* * *
"WHAT THE LA HELLE!"
[From the Kankakee Republican.]
He helped tramp the old Hindenburg line, but this time, beating it on
the strains of "Allons enfant de la Patrie le Jour de Gloire est de
Triomphe et Arrivee!"
* * *
Here is a characteristic bit of Vermontese that we picked up. A native
was besought to saw some wood, but he declined. The owner of the wood
offered double price for the sawing, and still the native declined. He
was pressed for a reason, and this was it: "Damned if I'll humor a man."
* * *
"It is not moral. It is immoral," declared an editorial colleague; and a
reader is reminded of Lex Iconles, the old Greek baker of Grammer's Gap,
Ark., who used to display in his window the enticing sign: "Doughnuts.
Different and yet not the same."
* * *
The mind of man is subject to many strange delusions, and one of these
is that the stock market has a bottom.
* * *
The manufacturer of a certain automobile advertises that his vehicle
"will hold five ordinary people." And, as a matter of fact, it usually
does.
* * *
The Westminster Gazette headlines "The Intolerable Dullness of Country
Life in Ireland." And Irene wonders what they would call excitement.
* * *
An advertisement of dolls mentions, superfluously, that "some may not
last the day." One does not expect them to.
* * *
The London Mendicity Society estimates that L100,000 is given away
haphazard every year to street beggars, and that the average beggar
probably earns more than the average working man. There is talk of the
beggars forming a union. A beggars' strike would be a fearsome thing.
* * *
I want to be a diplomat
And with the envoys stand,
A-wetting of my whistle in
A desiccated land.
The London Busman Story.
_I.--As George Meredith might have related it._
"Stop!" she signalled.
The appeal was comprehensible, and the charioteer, assiduously obliging,
fell to posture of checking none too volant steeds.
You are to suppose her past meridian, nearer the twilight of years,
noteworthy rather for matter than manner; and her visage, comparable to
the beef of England's glory, well you wot. This one's descent was
mincing, hesitant, adumbrating dread of disclosures--these expectedly
ample, columnar, massive. The day was gusty, the breeze prankant;
petticoats, bandbox, umbrella were to be conciliated, managed if
possible; no light task, you are to believe.
"'Urry, marm!"
The busman's tone was patiently admonitory, dispassionate. A veteran in
his calling, who had observed the ascending and descending of a myriad
matrons, in playful gales.
"'Urry, marm!"
The fellow was without illusions; he had reviewed more twinkling columns
than a sergeant of drill. Indifference his note, leaning to ennui. He
said so, bluntly, piquantly, in half a dozen memorable words, fetching
yawn for period.
The lady jerked an indignant exclamation, and completed, rosily
precipitate, her passage to the pave.
_II.--As Henry James might have written it._
We, let me ask, what are we, the choicer of spirits as well as the more
frugal if not the undeservedly impoverished, what, I ask, are we to do
now that the hansom has disappeared, as they say, from the London
streets and the taxicab so wonderfully yet extravagantly taken its
place? Is there, indeed, else left for us than the homely but hallowed
'bus, as we abbreviatedly yet all so affectionately term it--the 'bus of
one's earlier days, when London was new to the unjaded sensorium and
"Europe" was so wonderfully, so beautifully dawning on one's so avid and
sensitive consciousness?
And fate, which has left us the 'bus--but oh, in what scant and shabby
measure!--has left us, too, the weather that so densely yet so
congruously "goes with it"--the weather adequately enough denoted by the
thick atmosphere, the slimy pavements, the omnipresent unfurled umbrella
and the stout, elderly woman intent upon gaining, at cost of whatever
risk or struggle, her place and portion among the moist miscellany to
whom the dear old 'bus-- But perhaps I have lost the thread of my
sentence.
Ah, yes--that "stout, elderly woman"; so superabundant whether as a
type or as an individual; so prone--or "liable"--to impinge tyrannously
upon the consciousness of her fellow-traveller, and in no less a degree
upon that of the public servant, who, from his place aloft, guides, as
it is phrased, the destinies of the conveyance. It was, indeed, one of
the most notable of these--a humble friend of my own--who had the
fortune to make the acute, recorded, historic observation which, with
the hearty, pungent, cursory brevity and point of his class and
_metier_--the envy of the painstaking, voluminous analyst and artist of
our period-- But again I stray.
She was climbing up, or climbing down, perplexed equally, as I gather,
by the management of her _parapluie_ and of her--_enfin_, her
petticoats. The candid anxiety of her round, underdone face, as she so
wonderfully writhed to maintain the standard of pudicity dear--even
vital--to the matron of the British Isles appealed--vividly, though
mutely--to the forbearance that, seeing, would still seem _not_ to see,
her foot, her ankle, her _mollet_--as I early learned to say in Paris,
where, however, so exigent a modesty is scarcely ... well, scarcely.
"Madam," the gracious fellow said in effect, "_ne vous genez pas_." Then
he went on to assure her briefly that he was an elderly man; that he had
"held the ribbons," as they phrase it, for several years; that many
were the rainy days in London; that each of these placed numerous
women--elderly or younger--in the same involuntary predicament as that
from which she herself had suffered; and that so far as he personally
was concerned he had long since ceased to take any extreme delight in
the-- _Bref_, he was charming; he renewed my fading belief--fading, as I
had thought, disastrously but immitigably--in the capacity of the
Anglo-Saxon for _esprit_; and I am glad indeed to have taken a line or
so to record his _mot_.
_III.--As finally elucidated by Arnold Bennett._
Maria Wickwyre, of the Five Towns, emerged from muddy Bombazine Lane and
stood in the rain and wind at Pie Corner, eighty-four yards from the
door of St. Jude's chapel, in the Strand. She was in London! Yes, she
was on that spot, she and none other. It might have been somewhere else;
it might have been somebody else. But it wasn't. Wonderful! The miracle
of Life overcame her.
She had arms. Two of them. They were big and round, like herself. One
held a large parcel ("package" for the American edition); the other, an
umbrella. She also had two legs. She stood on them. If they had been
absent, or if they had weakened, she would have collapsed. But they
held her up. Ah, the mysteries of existence! More than ever was she
conscious of her firm, strong underpinning. Maria waved her umbrella and
her parcel and stopped a 'bus. The driver was elderly, wrinkled,
weatherbeaten. Maria got in and rode six furlongs and some yards to
Mooge Road, and then she stopped the 'bus to get out.
If she was conscious of her upper members and their charges, she was
still more conscious of her lower ones. If she had her parcel and her
umbrella to think about, she also had her stockings and petticoats to
consider. The wind blew, the rain drizzled, the driver looked around,
wondering why Maria didn't get out and have done with it.
"If he should see them!" she gasped. (You know what she meant by
"them.") Her round, broad face mutely implored the 'busman to look the
other way.
He wearily closed his eyes. He had been rumbling through the Strand for
thirty years. "Lor', mum," he said, "legs ain't no treat to me!"
Maria collapsed, after all, and took the 4:29 for home that same
afternoon.