_AN UNRULY METER.--SCENES IN A SANCTUM_.
During one of the cold spells of last winter the gas-meter in my
cellar was frozen. I attempted to thaw it out by pouring hot water
over it, but after spending an hour upon the effort I emerged from the
contest with the meter with my feet and trousers wet, my hair full of
dust and cobwebs and my temper at fever heat. After studying how I
should get rid of the ice in the meter, I concluded to use force
for the purpose, and so, seizing a hot poker, I jammed it through
a vent-hole and stirred it around inside of the meter with a
considerable amount of vigor. I felt the ice give way, and I heard the
wheels buzz around with rather more vehemence than usual. Then I went
up stairs.
I noticed for three or four days that the internal machinery of the
meter seemed to be rattling around in a remarkable manner; it could
be heard all over the house. But I was pleased to find that it
was working again in spite of the cold weather, and I retained my
serenity.
About two weeks afterward my gas bill came. It accused me of burning
during the quarter about one million five hundred thousand feet of
gas, and it called on me to settle to the extent of nearly three
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I put on my hat and went down to
the gas-office. I addressed one of the clerks:
"How much gas did you make at the Blank works last quarter?"
"I dunno; about a million feet, I reckon."
"Well, you have charged me in my bill for burning half a million more
than you made; I want you to correct it."
"Less see the bill. Hm--m--m! this is all right. It's taken off of the
meter. That's what the meter says."
"S'pose'n it does; I _couldn't_ have burned more'n you made."
"Can't help that; the meter can't lie."
"Well, but how d'you account for the difference?"
"Dunno; 'tain't our business to go nosing and poking around after
scientific truth. We depend on the meter. If that says you burned six
million feet, why, you _must_ have burned it, even if we never made a
foot of gas out at the works."
"To tell you the honest truth," said I, "the meter was frozen, and I
stirred it up with a poker and set it whizzing around."
"Price just the same," said the clerk. "We charge for pokers just as
we do for gas."
"You are not actually going to have the audacity to ask me to pay
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on account of that poker?"
"If it was seven hundred thousand dollars, I'd take it with a calmness
that would surprise you. Pay up, or we'll turn off your gas."
"Turn it off and be hanged," I exclaimed as I emerged from the office,
tearing the bill to fragments. Then I went home; and grasping that
too lavish poker, I approached the meter. It had registered another
million feet since the bill was made out; it was running up a score of
a hundred feet a minute; in a month I would have owed the gas company
more than the United States Government owes its creditors. So I beat
the meter into a shapeless mass, tossed it into the street and turned
off the gas inside the cellar.
Then I went down to the _Patriot_ office to persuade Major Slott
to denounce the fraud practiced by the company. While I was in the
editorial room two or three visitors came in. The first one behaved
in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner. He saluted the major by
throwing a chair at him. Then he seized the editor by the hair, bumped
his head against the table three or four times and kicked him. When
this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very
close to the major's nose and said, "You idiot and outcast, if you
don't put that notice in to-morrow, I'll come round here and murder
you! Do you hear me?" Then he cuffed the major's ears a couple of
times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head,
poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the
table and went out. During all this time the major sat still with a
sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word. When
the man left, the major picked up the table, wiped the ink and sand
from his face, and turning to me said,
"Harry will have his little fun, you see."
[Illustration: THE SHERIFF IS MAD]
"He is a somewhat exuberant humorist," I replied. "What was the object
of the joke?"
"Well, he's going to sell his furniture at auction, and I promised to
notice the fact in to-day's _Patriot_, but I forgot it, and he called
to remind me of it."
"Do all of your friends refresh your memory in that vivid manner? If
I'd been in your place, I'd have knocked him down."
"No, you wouldn't," said Slott--"no, you wouldn't. Harry is the
sheriff, and he controls two thousand dollars' worth of official
advertising. I'd sooner he'd kick me from here to Borneo and back
again than to take that advertising away from the _Patriot_. What are
a few bumps and a sore shin or two compared with all that fatness? No,
sir; he can have all the fun he wants out of me."
The next visitor was less demonstrative. He was tall and slender and
clad in the habiliments of woe. He entered the office and took a
chair. Removing his hat, he wiped the moisture from his eyes, rubbed
his nose thoughtfully for a moment, put his handkerchief in his hat,
his hat upon the floor, and said,
"You didn't know Mrs. Smith?"
"I hadn't that pleasure. Who was she?"
"She was my wife. She's been sick some time. But day before yesterday
she was took worse, and she kep' on sinking until evening, when she
gave a kinder sudden jump a couple of times, and then her spirit
flickered. Dead, you know. Passed away into another world."
"I'm very sorry."
"So am I. And I called around to see if I couldn't get some of
you literary people to get out some kind of a poem describing her
peculiarities, so that I can advertise her in the paper."
"I dunno; maybe we might."
[Illustration: MR. SMITH'S GRIEF]
"Oh, you didn't know her, you say? Well, she was a sing'lar kinder
woman. Had strong characteristics. Her nose was the crookedest in the
State--all bent around sideways. Old Captain Binder used to say that
it looked like the jibsail of an oyster-sloop on the windward tack.
Only his fun, you know. But Helen never minded it. She said herself
that it aimed so much around the corner that whenever she sneezed
she blew down her back hair. There were rich depths of humor in that
woman. Now, I don't mind if you work into the poem some picturesque
allusion to the condition of her nose, so her friends will recognize
her. And you might also spend a verse or two on her defective eye."
"What was the matter with her eye?"
"Gone, sir--gone! Knocked out with a chip while she was splitting
kin'ling-wood when she was a child. She fixed it up somehow with a
glass one, and it gave her the oddest expression you ever saw. The
false one would stand perfectly still while the other one was rolling
around, so that 'bout half the time you couldn't tell whether she was
studying astronomy or watching the hired girl pare potatoes. And she
lay there at night with the indisposed eye wide open glaring at me,
while the other was tight shut, so that sometimes I'd get the horrors
and kick her and shake her to make her get up and fix it. Once I got
some mucilage and glued the lid down myself, but she didn't like it
when she woke in the morning. Had to soak her eye in warm water, you
know, to get it open.
"Now, I reckon you could run in some language about her eccentricities
of vision, couldn't you? Don't care what it is, so that I have the
main facts."
"Was she peculiar in other respects?"
"Well, yes. One leg was gone--run over by a wagon when she was little.
But she wore a patent leg that did her pretty well. Bothered her
sometimes, but most generally gave her a good deal of comfort. She was
fond of machinery. She was very grateful for her privileges. Although
sometimes it worried her, too. The springs'd work wrong now and then,
and maybe in church her leg'd give a spurt and begin to kick and
hammer away at the board in front of the pew until it sounded like a
boiler-factory. Then I'd carry her out, and most likely it'd kick at
me all the way down the aisle and end up by dancing her around the
vestibule, until the sexton would rebuke her for waltzing in church.
Seems to me there's material for poetry in that, isn't there? She was
a self-willed woman. Often, when she wanted to go to a sewing-bee or
to gad about somewhere, maybe, I'd stuff that leg up the chimney or
hide it in the wood-pile. And when I wouldn't tell her where it was,
do you know what she'd do?"
"What?"
"Why, she'd lash an umbrella to her stump and drift off down the
street 'sif that umbrella was born there. You couldn't get ahead of
her. She was ingenious.
"So I thought I'd mention a few facts to you, and you can just throw
them together and make them rhyme, and I'll call 'round and pay you
for them. What day? Tuesday? Very well; I'll run in on Tuesday and see
how you've fixed her up."
Then Mr. Smith smoothed up his hat with his handkerchief, wiped the
accumulated sorrow from his eyes, placed his hat upon his head,
and sailed serenely out and down the stairs toward his desolated
hearthstone.
The last caller was an artist. He took a chair and said,
"My name is Brewer; I am the painter of the allegorical picture of
'The Triumph of Truth' on exhibition down at Yelverton's. I called,
major, to make some complaint about the criticism of the work which
appeared in your paper. Your critic seems to have misunderstood
somewhat the drift of the picture. For instance, he says--Let me quote
the paragraph:
"'In the background to the left stands St. Augustine with one foot
on a wooden Indian which is lying upon the ground. Why the artist
decorated St. Augustine with a high hat and put his trousers inside
his boots, and why he filled the saint's belt with navy revolvers and
tomahawks, has not been revealed. It strikes us as being ridiculous to
the very last degree.'
"Now, this seems to me to be a little too harsh. That figure does
_not_ represent St. Augustine. It is meant for an allegorical picture
of Brute Force, and it has its foot upon Intellect--_Intellect_, mind
you! and _not_ a cigar-store Indian. It is a likeness of Captain Kidd,
and I set it back to represent the fact that Brute Force belonged to
the Dark Ages. How on earth that man of yours ever got an idea that it
was St. Augustine beats me."
"It is singular," said the major.
"And now let me direct your attention to another paragraph. He says,
"'We were astonished to notice that while Noah's ark goes sailing
in the remote distance, there is close to it a cotton-factory, the
chimney of which is pouring out white smoke that covers the whole of
the sky in the picture, while the ark seems to be trying to sail down
that chimney. Now, they didn't have cotton-factories in those days;
the thing don't hang. The artist must have been drunk.'
"Now, this insinuation pains me. How would you like it if you painted
a picture of the tower of Babel, and somebody should come along and
insist that it was the chimney of a cotton-factory, and that the
clouds with which the sky is covered were smoke? Cotton-factory! Your
man certainly cannot be familiar with the Scriptures; and when he
talks about the ark sailing down that chimney, he forgets that the
reason why it is standing on one end is that the water is so rough as
to make it pitch. You know the Bible says that arks did pitch 'without
and within.' Now, don't it?"
"I think maybe it does," said the major.
"But that's not the worst. I can stand that; but what do you think
of a man that goes to criticising a work of art, and says--Now just
listen to this:
"'On the right is a boy who has his clothes off and has apparently
been in swimming, and has been rescued by a big yellow dog just as he
was about to drown. What this has to do with the Triumph of Truth we
don't know, but we do know that the dog is twice as large as the boy,
and that he has the boy's head in his mouth, while the boy's hands are
tied behind his back. Now, for a boy to go in swimming with his hands
tied, and for a dog to swallow his head so as to drag him out, appears
to us the awfulest foolishness on earth.'
"You will probably be surprised to learn that your critic is here
referring to a very beautiful study of a Christian martyr who has been
thrown among the wild beasts of the arena, and who is engaged in being
eaten by a lion. The animal is not a yellow dog; that human being has
not been in swimming; and the reason that he is smaller than the lion
is that I had to make him so in order to get his head into the lion's
mouth. Would you have me represent the lion as large as an elephant?
Would you have me paste a label on the Christian martyr to inform the
public that 'This is not a boy who has been treading water with
his hands tied'? Now, look at the matter calmly. Is the _Patriot_
encouraging art when it goes on in this manner? Blame me if I think it
is."
"It certainly doesn't seem so."
"Well, then, what do you say to this? What do you think of a critic
who remarks,
"'But the most extraordinary thing in the picture is the group in
the foreground. An old lady with an iron coal-scuttle on her head is
handing some black pills to a ballet-dancer dressed in pink tights,
while another woman in a badly-fitting chemise stands by them brushing
off the flies with the branch of a tree, with a canary-bird resting
upon her shoulder and trying to sing at some small boys who are seen
in the other corner of the field. What this means we haven't the
remotest idea; but we do know that the ballet-dancers' legs have the
knee-pans at the back of the joint, and that the canary-bird looks
more as if he wanted to eat the coal-scuttle than as if he desired to
sing.'
"This is too bad. Do you know what that beautiful group really
represents? That old lady, as your idiot calls her, is Minerva, the
goddess of War, handing cannon balls to the goddess of Love as a token
there shall be no more war. And the figure in what he considers the
chemise is the genius of Liberty holding out an olive branch with
one hand, while upon her shoulder rests an American eagle screaming
defiance at the enemies of his country, who are seen fleeing in the
distance. Canary bird! small boys! ballet-girl! The man is crazy, sir;
stark, staring mad. And now I want you to write up an explanation for
me. This kind of thing exposes me to derision. I can't stand it, and,
by George! I won't! I'll sue you for libel."
Then the major promised to make amends, and Mr. Brewer withdrew in a
calmer mood.