songs, slap in your jokes, fasten 'em together, and the thing is done.
First act, get your hero and heroine into trouble. Second act, get 'em
out."
"And for the third?" queried the Poet.
"Don't have a third," said the Idiot. "A third is always superfluous;
but, if you must have it, make up some kind of a vaudeville show and
stick it in between the first and second."
"Tush!" said the Bibliomaniac. "That would make a gay comic opera."
"Of course it would, Mr. Bib," the Idiot agreed. "And that's what we
want. If there's anything in this world that I hate more than another it
is a sombre comic opera. I've been to a lot of 'em, and I give you my
word of honor that next to a funeral a comic opera that lacks gayety is
one of the most depressing functions known to modern science. Some of
'em are enough to make an undertaker weep with jealous rage. I went to
one of 'em last week called 'The Skylark,' with an old chum of mine who
is a surgeon. You can imagine what sort of a thing it was when I tell
you that after the first act he suggested we leave the theatre and come
back here and have some fun cutting my leg off. He vowed that if he
ever went to another opera by the same people he'd take ether
beforehand."
"I shouldn't think that would be necessary," sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"If it was as bad as all that, why didn't it put you to sleep?"
"It did," said the Idiot. "But the music kept waking us up again. There
was no escape from it except that of actual physical flight."
"Well, about this collaboration of ours," suggested the Poet. "What do
you think we should do first?"
"Write an opening chorus, of course," said the Idiot. "What did you
suppose? A finale? Something like this:
"If you want to know who we are,
Just ask the Evening Star,
As he smiles on high
In the deep-blue sky,
With his tralala-la-la-la.
We are maidens sweet
With tripping feet,
And the googoo eyes
Of the skippity-hi's,
And the smile of the fair gazoo;
And you'll find our names
'Mongst the wondrous dames
Of the Who's Who-hoo-hoo-hoo."
"Get that sung with spirit by sixty-five ladies with blond wigs and gold
slippers, otherwise dressed up in the uniform of a troop of Russian
cavalry, and you've got your venture launched."
"Where can you find people like that?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"New York's full of 'em," replied the Idiot.
"I don't mean the people to act that sort of thing--but where would you
lay your scene?" explained the Bibliomaniac.
"Oh, any old place in the Pacific Ocean," said the Idiot. "Make your own
geography--everybody else does. There's a million islands out there of
one kind or another, and as defenceless as a two-weeks'-old infant. If
you want a real one, fish it out and fire ahead. If you don't, make one
up for yourself and call it 'The Isle of Piccolo,' or something of that
sort. After you've got your chorus going, introduce your villain, who
should be a man with a deep bass voice and a piratical past. He's the
chap who rules the roost and is going to marry the heroine to-morrow.
That will make a bully song:
"I'm a pirate bold
With a heart so cold
That it turns the biggest joys to solemn sorrow;
And the hero-ine,
With her eyes so fine,
I am going to--marry--to-morrow.
CHORUS
"He is go-ing to-marry--to-morrow
The maid with a heart full of sorrow;
For her we are sorry
For she weds to-morry--
She is going to-marry--to-morrow."
"Gee!" added the Idiot, enthusiastically, "can't you almost hear that
already?"
"I am sorry to say," said Mr. Brief, "that I can. You ought to call your
heroine Drivelina."
"Splendid!" cried the Idiot. "Drivelina goes. Well, then, on comes
Drivelina, and this beast of a pirate grabs her by the hand and makes
love to her as if he thought wooing was a game of snap-the-whip. She
sings a soprano solo of protest, and the pirate summons his hirelings to
cast Drivelina into a Donjuan cell, when boom! an American war-ship
appears on the horizon. The crew, under the leadership of a man with a
squeaky tenor voice, named Lieutenant Somebody or Other, comes ashore,
puts Drivelina under the protection of the American flag, while his crew
sing the following:
"We are jackies, jackies, jackies,
And we smoke the best tobaccys
You can find from Zanzibar to Honeyloo.
And we fight for Uncle Sammy,
Yes, indeed we do, for damme
You can bet your life that that's the thing
to do,
Doodle-do!
You can bet your life that that's the thing to
doodle--doodle--doodle--doodle-do."
"Eh! What?" demanded the Idiot.
"Well--what yourself?" asked the Lawyer. "This is your job. What next?"
"Well--the pirate gets lively, tries to assassinate the lieutenant, who
kills half the natives with his sword, and is about to slay the pirate
when he discovers that he is his long-lost father," said the Idiot. "The
heroine then sings a pathetic love-song about her baboon baby, in a
green light to the accompaniment of a lot of pink satin monkeys banging
cocoanut-shells together. This drowsy lullaby puts the lieutenant and
his forces to sleep, and the curtain falls on their capture by the
pirate and his followers, with the chorus singing:
"Hooray for the pirate bold,
With his pockets full of gold;
He's going to marry to-morrow.
To-morrow he'll marry,
Yes, by the Lord Harry,
He's go-ing--to-marry--to-mor-row!
And that's a thing to doodle--doodle-doo."
"There," said the Idiot, after a pause. "How is that for a first act?"
"It's about as lucid as most of them," said the Poet, "but, after all,
you have got a story there, and you said you didn't need one."
"I said you didn't need one to start with," corrected the Idiot. "And
I've proved it. I didn't have that story in mind when I started. That's
where the easiness of the thing comes in. Why, I didn't even have to
think of a name for the heroine. The inspiration for that popped right
out of Mr. Brief's mouth as smoothly as though the name Drivelina had
been written on his heart for centuries. Then the title--'The Isle of
Piccolo'--that's a dandy, and I give you my word of honor, I'd never
even thought of a title for the opera until that revealed itself like a
flash from the blue; and as for the coon song, 'My Baboon Baby,' there's
a chance there for a Zanzibar act that will simply make Richard Wagner
and Reginald de Koven writhe with jealousy. Can't you imagine the lilt
of it:
"My bab-boon--ba-habee,
My bab-boon--ba-habee--
I love you dee-her-lee
Yes dee-hee-hee-er-lee.
My baboon--ba-ha-bee,
My baboon--ba-ha-bee,
My baboon--ba-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-hay-bee-bee."
"And all those pink satin monkeys bumping their cocoanut-shells together
in the green moonlight--"
"Well, after the first act, what?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"The usual intermission," said the Idiot. "You don't have to write that.
The audience generally knows what to do."
"But your second act?" asked the Poet.
"Oh, come off," said the Idiot, rising. "We were to do this thing in
collaboration. So far, I've done the whole blooming business. I'll leave
the second act to you. When you collaborate, Mr. Poet, you've got to do
a little colabbing on your own account. What did you think you were to
do--collect the royalties?"
"I'm told," said the Lawyer, "that that is sometimes the hardest thing
to do in a comic opera."
"Well, I'll be self-sacrificing," said the Idiot, "and bear my full
share of it."
"It seems to me," said the Bibliomaniac, "that that opera produced in
the right place might stand a chance of a run."
"Thank you," said the Idiot. "After all, Mr. Bib, you are a man of some
penetration. How long a run?"
"One consecutive night," said the Bibliomaniac.
"Ah--and where?" demanded the Idiot, with a smile.
"At Bloomingdale," answered the Bibliomaniac, severely.
"That's a very good idea," said the Idiot. "When you go back there, Mr.
Bib, I wish you'd suggest it to the superintendent."
VI
HE DISCUSSES FAME
"Mr. Poet," said the Idiot, the other morning as his friend, the
Rhymster, took his place beside him at the breakfast-table, "tell me:
How long have you been writing poetry?"
"Oh, I don't know," said the Poet, modestly. "I don't know that I've
ever written any. I've turned out a lot of rhymes in my day, and have
managed to make a fair living with them, but poetry is a different
thing. The divine afflatus doesn't come to every one, you know; and I
doubt if anybody will be able to say whether my work has shown an
occasional touch of inspiration, or not until I have been dead fifty or
a hundred years."
"Tut!" exclaimed the Idiot. "That's all nonsense. I am able to say now
whether or not your work shows the occasional touch of inspiration. It
does. In fact, it shows more than that. It shows a semi-occasional touch
of inspiration. How long have you been in the business?"
"Eighteen years," sighed the Poet. "I began when I was twelve with a
limerick. As I remember the thing, it went like this:
"There was a young man of Cohasset
Turned on the red-hot water-faucet.
When asked: 'Is it hot?'
He answered, 'Well, thot
Is a pretty mild way for to class it.'"
"Good!" said the Idiot. "That wasn't a bad beginning for a boy of
twelve."
"So my family thought," said the Poet. "My mother sent it to the Under
the Evening Lamp Department of our town paper, and three weeks later I
was launched. I've had the _cacoethes scribendi_ ever since--but, alas!
I got more fame in that brief hour of success than I have ever been able
to win since. It is a mighty hard job, Mr. Idiot, making a name for
yourself these days."
"That's the point I was getting at," said the Idiot, "and I wanted to
have a talk with you on the subject. I've read a lot of your stuff in
the past eight or ten years, and, in my humble judgment, it is better
than any of that rhymed nonsense of Henry Wintergreen Boggs, whose name
appears in the newspapers every day in the year; of Susan Aldershot
Spinks, whose portrait is almost as common an occurrence in the papers
as that of Lydia Squinkham; of Circumflex Jones, the eminent
sweet-singer of Arizona; or of Henderson Hartley MacFadd, the Canadian
Browning, of whom the world is constantly hearing so much. I have
wondered if you were going about it in the right way. What is your plan
for winning fame?"
"Oh, I keep plodding away, doing the best I can all the while," said the
Poet. "If there's any good in my stuff, or any stuff in my goods, I'll
get my reward some day."
"Fifty or a hundred years after you're dead, eh?" said the Idiot.
"Yes," smiled the Poet.
"Well--your board-bills won't be high then, anyhow," said the Idiot.
"That's one satisfaction, I presume. They tell me Homer hasn't eaten a
thing for over twenty centuries. Seems to me, though, that if I were a
poet I'd go in for a little fame while I was alive. It's all very nice
to work the skin off your knuckles, and to twist your gray matter inside
out until it crocks and fades, so that your great-grandchildren can
swell around the country sporting a name that has become a household
word, but I'm blessed if I care for that sort of thing. I don't believe
in storing up caramels for some twenty-first-century baby that bears my
name to cut his teeth on, when I have a sweet tooth of my own that is
pining away for the lack of nourishment; and, if I were you, I'd go in
for the new method. What if Browning and Tennyson and Longfellow and Poe
did have to labor for years to win the laurel crown, that's no reason
why you should do it. You might just as well reason that because your
forefathers went from one city to another in a stage-coach you should
eschew railways."
"I quite agree with you," replied the Poet. "But in literature there is
no royal road to fame that I know of."
"What!" cried the Idiot. "No royal road to fame in letters! Why, where
have you been living all these years, Mr. Poet? This is the age of the
Get Fame-Quick Scheme. You can make a reputation in five minutes, if you
only know the ropes. I know of at least two department stores where you
can go and buy all you want of it, and in all its grades--from notoriety
down to the straight goods."
"Fame? At a department store!" put in Mr. Whitechoker, incredulously.
"Certainly," said the Idiot. "Ready-made laurels on demand. Why not?
It's the easiest thing in the world. Fact is, between you and me, I am
considering a plan now for the promoting of a corporation to be called
the United States Fame Company, Limited, the main purpose of which
shall be to earn money for its stockholders by making its customers
famous at so much per head. It won't make any difference whether the
customer wishes to be famous as an actor, a novelist, or a poet, or any
other old thing. We'll turn the trick for him, and guarantee him more
than a taste of immortality."
"You may put me down for four dollars' worth of notoriety," said Mr.
Brief, with a laugh.
"All right," said the Idiot, dryly. "There's a lot in your profession
who like the cheap sort. But I warn you in advance that if you go in for
cheap notoriety, you'll find it a pretty hard job getting anybody to
sell you any eighteen-karat distinction later."
"Well," said the Poet, "I don't know that I can promise to be one of
your customers until I know something of the quality of the fame you
have to sell. Tell me of somebody you've made a name for, and I'll take
the matter into consideration if I like the style of laurel you have
placed on his brow."
"Lean over here and I'll whisper," said the Idiot. "I don't mind telling
you, but I don't believe in giving away the secrets of the trade to the
rest of these gentlemen."
The Poet did as he was bade, and the Idiot whispered a certain great
name in his ear.
"No!" cried the Poet, incredulously.
"Yes, sir. Fact!" said the Idiot. "He was made famous in a night. The
first thing we did was to get him to elongate his signature. He was
writing as--P. K. Dubbins we'll call him, for the sake of the argument.
Now a name like that couldn't be made great under any circumstances
whatsoever, so we made him write it out in full: Philander Kenilworth
Dubbins--regular broadside, you see. P. K. Dubbins was a pop-shot, but
Philander Kenilworth Dubbins spreads out like a dum-dum bullet or hits
you like a blast from a Gatling gun. Printed, it takes up a whole line
of a newspaper column; put at the top of an advertisement, it strikes
the eye with the convincing force of a circus-poster. You can't help
seeing it, and it makes, when spoken, a mouthful that is nothing short
of impressive and sonorous."
"Still," suggested Mr. Brief, with a wink at the Bibliomaniac, "you have
only multiplied your difficulties by three. If it was hard for your
friend Dubbins to make one name famous, I can't see that he improves
matters by trying to make three names famous."
"On the modern business principle that to accomplish anything you must
work on a large scale," said the Idiot. "Philander Kenilworth Dubbins
was a better proposition than P. K. Dubbins. The difference between them
in the mere matter of potentialities is the difference between a corner
grocery and a department store, or a kite with a tail and one without.
Well, having created the name, the next thing to do was to exploit it,
and we advertised Dubbins for all there was in him. We got Mr. William
Jones Brickbat, the eminent novelist, to say that he had read Dubbins's
poems, and had not yet died; we got Edward Pinkham, the author of "The
Man with the Watering-pot," to send us a type-written letter, saying
that Dubbins was a coming man, and that his latest book, _Howls from
Helicon_, contained many inspired lines. But, best of all, we prevailed
upon the manufacturers of celluloid soap to print a testimonial from
Dubbins himself, saying that there was no other soap like it in the
market. That brought his name prominently before every magazine-reader
in the country, because the celluloid-soap people are among the biggest
advertisers of the day, and everywhere that soap ad went, why, Dubbins's
testimonial went also, as faithfully as Mary's Little Lamb. After that
we paid a shirt-making concern down-town to put out a new collar called
"The Helicon," which they advertised widely with a picture of Dubbins's
head sticking up out of the middle of it; and, finally, as a crowning
achievement, we leased Dubbins for a year to a five-cent cigar company,
who have placarded the fences, barns, and chicken-coops from Maine to
California with the name of Dubbins--'Flora Dubbins: The Best Five-Cent
Smoke in the Market.'"
"And thus you made the name of Dubbins famous in letters!" sneered the
Doctor.
"That was only the preliminary canter," replied the Idiot. "So far,
Dubbins's greatness was confined to fences, barns, chicken-coops, and
the advertising columns of the magazines. The next thing was to get him
written up in the newspapers. That sort of thing can't be bought, but
you can acquire it by subtlety. Plan one was to make an after-dinner
speaker out of Dubbins. This was easy. There are a million public
dinners every year, but a limited supply of good speakers; so, with a
little effort, we got Dubbins on five toast-cards, hired a humorist out
in Wisconsin to write five breezy speeches for him, Dubbins committed
them to memory, and they went off like hot-cakes. Morning papers would
come out with Dubbins's picture printed in between that of Bishop Potter
and a member of the cabinet, who also spoke. Copies of Dubbins's
speeches were handed to the reporters before the dinner began, so that
it didn't make any difference whether Dubbins spoke them or not--the
papers had 'em next morning just the same, and inside of six months you
couldn't read an account of any public banquet without running up
against the name of Philander Kenilworth Dubbins."
"Well, I declare!" ejaculated Mr. Whitechoker. "What a strange affair!"
"Then we got Dubbins's publishers to take a hand," said the Idiot. "They
issued a monthly budget of gossip concerning their authors, which
newspaper editors all over quoted in their interesting items of the day.
From these paragraphs the public learned that Dubbins wrote between
4 A.M. and breakfast-time; that Dubbins never penned a line
without having a tame rabbit, named Romola, sitting alongside of his
ink-pot; that Dubbins got his ideas for his wonderful poem, 'The Mystery
of Life,' from hearing a canary inadvertently whistle a bar of
'Hiawatha;' that Dubbins was the best-dressed author in the State of New
York, affecting green plaid waistcoats, pink shirts, and red neckties;
witty things that Dubbins's boy had said about Dubbins's work to
Dubbins himself were also spread all over the land, until finally
Philander Kenilworth Dubbins became a select series of household words
in every town, city, and hamlet in the United States. And there he is
to-day--a great man, bearing a great name, made for him by his friends.
_Howls from Helicon_ is full of bad poems, but Dubbins is a son of
Parnassus just the same. Now we propose to do it for others. For five
dollars down, Mr. Poet, I'll make you conspicuous; for ten, I'll make
you notorious; for fifty, I'll make you famous; for a hundred, I'll give
you immortality."
"Good!" cried the Poet. "Immortality for a hundred dollars is cheap.
I'll take that."
"You will?" said the Idiot, joyfully. "Put up your money."
"All right," laughed the Poet. "I'll pay--C. O. D."
"Another hundred gone!" moaned the Idiot, as the party broke up and its
members went their several ways. "I think it's abominable that this
commercial spirit of the age should have affected even you poets. You
ought to have gone into business, old man, and left the Muses alone.
You've got too good a head for poetry."
VII
ON THE DECADENCE OF APRIL-FOOL'S-DAY
"I am sorry to observe," said the Idiot, as he sat down at the
breakfast-table yesterday morning, "that the good old customs of my
youthful days are dying out by slow degrees, and the celebrations that
once filled my childish soul with glee are no longer a part of the
pleasures of the young. Actually, Mr. Whitechoker, I got through the
whole day yesterday without sitting on a single pin or smashing my toes
against a brickbat hid beneath a hat. What on earth can be coming over
the boys of the land that they no longer avail themselves of the
privileges of the fool-tide?"
"Fool-tide's good," said Mr. Brief. "Where did you get that?"
"Oh, I pried it out of my gray-matter 'way back in the last century,"
said the Idiot. "It grew out of a simple little prank I played one April
1st upon an uncle of mine. I bored a hole in the middle of a pine log
and filled it with powder. We had it that night on the hearth, and a
moment later there wasn't any hearth. In talking the matter over later
with my father and mother and the old gentleman, in order to turn the
discussion into more genial channels, I asked why, if the Yule-log was
appropriate for the Yule-tide, the Fool-log wasn't appropriate for the
Fool-tide."
"I hope you got the answer you deserved," said the Bibliomaniac.
"I did," sighed the Idiot. "I got all there was coming to me--slippers,
trunk-strap, hair-brush, and plain hand; but it was worth it. All the
glories of Vesuvius, Etna, Popocatepetl, and Pelee rolled into one could
never thereafter induce in me anything approaching that joyous sensation
that I derived from the spectacle of that fool-log and that happy hearth
soaring up through the chimney together, hand in hand, and taking with
them such portions of the flues, andirons, and other articles of
fireplace vertu as cared to join them in their upward flight."
"You must have been a holy terror as a boy," said the Doctor. "I should
not have cared to live on your block."
"Oh, I wasn't so bad," observed the Idiot. "I never was vicious or
malicious in what I did. If I poured vitriol into the coffee-pot at
breakfast my father and mother knew that I didn't do it to give pain to
anybody. If I hid under my maiden aunt's bed and barked like a bull-dog
after she had retired, dear old Tabitha knew that it was all done in a
spirit of pleasantry. When I glued my grandfather's new teeth together
with stratina, that splendid old man was perfectly aware that I had no
grudge I was trying thus to repay; and certainly the French teacher at
school, when he sat down on an iron bear-trap I had set for him in his
chair, never entertained the notion that there was the slightest
animosity in my act."
"By jingo!" cried the Bibliomaniac. "I'd have spanked you good and hard
if I'd been your mother."
"Don't you fret--she did it; that is, she did up to the time I was ten
years old, and then she had such a shock she gave up corporeal
punishment altogether," said the Idiot.
"Had a shock, eh?" smiled the Lawyer. "Nearly killed you, I suppose,
giving you what you deserved?"
"No," said the Idiot. "Spanked me with a hair-brush without having
removed a couple of Excelsior torpedoes from my pistol-pocket. On the
second whack I appeared to explode. Poor woman! She didn't know I was
loaded, and from that time on she was as afraid of me as most other
women are of a gun."
"I'd have turned you over to your father," said the Bibliomaniac,
indignantly.
"She did," said the Idiot, sadly. "I never used explosives again. In
later years I took up the milder April-fool diversions, such as filling
the mucilage-pot with ink and the ink-pot with mucilage; mixing the
granulated sugar with white sand; putting powdered brick into the
red-pepper pot; inserting kerosene-oil into the sweet-oil bottle, and
little things like that. I squandered a whole dollar one
April-fool's-day sending telegrams to my uncles and aunts, telling them
to come and dine with us that night; and they all came, too, although my
father and mother were dining out that evening, and--oh dear,
April-fool's-day is not what it used to be. The boys and girls of the
present generation are little old men and women with no pranks left in
them. Why, I don't believe that nine out of ten boys, who are about to
enter college this spring, could rig up a successful tick-tack on a
window to save their lives; and the joy of carrying a piece of twine
across the sidewalk from a front-door knob to a lamp-post, hat-high, and
then sitting back in the seclusion of a convenient area and watching the
plug-hats of the people go down before it--that is a joy that seems to
be wholly untasted of the present generation of infantile dignitaries
that we call the youth of the land. What is the matter with 'em, do you
suppose?"