
that ever lived, has founded and liberally advertised his 'Chaperon
Company (Limited).' It's a great thing even in Hades for young people
to be chaperoned by an English queen, and Henry has been smart enough to
see it, and having seven or eight queens, all in good standing, he has
been doing a great business. Just look at it from a business point
of view. There are seven nights in every week, and something going on
somewhere all the time, and queens in demand. With a queen quoted so low
as $100 a night, Henry can make nearly $5000 a week, or $260,000 a
year, out of evening chaperonage alone; and when, in addition to this,
yachting-parties up the Styx and slumming-parties throughout the country
are being constantly given, the man's opportunity to make half a million
a year is in plain sight. I'm told that he netted over $500,000 last
year; and of course he had to advertise to get it, and this Xanthippe
woman goes out of her way to get in a nasty little fling at one of my
mainstays for his matrimonial propensities.”
“Failing utterly to see,” said I, “that, in marrying so many times,
Henry really paid a compliment to her sex which is without parallel in
royal circles.”
“Well, nearly so,” said Boswell. “There have been other kings who were
quite as complimentary to the ladies, but Henry was the only man among
them who insisted on marrying them all.”
“True,” said I. “Henry was eminently proper--but then he had to be.”
“Yes,” said Boswell, with a meditative tap on the letter Y. “Yes--he had
to be. He was the head of the Church, you know.”
“I know it,” I put in. “I've always had a great deal of sympathy for
Henry. He has been very much misjudged by posterity. He was the father
of the really first new woman, Elizabeth, and his other daughter, Mary,
was such a vindictive person.”
“You are a very fair man, for an American,” said Boswell. “Not only
fair, but rare. You think about things.”
“I try to,” said I, modestly. “And I've really thought a great deal
about Henry, and I've truly seen a valid reason for his continuous
matrimonial performances. He set himself up against the Pope, and he had
to be consistent in his antagonism.”
“He did, indeed,” said Boswell. “A religious discussion is a hard one.”
“And Henry was consistent in his opposition,” said I. “He didn't yield
a jot on any point, and while a great many people criticise him on the
score of his wives--particularly on their number--I feel that I have in
very truth discovered his principle.”
“Which was?” queried Boswell.
“That the Pope was wrong in all things,” said I.
“So he said,” commented Boswell.
“And being wrong in all things, celibacy was wrong,” said I.
“Exactly,” ejaculated Boswell.
“Well, then,” said I, “if celibacy is wrong, the surest way to protest
against it is to marry as many times as you can.”
“By Jove!” said Boswell, tapping the keys yearningly, as though he
wished he might spare his hand to shake mine, “you are a man after my
own heart.”
“Thanks, old chap,” said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the
air with my visionary friend--“thanks. I've studied these things with
some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as
I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man--as is natural,
since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of the English
Church. He wasn't willing to be married a second or a seventh time
unless he was really a widower. He wasn't as long in taking notice again
as some modern widowers that I have met, but I do not criticise him on
that score. I merely attribute his record to his kingly nature, which
involves necessarily a quickness of decision and a decided perception
of the necessities which is sadly lacking in people who are born to a
lesser station in life. England demanded a queen, and he invariably met
the demand, which shows that he knew something of political economy as
well as of matrimony; and as I see it, being an American, a man needs to
know something of political economy to be a good ruler. So many of our
statesmen have acquired a merely kindergarten knowledge of the science,
that we have had many object-lessons of the disadvantages of a merely
elementary knowledge of the subject. To come right down to it, I am
a great admirer of Henry. At any rate, he had the courage of his
heart-convictions.”
“You really surprise me,” tapped Boswell. “I never expected to find an
American so thoroughly in sympathy with kings and their needs.”
“Oh, as for that,” said I, “in America we are all kings and we are not
without our needs, matrimonial and otherwise, only our courts are
not quite so expeditious as Henry's little axe. But what was Henry's
attitude towards this extraordinary flight of Xanthippe's?”
“Wrath,” said Boswell. “He was very much enraged, and withdrew his
advertisements, declined to give our society reporters the usual
accounts of the functions his wives chaperoned, and, worst of all, has
withdrawn himself and induced others to withdraw from the symposium I
was preparing for my special Summer Girls' issue, which is to appear
in August, on 'How Men Propose.' He and Brigham Young and Solomon and
Bonaparte had agreed to dictate graphic accounts of how they had done
it on various occasions, and Queen Elizabeth, who probably had more
proposals to the square minute that any other woman on record, was to
write the introduction. This little plan, which was really the idea of
genius, is entirely shattered by Mrs. Socrates's infernal interference.”
“Nonsense,” said I. “Don't despair. Why don't you come out with a plain
statement of the facts? Apologize.”
“You forget, my dear sir,” interposed Boswell, “that one of the
fundamental principles of Hades as an institution is that excuses don't
count. It isn't a place for repentance so much as for expiation, and I
might apologize nine times a minute for forty years and would still have
to suffer the penalty of the offence. No, there is nothing to be done
but to begin my newspaper work again, build up again the institution
that Xanthippe has destroyed, and bear my misfortunes like a true
spirit.”
“Spoken like a philosopher!” I cried. “And if I can help you, my dear
Boswell, count upon me. In anything you may do, whether you start
a monthly magazine, a sporting weekly, or a purely American Sunday
newspaper, you are welcome to anything I can do for you.”
“You are very kind,” returned Boswell, appreciatively, “and if I need
your services I shall be glad to avail myself of them. Just at present,
however, my plans are so fully prepared that I do not think I shall
have to call upon you. With Sherlock Holmes engaged to write twelve
new detective stories; Poe to look after my tales of horror; D'Artagnan
dictating his personal memoirs; Lucretia Borgia running my Girls'
Department; and others too numerous to mention, I have a sufficient
supply of stuff to fill up; but if you feel like writing a few poems for
me I may be able to use them as fillers, and they may help to make your
name so well known in Hades that next year I shall be able to print a
Worldly Letter from you every week with a good chance of its proving
popular.”
And with this promise Boswell left me to get out the first number of The
Cimmerian: a Sunday Magazine for all. Taking him at his word, I sent him
the following poem a few days later: