lady--she has rather small hands. And there was a nice pair of red ones
on a tape. Whenever she went out in the back-yard to make
snowballs--but we decided against it. We were told to get a
hug-me-tight; and a hug-me-tight we were resolved to get, even if they
sent in a hurry-up call for the Morality Squad.
By this time, however, we were aware that a hug-me-tight was not a thing
for a nervous man to ask a young lady for, without preparing her mind
gently. We have always believed that we have a spiritual face--the
grave, sweet expression of a monk who is happy in his calling. But any
healthy man who says he can look spiritual while asking a lady-clerk for
a hug-me-tight is a liar. We hate to be vulgar, but no other word will
do. The thing isn't possible--that's all. So we were politic.
"Have you any woollen garments, something in the nature of a jacket," we
asked in our most elaborately casual tone, while the blond person patted
her hair and stared negligently past our right ear, "which would be
suitable for an elderly lady to wear in the house or under a coat?"
"Oh, what you want is a hug-me-tight," she said.
And she never batted an eye! The self-control of women at times is
really a wonderful thing. So we got our hug-me-tight at last. But
never again--s'elp us! We'll get that nice old lady a meerschaum pipe
first.
[Illustration: VENTILATION]
*Ventilation*
This is the season of the year--we are writing on a fine brisk December
day, friend reader--when ventilation becomes one of the paramount
issues. To open the window or not to open it, that is the question.
Discussions on this topic have been known to split families. They have
even led to the splitting of heads.
Heaven only knows how many divorces have been started by arguments as to
how much air should be let into the bedroom o' nights--with the number
of blankets and the thickness of the eiderdown as sub-headings of
debate.
Consider the sad lot of the ordinary poor anaemic husband married to one
of those hardy modern women, who are so full-blooded that they can't
bear to wear anything to speak of above the corset-top or below the
knees. We saw one on the street the other day, and about the only
difference between her and "September Morn" was a sealskin coat thrown
back on the shoulders, and the fact that she didn't stand the same way
as the lady in the picture. It was a cold day, too.
Naturally persons of such airy inclinations and fervid temperament
wouldn't want to be burdened with a whole lot of blankets and quilts
when they go by-by. Obviously you can't take a really truly "beauty
sleep" with several layers of bed-clothes piled up on you like the roof
of a dug-out. The thing isn't done--not in any pictures that we have
seen, that is. As a pious and embarrassed bachelor, of course, we speak
of such matters purely from report and from such evidences as we have
gleaned from the movies and from those bed-room scenes now so popular in
stage-performances. Stage-beds never have any blankets. Their
appointments always are of pink silk, and no conscientious actress would
dream of pulling them up any higher than the lace-work on her nighty.
But consider the case of the modern husband. He, poor devil, is not
hardened by going around the streets with his shirt laid open so as to
expose everything from his collar-bone to his solar-plexus. Also his
pants are of wool--or so the tailor claims--and they extend to his feet.
If they were made of georgette (we got this from a department-store
"ad") and cut off at the knee so as to display about three dollars'
worth of transparent silk stocking, they might help to harden his
constitution--also his nerve. But, as a matter of fact, he would
probably get double pneumonia while the first policeman he met was
dragging him off to the station. If he didn't get double pneumonia, he
would certainly get three months.
Naturally such a man is soft and sensitive to cold. If he lets any
draught into his room at night, he wants a nice, tame little draught
that will coil up quietly under the dresser and stay there. His wife on
the other hand, accustomed to the rigors of the open street with hardly
any other defence than her natural beauty, insists on letting into the
room one of those northern zephyrs that play about exposed
street-corners in the month of January. That is where the trouble
starts, and--well, when we finally get a divorce court in Canada, this
will probably be regarded as one of the statutory causes.
Of course, it isn't only a man's wife that drives him into nightly cold
storage. There is the pressure of public opinion, for instance. The
same absurd force of custom which drags a man out of bed in the morning,
blue and shivering, and plunges him into a tub full of icy water,
directs that he shall leave his window open all night for fear of what
the neighbors would think of him if he didn't.
We are a coward like everyone else, and we do it. We don't believe the
health-hints we see in the magazines. We have no wife to bully us in
the matter of the aeration of our boudoir. And yet we cower miserably
under the clothes all winter long, while icy gales leap in through the
window, chucking our garments off the chair where we pile them up,
blowing the undress portraits of our favorite characters in ancient
history, Helen of Troy, Venus, and Phryne, about the room, and reaching
under the clothes to tickle our feet with icicles.
It isn't good for us. It isn't good for any man to spend the night with
his head under the pillow instead of on top of it. But what are we to
do about it? We don't dare keep our window closed--what would our
landlady say, if she found out? She'd probably decide we had measles,
and throw us out to prevent the house being quarantined.
And next morning! Great guns, but that room is cold! It would be just
about right for a little Esquimau, but we are not a little Esquimau. We
don't rub ourself all over with train-oil or whale-blubber. We don't
even know how to induce a whale to blubber on us. Neither do we sleep
in fur pyjamas, which also serve for business and social purposes.
Little Esquimaus don't even have to put their hats on when they get up.
They are all dressed as it is.
The terrible predicament of a civilized man dressing in a cold room is
that he has to take off what little he has on before he can put on
anything else. One's flannelette nighty may be no great shakes as a
protection, but at least one has been able to warm it up a little during
the night. And then to take it off, while your teeth chatter and your
blood congeals--there are few sadder partings than this.
One's only safety lies in speed. If you could only see us as we
leap--oh, with a chaperon, of course, dearie--no, no, we don't mean that
we leap with a chaperon, but that it would be all right for you to see
us if you brought a chaperon--oh, well, anyway, we certainly leap.
But it must be admitted that civilized male habiliments are not adapted
to speedy dressing. Neither are female, for that matter, judging by the
length of time we have to wait whenever we take anyone to the theatre.
If they would only devise some sort of clothes--for the winter months,
at any rate--that a man could jump into and fasten with one or two
buttons! You know how a firehorse runs into his harness. Well,
something along that line would do.
As it is, we drop our _robe de nuit_ like Psyche at the bath--only a
little more hurriedly, perhaps--and then we start a deadly wrestle with
a set of underwear which has deliberately tied itself up in a series of
fancy knots. Our feet stick halfway in, and we stagger about on one
foot dragging and moaning, while our epidermis assumes all the colors of
a sick chameleon. It is a very painful predicament, mortifying to one's
sense of dignity, and hurtful to one's eternal salvation because of the
expletives one is sometimes led to blurt out.
And then think of the complication of hose-supports, suspenders, collars
and ties, and all the rest of it. Besides, you have probably forgotten
to put buttons in a clean shirt the night before, and you have to stand
there with palsied fingers babbling in imbecile rage while the studs
roll gaily under the bureau. No wonder a man comes down to his
breakfast on cold mornings with a seething rage that would make a
Prussian hate-party look like a June day in the pigeon-loft.
Who started this ventilation racket, anyway? Our grandfathers had no use
for it, Heaven knows. Personally we can recall our paternal
grandparent, armed with a large, strong kitchen-knife, shoving gobs of
cotton-batting into the cracks around the double-windows, in case a
skinny little draught should be able to worm its way in somewhere. And
yet the old gentleman was not cut off prematurely by some wasting
disease. He celebrated, on the contrary, a very merry ninety-fourth
birthday before he went aloft to poke cotton-batting cloudlets, no
doubt, into the crevices in the pearly panes of heaven.
We have also known a lot of other vigorous old people who had about as
much use for ventilation as they had for a velocipede. Of course, this
sort of talk from us sounds very reactionary and benighted and all that,
but we can't help recalling that people seemed to live longer and more
comfortably in the good old stuffy days than they do now, when a man is
a small body of chills entirely surrounded by draughts. Perhaps some
brother or sister will rise up in meeting and explain this little matter
to us.
Air, fresh air--everyone seems to be shouting for it as though they were
Huns caught in a foundered submarine. But old-fashioned business men
used to do their work in hermetically sealed offices containing a
wood-stove that made the varnish smoke on the furniture. If anyone
opened the door wide enough to let in a draught the size of a
lead-pencil, they swore at him. And as for opening the windows--only
over their dead bodies, that's all! Besides, they were usually nailed
down till the next spring.
But your modern business man's ideal seems to be an office that is about
as weather-proof as a squirrel-cage. We called on a man the other day,
and he was sitting between two wide-open windows with a gale blowing
through them that nearly shot us back down the stairs again.
"Great, isn't it?" the Arctic idiot chortled. "Nothing like good fresh
air! Keeps up your efficiency, you know, puts pep into you."
We said that obviously a man would have to keep moving if he wanted to
save himself from freezing to death in that office. But where did his
customers get off? It might be all right for him to freeze out a poor
devil of a journalist like ourself, but how about freezing out a
pork-packer or a bank-president? Not that we have any painful objection
to seeing them frozen, God Wot--we have been frozen out of banks too
often ourself.
"Oh, a man's customers come in off the street," he said breezily, "and
they're usually wearing their street-clothes, so they're all right."
We took the tip. We buttoned our overcoat, turned up our collar, pulled
our hat well down on our head, drew on our gloves, hunched up our back,
and were able to talk to him for three minutes about as comfortably as
though we were sitting on the top ledge of a sky-scraper in a blizzard.
If there's anything we hate, it is a draught in the ear. The only
draught we don't object to is the sort that one gets out of a keg, and
naturally one doesn't get it in the ear--not unless the party has been
going on a long time.
Take our own office. The window swings on a central pivot. The beauty
of this system is that you can get more air this way in a shorter time
than by any other expedient short of removing the side wall. But you
can't get just a little air. Either you don't get any at all, or you
get a tornado that lifts you out of your seat by the back-hair.
Of course, the system has one advantage--you can aim the draught. By
setting the window at the correct angle, you can switch an aerial
Niagara into the next office, from which it comes back slightly warmed
up and as a rule highly flavored with cigarette smoke and profanity.
This vicarious ventilation, so to speak, has its advantages, but it is
apt to lead to reprisals--and not always in kind. Some son of a gun,
for instance, slipped into our office this afternoon and stole all our
matches. We know they weren't blown away, for they were in a drawer.
While we feel keenly on this subject of ventilation and believe that the
thing is being greatly overdone, we don't wish to write ourself down as
entirely opposed to fresh air. Some concessions must be made to the
popular hygiene of the day. All that we ask for is reasonable
moderation. We don't mind a nice little draught slipping into the room
from time to time, so long as it comes in quietly and unnoticeably. What
we hate is the sort of draught that leaps at the back of our neck and
shoves an icy mitt down our collar.
Personally, we look forward to the time--will the reader please excuse
us for a moment? The chap in the office next door has just opened his
pivot window again, and has blown our hat, ten pages of this manuscript,
a dollar bill, and seventeen cents' worth of postage stamps down the
corridor. We are going in to speak to him about it.
(We are taking a paper-weight with us).
[Illustration: CITY CHICKENS]
*City Chickens*
For a long time we have wanted to write about urban poultry; but we have
been too nervous to start. It may seem to the reader that we are
carrying our natural delicacy too far and are becoming almost prudish,
but the fact remains that we were afraid to write about city chickens
for fear of being misunderstood.
You see the word "chicken" has acquired ramifications of meaning which
have nothing whatever to do with Plymouth Rocks, or Silver Wyandottes,
or Buff Cochins, or any of the other standard breeds of hen. It
occurred to us, therefore, that if we were to start an article about
keeping chickens and dressing chickens and that sort of thing, readers
of a precipitous turn of mind might jump to indecorous conclusions.
We hasten to assure the reader that we don't mean that kind of "chicken"
at all. In the first place, we don't know anything about them. We are
too virtuous--also too poor. It is true that occasionally, when forced
by our professional duties to investigate the night-life of great
cities, we have seen poultry of this sort gaily cavorting about and--but
we are growing prolix. Let it suffice to state that this article is
written about the sort of chicken that goes garbed in feathers--hen
feathers, we mean, not ostrich plumes.
It is really extraordinary how many people in town keep chickens. The
love of things rural seems to die hard in the urban breast. Unable to
go out in the early dawn and chew straws while he gazes placidly at his
hay field or his hog lot, the city man keeps hens.
First of all he purchases a whole library of hen literature. He
discovers that there are about seven hundred breeds, and that each one
is ideal for his purposes. Finally he buys four hens and a rooster
which can trace back their ancestry through two hundred generations or
more of aristocratic hendom. No common pullets for the city man who is
going in for poultry--nothing but the real blue bloods at about forty
dollars apiece.
He has previously built a strictly up-to-date hen-house--steam heat, hot
and cold water, nursery, tiled bathroom, maid's quarters, and all the
rest. If he is a very kind-hearted man, he may even put in a gramophone
and hang comic pictures on the walls. They say it is very important
that hens should be kept in a cheerful state of mind. Personally, we
have always had our doubts about a chicken having any mind at all. But
that's what the books say, and who are we that we should venture to
dispute with a book?
Of course, these chickens don't lay. Purse-proud and aristocratic
chickens of this sort never do. They have no incentive. Why should
they go to the trouble of laying eggs and having a family when they can
get everything a hen's heart desires without it? Besides, the late
hours they keep tend to a low birth-rate.
The Downer, however, gets it into his poor numb noodle that the food
isn't right. He starts experimenting, and once you start experimenting
with hen-feed you are headed for bankruptcy and the bug-buggy. The only
thing that saves you is that the chickens die in time--chickens that are
fed everything from canary seed to lobster and champagne are apt to die
young.
Is the owner discouraged?--usually, no. Ten to one he goes out and buys
another half dozen members of the poultry peerage. The only difference
is that this time he gets a different family, Brown Leghorns instead of
Black Minorcas, for instance. But the result is always the same.
Occasionally, of course, a hen will forget herself and the social
exigencies of city life and will lay an egg. Now and then they are even
known to have a chicken--in extreme cases, two or three. But families
of this unfashionable size are extremely rare. At a moderate
estimate--allowing only a reasonable interest on capital invested, the
house, hens, food, etc.--the eggs cost three dollars and a half each,
and the baby chickens six and a quarter. But every time one arrives the
proud owner goes about for days telling all his friends what a
convenience and economy it is to grow your own eggs and spring chickens
right there on the premises.
There is something pathetic about the way the moral character of
chickens deteriorates in town. We have often wondered, in fact, why the
parsons do not draw stern ethical lessons for their sermons from the way
decent, well-behaved country chickens take to evil courses in large
cities.
Time and time again we have seen innocent and energetic young roosters
from the farm come into our neighborhood--rather a respectable
neighborhood, too, as neighborhoods go--nice, young roosters of good
habits, who always got up at the proper time in the morning and went to
bed early o'nights and crowed with fidelity and discretion.
And what happened? Why, those roosters wouldn't be exposed to the
pernicious influence of city life for more than a month before they
would be staying up all night, crowing at the electric lights, and
keeping the hens up, too. What becomes of family life under these
conditions? What sort of future is there before a hennery where the
rooster sleeps all day and the hens sit around and hold mothers'
meetings without an egg or a chick in the place?
There is a rooster in our block just now, who has gone absolutely to the
demnition bow-wows. We first knew him as a kindly young cockerel from
one of the small provincial towns, good humored, honest, and orderly.
But you ought to see him now--especially you ought to hear him. The
brute crows his head off every time in the night that an automobile goes
by; and he spends his afternoons sitting on the side fence watching the
girls in the tight skirts--with the nastiest leer in his eye! We often
hear the hens calling to him; but what does he care about his family
responsibilities?--not a kluck!
The neighbors are all talking about that rooster. They are also shying
things at him whenever he gets within range. This brings up another
unpleasant feature of keeping hens in town. The neighbors are very apt
to be cross about it. They never seem able to take the same idyllic
view of chickens that the owner does--very narrow-minded people,
neighbors, as a rule.
Even the best-behaved fowl are likely to fly over the fence occasionally
into a neighbor's yard and dig worms out of the gravel walk or make
impromptu salad of his geraniums and young onions. And you have no idea
how annoyed the neighbor gets over these little outbreaks of
playfulness. Think, too, of the eggs that must result from it. Just
imagine, friend reader, an egg with a geranium shell and a flavor of
young onion!--or heliotrope and carrot tops!--or burdock and tomato can!
The possibilities are unlimited.
This reminds us of a man we knew once who lived back of a brewery. We
didn't seek out his acquaintance and make ourself a friend of his just
because he lived back of a brewery--it happened that way, that's all.
We couldn't very well cut a man just because he lived back of a brewery,
could we?
He also kept chickens. We didn't let this interfere with our friendship
either. But he had certainly the gosh-darndest time with his chickens
of anyone we ever knew. There were about fifty of them--four
roosters--and they had a nice, roomy hen-house with separate beds and
great big perches to sit around and talk on, every comfort in fact.
But did those chickens stay at home and lay eggs and rear large families
and attend to the other duties of their station in life? No, they did
not. They took to drink. We can hear the reader snort in disgust as he
reads this--if he does. The reader no doubt thinks we are lying. Not
knowing the sterling honesty of our nature, the reader doubts our word.
But fortunately we have court records to back us up, for our friend sued
the brewery for damages.
You see, the brewers used to throw out their used malt and the lees of
the beer-vats in a huge pile just back of our friend's fence. One day
an enterprising young rooster, whose moral upbringing had been
neglected, hopped over the fence and tried some of the malt. It tasted
good. Little did he know, poor bird, that he was getting into the
clutches of the Demon Rum. He ate fermented malt till he couldn't jam
down another grain.
Did it go to his head? Did it?--dear reader, that young rooster
accumulated the loveliest load of lush, the most beauteous and bountiful
"bun" ever seen in that district--and it is a district rather famous for
its "buns."
It was long after dark when the young rooster got home--trying to find
the key-hole, no doubt--and he aroused the whole hennery. He staggered
around crowing comic songs, insulted all the most respectable hens in
the place, started out to whip the other roosters, and put the whole
place on the blink generally.
Our friend was aroused by the uproar, and rushed out, thinking that a
rat or a stray dog had got into the hen house. He said that it was the
finest representation of a hilarious "jag" in an old ladies' home that
he ever saw. But, of course, he didn't know at the time what was wrong
with the young rooster. He thought he was sick, and went out next
morning and gave him some bread and milk--or whatever it is one gives
sick roosters. But the rooster would have none of it. He didn't want
bread and milk. What he wanted was some bromo-seltzer or a "Collins."
Was the young rooster enlightened as to the evil of his ways? Did he
take the pledge and climb on the water-bucket? Alas, no! What that
young rooster did was to fly right back over the fence that very
afternoon and tank up once more. Worse still, he brought the other
roosters with him.
That night there was another rough party in the hennery--four times
rougher than the other, for there were four roosters in it. They went
in for close harmony in their choral work, and also did a little close
scrapping. They even tried to whip our friend the owner when he went
out to restore order.
Talk about drunkards' homes and temperance lessons!--that hennery would
have furnished the W.C.T.U. and the Prohibitionists generally with
arguments for a five years' campaign. In a few days every chicken in
the place had developed a taste and capacity for beer that would have
filled half the population of Bavaria with envy. Life for them became
just one big "bust" after another.
Instead of hopping cheerfully from bed at the first peep of dawn, those
chickens slept in till noon. They didn't care who got the early worm.
Then they piled over the fence to the malt pile, and stayed right there
till closing time and after. They stayed, in fact, till our friend went
over and carried them back. He said it made him feel like a police van
on the Twelfth of July.
Nothing could keep those hens away from the booze. Our friend built the
fence higher; but they dug a tunnel under it. When he blocked that up,
they flew over into the neighbors' yards and got around that way. They
would even go out by his front gate and walk around the block, and come
staggering back at all hours of the night in a way that would give any
house a bad name.
Finally he sued the brewery for alienating his hens' affections--they
only laid one egg in three months, and when our friend tried to eat it
it went to his head it was so full of alcohol. But the Judge said that
a man who kept hens in town should be shut up somewhere and have his
property managed for him.