"It's called the Carnegie because of the size of the checks. Then
there's poor old Jimmie Varickstreet--the last remnant of a first
family--hasn't enough money to keep a goat-wagon, and couldn't tell you
the difference between a saw-horse and a crupper. He gives up his hall
bedroom Horse-Show week and lives in the place day and night, covering
up the delinquencies of his afternoon and evening clothes with a long
yellow ulster with buttons like butter-saucers distributed all over his
person--"
"Where did he get it, if he's so beastly poor?" demanded the Lawyer.
"He's gone without food and drink and clothes that don't show. He has
scrimped and saved, and denied himself for a year to get up a gaudy
shell in which for six glorious days to shine resplendent," said the
Idiot. "Jimmie lives for those six days, and as you see him flitting
from box to box and realize that he is an opulent swell for six days of
every year, and a poor, down-trodden exile for the rest of the time, you
don't grudge him his little diversion and almost wish you had sufficient
will power to deny yourself the luxuries and some of the necessities of
life as well to get a coat like that. If I had my way they'd award
Jimmie Varickstreet at least an honorable mention as one of the most
interesting exhibits in the whole show.
"And there are plenty of others. There's raw material enough in that
Horse Show to make it a permanent exhibition if the managers would only
get together and lick it into shape. As a sort of social zoo it is
unsurpassed, and why they don't classify the various sections of it I
can't see. In the first place, imagine a dozen boxes filled with members
of the Four Hundred, men and women whose names have become household
words, and wearing on their backs garments made by the deft fingers of
the greatest sartorial artists of the ages. You and I walk in and are
permitted to gaze upon this glorious assemblage--the American
nobility--in its gayest environment. Wouldn't it interest you to know
that that very beautiful woman in the lavender creation, wrapped up in a
billion-dollar pearl necklace, is the famous Mrs. Bollington-Jones, who
holds the divorce championship of South Dakota, and that those two chaps
who are talking to her so vivaciously are two of her ex-husbands, Van
Bibber Beaconhill and 'Tommy' Fitz Greenwich? Wouldn't it interest you
more than any horse in the ring to know that her gown was turned out at
Mrs. Robert Bluefern's Dud Studio at a cost of nine thousand seven
hundred and fifty dollars, hat included? Yet the programme says never a
word about these people. Every horse that trots in has a number so that
you can tell who and what and why he is, but there are no placards on
Mrs. Bollington-Jones by which she may be identified.
"Then on the promenade, there is Hooker Van Winkle. He's out on bail for
killing a farmer with his automobile up in Connecticut somewhere. There
is young Walston Addlepate, whose father pays him a salary of
twenty-five thousand dollars a year for keeping out of business. There's
Jimson Gooseberry, the cotillon leader, whose name is on every lip
during the season. Approaching you, dressed in gorgeous furs, is Mrs.
Dinningforth Winter, who declined to meet Prince Henry when he was here,
because of a previous engagement to dine with Tolby Robinson's pet
monkey just in from a cruise in the Indies. And so it goes. The place
fairly shrieks with celebrities whose names appear in the _Social
Register_, and whose photographs in pink and green are the stock in
trade of the Sunday newspapers of saffron tendencies everywhere--but
what is done about it? Nothing at all. They come and go, conspicuous
but unidentified, and wasting their notoriety on the desert air. It is a
magnificent opportunity wasted, and, unless you happen to know these
people by sight, you miss a thousand and one little points which are the
_sine qua non_ of the show."
"I wonder you don't write another Baedeker," said the
Bibliomaniac--"_The Idiot's Hand-book to the Horse Show, or Who's Who
at the Garden._"
"It would be a good idea," said the Idiot. "But the show people must
take the initiative. The whole thing needs a live manager."
"A sort of Ward MacAllister again?" asked Mr. Brief.
"No, not exactly," said the Idiot. "Society has plenty of successors to
Ward MacAllister. What they seem to me to need most is a P. T. Barnum. A
man like that could make society a veritable Klondike, and with the
Horse Show as a nucleus he wouldn't have much trouble getting the thing
started along."
XVII
SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS
"By Jingo!" said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at the
breakfast-table the other morning, "but I'm just regularly tuckered
out."
"Late hours again?" asked the Lawyer.
"Not a late hour," returned the Idiot. "Matter of fact, I went to bed
last night at half-after seven and never waked until nine this morning.
In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I'd been put
through a threshing-machine. Every bone in my body from the funny to the
medulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair of
shoes on a school-boy in church, they are so stiff."
"Oh well," said the Doctor, "what of it? The pace that kills is bound
to have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution. If you, like other
young men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle,
what can you expect? You push nature into a corner and then growl like
all possessed because she rebels."
"Not I," retorted the Idiot. "Mr. Pedagog and the Poet and Mr. Bib may
lead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing.
I'm not striving after the unattainable. I'm not wasting my physical
substance in riotous living. The cold and clammy touch of dissipation is
not writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow.
Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of the
Subway to the other you won't find another man of my age who in general
takes better care of himself. I am as watchful of my own needs as though
I were a baby and my own nurse at one and the same time. No mother could
watch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and--"
"Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?" cried the Lawyer,
irritated. "If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaiming
yourself as a physical wreck? There must be some cause for your
condition."
"There is," said the Idiot, meekly. "I went Christmas shopping yesterday
without having previously trained for it, and this is the result. I
sometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public health
more or less in your hands, don't take the initiative and stave off
nervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run-down physical
condition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying to
cure it after the fact. The ounce-of-prevention idea ought to be
incorporated, it seems to me, into the _materia medica_."
"What would you have us do, move mountains?" demanded the Doctor. "I'm
not afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science,
but the shopping-fever--well, it is incurable. Once it gets hold of a
man or a woman, and more especially a woman, there isn't anything that
I know of can get it out of the system. I grant you that it is as much
of a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yet
been discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty,
and even that has been known to fail."
"That's true enough," said the Idiot, "but what you can do is to make it
harmless. There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regard
as necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, because
people can be put physically into such a condition that they are
practically immune to their ravages."
"Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by
it. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil
effects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump you
full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce
of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of
radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his
pocket," said the Doctor.
"Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling," said the Idiot. "A college
president might as well say that boys will play football, and that
there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of
playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well as
anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an
epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that
it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks
to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the
men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the
exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and
nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy
exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can
do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus
to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'd
bounce him, that's what."
"Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,"
sneered the Doctor.
"Certainly," quoth the Idiot. "I dreamed it all out in my sleep last
night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of
establishments all over the country--"
"To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor. "A sort of Keeley
Cure for shopping inebriates?"
"Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot. "The shopping inebriate is too much of a
factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that
popular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium."
"A what?" roared the Doctor.
"A shopnasium," explained the Idiot. "We have gymnasiums in which we
teach gymnastics. Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what we
might call shopnastics? Just think of what a boon it would be for a lot
of delicate women, for instance, who know that along about
Christmas-time they must hie them forth to the department stores, there
to be crushed and mauled and pulled and hauled until there is scarcely
anything left to them, to feel that they could come to our shopnasium
and there be trained for the ordeal which they cannot escape."
"Very nice," said the Doctor. "But how on earth can you train them?
That's what I'd like to know."
"How? Why, how on earth do you train a football team except by
practice?" demanded the Idiot. "It wouldn't take a very ingenious mind
to figure out a game called shopping that would be governed by rules
similar to those of football. Take a couple of bargain-counters for the
goals. Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other. Then
let sixty women start from number one and try to get to number two
across the field through another body of sixty women bent on getting to
the other one, and _vice versa_. You could teach 'em all the arts of the
rush-line, defence, running around the ends, breaking through the
middle, and all that. At first the scrimmage would be pretty hard on the
beginners, but with a month's practice they'd get hardened to it, and
by Christmas-time there isn't a bargain-counter in the country they
couldn't reach without more than ordinary fatigue. An interesting
feature of the game would be to have automatic cars and automobiles and
cabs running to and fro across the field all the time so that they would
become absolute masters of the art of dodging similar vehicles when they
encounter them in real life, as they surely must when the holiday season
is in full blast and they are compelled by the demands of the hour to go
out into the world."
"The women couldn't stand it," said the Doctor. "They might as well be
knocked out at the real thing as in the imitation."
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "They wouldn't be knocked out if you gave
them preliminary individual exercise with punching-bags, dummies for
tackle practice, and other things the football player uses to make
himself tough and irresistible."
"But you can't reason with shopping as you do with football," suggested
the Lawyer. "Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains the
football player through the toughest of fights. The knowledge that the
nation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is half
the backing of your quarter-back."
"That's all right," said the Idiot, "but the make-up of the average
woman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, the
chase after a bargain does for a woman. I have known women so worn and
weary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strength
an hour later at a Monday marked-down sale of laundry soap and Yeats's
poems. What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so on
the question of incentive to action, Mr. Brief, the sexes are about
even. I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me to
make a fortune. Dr. Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for the
training and development of expert shoppers in all branches of
shopnastics, under the medical direction of yourself and my business
management would be a winner. Moreover, it would furnish a business
opening for all those football players our colleges are turning out,
for, as our institution grew and we established branches of it all over
the country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city,
and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist of
the hour?"
"Oh, well," said the Doctor, "perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, after
all; but I don't think I care to go into it. I don't want to be rich."
"Very well," said the Idiot. "That being the case, I will modify my
suggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Vassar and
other heads of women's colleges. As things are now they all ought to
have a course of shopping for the benefit of the young women who will
soon graduate into the larger institution of matrimony. That is the only
way I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be able
to cope with the strenuous life that is involved to-day in the purchase
of a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas. I know,
for I have been through it; and rather than do it again I would let the
All-American eleven for 1908 land on me after a running broad jump of
sixteen feet in length and four in the air."
XVIII
FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS
"I have a request to make of you gentlemen," observed the Idiot, as the
last buckwheat-cake of his daily allotment disappeared within. "And I
sincerely hope you will all grant it. It won't cost you anything, and
will save you a lot of trouble."
"I promise beforehand under such conditions," said the Doctor. "The
promise that doesn't cost anything and saves a lot of trouble is the
kind I like to make."
"Same here," said Mr. Brief.
"None for me," said the Bibliomaniac. "My confidence in the Idiot's
prophecies is about as great as a defeated statesman's popular
plurality. My experience with him teaches me that when he signals no
trouble ahead then is the time to look out for squalls. Therefore, you
can count me out on this promise he wants us to make."
"All right," said the Idiot. "To tell the truth, I didn't think you'd
come in because I didn't believe you could qualify. You see, the promise
I was going to ask you to make presupposes a certain condition which you
don't fulfil. I was going to ask you, gentlemen, when Christmas comes to
give me not the rich and beautiful gifts you contemplate putting into my
stocking, but their equivalent in cash. Now you, Mr. Bib, never gave me
anything at Christmas but advice, and your advice has no cash equivalent
that I could ever find out, and even if it had I'm long on it now. That
piece of advice you gave me last March about getting my head shaved so
as to give my brain a little air I've never been able to use, and your
kind suggestion of last August, that I ought to have my head cut off as
a sure cure of chronic appendicitis, which you were certain I had,
doctors tell me would be conducive to heart failure, which is far more
fatal than the original disease. The only use to which I can put it, on
my word of honor, is to give it back to you this Christmas with my best
wishes."
"Bosh!" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"It was, indeed," said the Idiot. "And there isn't any market for it.
But the rest of you gentlemen will really delight my soul if you will do
as I ask. You, Mr. Brief--what is the use of your paying out large sums
of money, devoting hour after hour of your time, and practically risking
your neck in choosing it, for a motor-car for me, when, as a matter of
fact, I'd rather have the money? What's the use of giving thirty-six
hundred dollars for an automobile to put in my stocking when I'd be
happier if you'd give me a certified check for twenty-five hundred
dollars? You couldn't get any such discount from the manufacturers, and
I'd be more greatly pleased into the bargain. And you, Doctor--generous
heart, that you are--why in thunder should you wear yourself out between
now and Christmas-day looking for an eighteen-hundred-dollar fur-lined
overcoat for me, when, as a matter of actual truth, I'd prefer a
twenty-two-dollar ulster with ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in the
change-pocket?"
"I'm sure I don't see why I should," said the Doctor. "And I promise you
I won't. What's more, I'll give you the ulster and the ten crisp one
hundred dollars without fail if you'll cash my check for eighteen
hundred dollars and give me the change."
"Certainly," said the Idiot. "How will you have it, in dimes or
nickels?"
"Any way you please," said the Doctor, with a wink at Mr. Brief.
"All right," returned the Idiot. "Send up the ulster and the ten crisps
and I'll give you my check for the balance. Then I'll do the same by
you, Mr. Poet. My policy involves a square deal for everybody whatever
his previous condition of servitude. Last year, you may remember, you
sent me a cigar and a lovely little poem of your own composition:
"When I am blue as indigo, you wrote,
And cold as is the Arctic snow,
Give me no megrims rotting.
I choose the friend
The Heavens send
Who takes me Idiyachting.
Remember that? Well, it was a mighty nice present, and I wouldn't sell
it for a million abandoned farms up in New Hampshire, but this year I'd
rather have the money--say one thousand dollars and five cents--a
thousand dollars instead of the poem and five cents in place of the
cigar."
"I am afraid you value my verse too high," smiled the Poet.
"Not that one," said the Idiot. "The mere words don't amount to much. I
could probably buy twice as many just as good for four dollars, but the
way in which you arranged them, and the sentiment they conveyed, made
them practically priceless to me. I set their value at a thousand
dollars because that is the minimum sum at which I can be tempted to
part with things that on principle I should always like to keep--like
my word of honor, my conscience, my political views, and other things a
fellow shouldn't let go of for minor considerations. The value of the
cigar I may have placed too high, but the poem--never."
"And yet you don't want another?" asked the Poet, reproachfully.
"Indeed I do," returned the Idiot, "but I can't afford to own so much
literary property any more than I can afford to possess Mr. Brief's
automobile--and this is precisely what I am driving at. So many people
nowadays present us at Christmas with objects we can't afford to own,
that we cannot possibly repay, and overwhelm us with luxuries when we
are starving for our necessities, so that Christmas, instead of bringing
happiness with it, brings trial and tribulation. I know of a case last
year where a very generous-hearted individual sent a set of Ruskin,
superbly bound in full calf that would have set the Bibliomaniac here
crazy with joy, to a widow who had just pawned her wedding-ring to buy a
Christmas turkey for her children. A bundle of kindling-wood would have
been far more welcome than a Carnegie library at that moment, and yet
here was a generous soul who was ready to spend a good hundred dollars
to make the recipient happy. Do you suppose the lady looked upon that
sumptuous Ruskin with anything but misery in her heart?"
"Oh, well, she could have pawned that instead of her wedding-ring,"
sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
"She couldn't for two reasons," said the Idiot. "In the first place, her
sensibilities were such that she could not have pawned a present just
received, and, in the second place, she lived in the town of Hohokus on
the Nepperhan, and there isn't a pawnshop within a radius of fifty miles
of her home. Besides, it's easier to sneak into a pawnshop with a
wedding-ring for your collateral than to drive up with a van big enough
to hold a complete set of Ruskin bound in full calf. It takes nerve and
experience to do that with a cool and careless _mien_, and, whatever you
may have in that respect, Mr. Bib, there are few refined widows in
reduced circumstances who are similarly gifted. Then take the case of my
friend Billups--some sharp of a tailor got out a judgment against
Billups for ninety-eight dollars for a bill he couldn't pay on the
fifteenth of December. Billups got his name in the papers, and received
enough notoriety to fill him with ambition to go on the stage, and it
nearly killed him, and what do you suppose his friends did when
Christmas came around? Did they pay off that judgment and relieve him of
the odium of having his name chalked up on the public slate? Not they.
They sent him forty dollars' worth of golf-clubs, sixteen dollars' worth
of cuff-buttons, eight ten-dollar umbrellas, a half-dozen silver
match-boxes, a cigar-cutter, and about two hundred dollars' worth of
other trash that he's got to pay storage-room for. And on top of that,
in order to keep up his end, Billups has had to hang up a lot of
tradesmen for the match-cases and cigar-cutters and umbrellas and trash
he's sent to his generous friends in return for their generosity."
"Oh, rot," interrupted the Bibliomaniac. "What an idiot your friend
Billups must be. Why didn't he send the presents he received to others,
and so saved his money to pay his debts with?"
"Well, I guess he didn't think of that," said the Idiot. "We haven't all
got the science of Christmas-giving down as fine as you have, Mr. Bib.
But that is a valuable suggestion of yours and I'll put it down among
the things that can be done in the plan I am formulating for the
painless Christmas."
"We can't relieve one another's necessities unless we know what they
are, can we?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
"We can if we adopt my cash system," said the Idiot. "For instance, I
know that I need a dozen pairs of new socks. Modesty would prevent my
announcing this fact to the world, and as long as I wear shoes you'd
never find it out, but if, when Christmas came, you gave me twenty-five
dollars instead of Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ in words of one syllable,
you would relieve my necessities and so earn my everlasting gratitude.
Dr. Capsule here wouldn't acknowledge to you or to me that his
suspenders are held together in three places with safety-pins, and will
so continue to be until these prosperous times moderate; but if we were
to present him with nine dollars and sixty-eight cents on Christmas
morning, we should discern a look of gratitude in his eye on that
suspender account that would be missing if we were to hand him out a
seven-dollar gold-mounted shaving-mug instead. We should have shown our
generous spirit on his behalf, which is all a Christmas present ever
does, whether it is a diamond tiara or a chain of sausages, and at the
same time have relieved his anxieties about his braces. His gratitude
would be double-barrelled, and his happiness a surer shot. Give us the
money, say I, and let us relieve our necessities first, and then if
there is anything left over we can buy some memorial of the day with the
balance."
"Well, I think it's a pretty good plan," said Mrs. Pedagog. "It would
save a lot of waste, anyhow. But it isn't possible for all of us to do
it, Mr. Idiot. I, for instance, haven't any money to give you."
"You could give me something better," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't accept
any money from you for a Christmas present."
"Then what shall it be?" asked the Landlady.
"Well--a receipt in full for my bill to date," said the Idiot.
"Mercy!" cried the Landlady. "I couldn't afford that--"