here most of us leave the table more or less dissatisfied. We find
ourselves plunged into acrimonious discussions, which, to my mind,
arise entirely from the waffles. Mr. Pedagog is a most amiable
gentleman, and yet we find him this morning full of acerbity. On the
surface of things I seem to be the cause of his anger, but in reality it
is not I, but the waffles. He has seen me gradually absorbing them and
it has irritated him. Every waffle that I eat _he_ might have had if I
had not been here. If there had been no one here but Mr. Pedagog, he
would have had all the waffles; as it is, his supply is limited. This
affects his geniality. It makes him--"
"Pardon me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But you are all wrong. I haven't thought
of the things at all."
"Consciously to yourself you have not," said the Idiot. "Subconsciously,
however, you have. The Philosophy of the Unconscious teaches us that
unknown to ourselves our actions are directly traceable to motives we
wot not of. The truth of this is conclusively proven in this case. Even
when I point out to you the facts in the case you deny their truth,
thereby showing that you are not conscious of the real underlying motive
for your irritation. Now, why is that irritation there? Because our
several rights to the individual waffles that are served here are not
clearly defined at the outset. When Mary brings in a steaming platter
full of these delicious creations of the cook, Mr. Pedagog has quite as
much right to the one with the six of hearts on it as I have, but I get
it. He does not. Hence he is irritated, although he does not know it. So
with Mr. Whitechoker. Five minutes ago he was hastening through the four
of spades in order that he might come into possession of the ten of
diamonds that lay smoking before him. As he was about to put the last
spade in his mouth I requested him to hand me the ten of diamonds,
having myself gulped down the deuce of clubs to get ahead of him. He
couldn't decline to give me that waffle because he wanted it himself. He
had to give it to me. He was irritated--though he did not know it. He
sighed and gave me the waffle."
"I did want it," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But I did not know that I
sighed."
"There you are," said the Idiot. "It is the Philosophy of the
Unconscious again. If you are not conscious of so actual a thing as a
sigh, how much the more unconscious must you be of something so subtle
as motive?"
"And your waffle-deck?" said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally
imbibes. "How will that solve the problem? It seems to me to complicate
the problem. As it is, we have about thirty waffles, each one of which
is a germ of irritation in the breast of the man who _doesn't_ eat it.
If you have fifty-two waffles you have twenty-two more germs to sow
discord in our midst."
"You would have but for my scheme," said the Idiot. "I'd have a pack of
cards at the table, and I'd deal them out just as you do in whist. Each
card would represent the corresponding waffle. We'd begin breakfast by
playing one hand after the manner of whist. Each man would keep his
tricks, and when the waffles were served he would receive those, and
those only, represented by the cards in the tricks he had taken. If you
took a trick with the king of diamonds in it, you'd get the waffle with
the king of diamonds on it, and so on. Every man would be clearly
entitled through his skill in the game to the waffles that he ate."
"Very good," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But suppose you had bad luck and
took no tricks?"
"Then," said the Idiot, "you'd have bad luck and get no waffles."
"Tutt!" said Mr. Pedagog.
And that was the sole criticism any of the boarders had to make,
although there is reason to believe that the scheme had objectionable
features to the majority of them, for as yet Progressive Waffles has not
been played at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's.
IX
A Clearing-house for Poets
"How is your Muse these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Bibliomaniac one
Sunday morning while the mush was being served.
"Flourishing," said the Idiot. "Just flourishing--and no more."
"I should think you'd be pleased if she is flourishing," said the
Doctor.
"I'd rather she'd stop flourishing and do a little writing," said the
Idiot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and
graces of an ordinary type-writer with an unconquerable aversion to
work."
"You look upon your Muse as you would upon your type-writer, eh?" said
Mr. Pedagog.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "That's all my Muse is, and she isn't even a
capable type-writer. The general run of type-writers make sense of what
you write, but my Muse won't. You may not believe it, but out of ten
inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication
anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the
matter with her, but when I sit down to dictate a comic sonnet she turns
it into a serious jingle, and _vice versa_. We can't seem to get our
moods to fit. When I want to be serious she's flippant, and when I
become flippant she's serious."
"She must be very serious most of the time," said the Doctor.
"She is," said the Idiot, innocently. "But that's only because I'm
flippant most of the time. I'm going to give her warning. If she doesn't
brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another
Muse, that's all. I can't afford to have my income cut down fifty per
cent. just because she happens to be fickle."
"Maybe she is flirting with somebody else," suggested the Poet. "My Muse
does that occasionally."
"I doubt it," said the Idiot. "I haven't observed any other poet
encroaching upon my particular province. Even you, good as you are,
can't do it. But in any event I'm going to have a change. The day has
gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a
half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these
years that men have been writing poetry no one has thought of that.
People get up grain corners, corners in railway stock, monopolies in gas
and oil and everything else, about, but as yet no poet has cornered the
market in his business."
"That's easily accounted for," said the Bibliomaniac. "The poet
controls only his own work, and if he has any sense he doesn't want to
monopolize that."
"That isn't my scheme at all," said the Idiot. "You have a monopoly of
your own work always if you choose to avail yourself of it, and, as you
say, a man would be crazy to do so. What I'd like to see established is
a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing, for instance,
that I opened an office in Wall Street--a Bank for Poets, in which all
writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw
against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It
would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend
here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put
it in the bank. He'd be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn't have to
bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the
Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft
would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which
would include postage and commissions to the company."
"And suppose the company failed to dispose of it?" suggested the Poet.
"They'd do just as ordinary banks do with checks--stamp it 'Not Good,'"
said the Idiot. "That, however, wouldn't happen very often if the
concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If
the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought
in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand
it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was
comic, and proceed to deposit it with the usual deposit slip. The teller
would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if
it was not what I thought it, would stamp it 'Not Comic' or
'Counterfeit.' It is perfectly simple."
"Very simple," said Mr. Pedagog. "Though I should have used a synonym of
simple to describe it. It's idiotic."
"That's what people said of Columbus's idea that he could discover
America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't have dollars
slathered all over it in plain view is idiotic."
"The word slathered is new to me," said the School-master; "but I fancy
I know what you mean."
"The word slathered may be new to you," said the Idiot, "but it is a
good word. I have used it with great effect several times. Whenever any
one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the
good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word
fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more
than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much
gained."
"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there
is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve
of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."
"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had
every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody
that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a
successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry
than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the
market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his
whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen,
quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a
four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page,
our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of
yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure,
force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the
last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would
enable us to more than meet the losses."
"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr.
Whitechoker.
"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two
dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more
than he gets now. _He_ couldn't complain."
"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what
happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's
still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would
be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us,
they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am
informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers
labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business
for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a
magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash
in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in
a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve
hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets,
ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would
read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the
City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten
Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a
notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at
sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how
many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the
treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our
running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders
anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would
net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."
"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the
profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but
I doubt the security of the loans."
"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot.
"The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a
consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their
obligations."
"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the
Bibliomaniac.
"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself,
sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash
off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately
becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the
lady. _I_ have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself
completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks
burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the
man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze
into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to
tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The
commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his
salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he
could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan
department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in
and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet
to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as
brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or
wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts
of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had
just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could
borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to
the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the
aurora borealis."
"You'd have trouble finding a rhyme to borealis," said the Poet.
"Tutt!" said the Idiot. "What's the matter with 'Glory, Alice,' 'Listen
to my story, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are
a Tory, Alice' (this for a Revolutionary poem), or 'Come rowing in my
dory, Alice'? There's no end to 'em."
"If you'll write a rhyming dictionary I'll buy a copy," was the Poet's
sole comment.
"That will come later," said the Idiot. "Once get our clearing-house
established, we can branch out into a general Poetry Trust and Supply
Company that will make millions. We'll make so much money, by Jove!" he
added, slapping the table enthusiastically, "that we can afford to go
into the publishing business ourselves and bring out volumes of verse
for anybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't
write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and
say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author
and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's
book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if
you'll put out a first-class book of poems under my name I'll pay all
expenses and give you a royalty of twenty per cent. on every copy I give
away!' No money in it? Bah! You gentlemen don't know. If you say fortune
would not wait upon this venture _I_ say you are the kind of men who
would sell government bonds for their value as mere engravings if you
had the chance."
"You certainly do draw a roseate picture," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"I do indeed," said the Idiot, "and the paint is laid on thick."
"Well, I hope it goes," said the Poet. "I'll make a deposit the first
day of three hundred and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and
twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus, and one epic about ten
yards in length, all of which I have in my desk at this moment."
"Very well," said the Idiot, rising, "With that encouragement from you I
feel warranted in ordering the 'Not Good' stamp at least."
X
Some Electrical Suggestions
"If I were beginning life all over again," said the Idiot, "I'd be an
electrician. It seems to me that of all modern pursuits, barring
architecture perhaps, electricity is the most fascinating."
"There's probably more money in it than there is in Idiocy, too, I
fancy," said the Bibliomaniac, dryly.
"Well, I should think so," assented the Idiot. "Idiocy is merely an
intellectual diversion. Electricity is a practical science. Idiocy
cannot be said to be anything more than a luxury, while electricity has
become a necessity. I do not even claim that any real lasting benefit
can come to the world through Idiocy, but in electricity are
possibilities, not yet realized, for which the world will be distinctly
better and happier."
"It is kind of you to speak so highly of electricity," said the Doctor.
"The science may now advance, knowing that you approve."
"Approve?" cried the Idiot. "Approve is not the word, sir. I
enthuse--and why should I not, feeling, as I do, that in the electrical
current lies the germ of the Elixir of Life! I thoroughly believe that a
bottle of liquefied electricity would make us all young."
"Then don't take it!" said the School-master. "You have suffered from an
aggravated case of youngness for as long a time as I have known you.
Pray do nothing to intensify your youth."
"I fear I shall be forced to deny myself that pleasure, Mr. Pedagog,"
returned the Idiot, mildly, "for the unhappy reason that as yet the
formula for the Electrical Elixir has not been discovered; that it will
be discovered before I die I hope and pray, because, unlike the man in
the hymn, I would live always. I'd like to be an immortal."
"An immortal Idiot! Think of it!" said the Doctor.
"I didn't expect much sympathy from you, Dr. Capsule," said the Idiot.
"The man with car-horses to sell does not dote upon the trolley-car."
"The application of the allegory is not entirely apparent," said the
Doctor.
"No?" said the Idiot. "I am surprised. I thought you intellectuals
absorbed ideas more quickly. To deal in plain terms, since it appears to
be necessary, a plan which involves the indefinite extension of mortal
life and the elimination of bodily ills is not likely to receive the
hearty endorsement of the medical profession. If a man could come home
on a stormy night and offset the deleterious effects of wet feet by
swallowing an electric pill, one containing two volts, like a two-grain
quinine pill, for instance, with greater certainty than one feels in
taking quinine, your profession would have to put up the shutters and go
into some such business as writing articles on 'Measles as It Used to
Be,' or 'Disorders of the Ante-Electrical Period.' The fine part of it
all is that we should not have to rely for our medicines upon the state
of the arsenic market, or the quinine supply, or the squill product of
the year. Electric sparks can be made without number whether the sun
shines or not. The failure of the Peruvian Bark Crop, or the destruction
by an early frost of the Castor Oil Wells, would cease to be a hideous
possibility to delicate natures. They could all fail for all mankind
need fear, for electricity can be generated when and wherever one has
need of it. If your electric pills were used up, and the chemist too far
away from your house for you to get the supply replenished at the
moment, you could put on your slippers and by walking up and down your
carpeted floor for ten or fifteen minutes generate enough electricity to
see you through. Of course you'd have to have a pair of
dynamic-storage-reservoir slippers to catch the sparks as they flew, but
I fancy they'd be less costly in the long run than the medicines we have
to-day."
"Why have wet feet at all if electricity is to be so all-powerful?"
suggested Mr. Whitechoker. "Why not devise an electrical foot-protector
and ward off all possibility of damp, cold feet?"
"You couldn't do that with men and women constituted as they are," said
the Idiot. "Your foot-protector would no doubt be a good thing, but so
are rubber overshoes. Nothing will ever be patented to compel a man to
keep his feet dry, and he won't do it except under compulsion, but once
having his feet wet he will seek the remedy. It's the Elixir of Life
that I bank on most, however. I don't believe there is one among us,
excepting Mrs. Pedagog, to whom twenty-five was not the most delightful
period of existence. To Mrs. Pedagog, as to all women, eighteen is
the limit. But men at twenty-five and women at eighteen know so much,
enjoy so much, regard themselves so highly! There is nothing _blase_
about them then. Disillusion--which I think ought to be called
dissolution--comes later. At thirty a man discovers that the things he
knew at twenty-five aren't so; and as for a woman at twenty-five, if so
be she is unmarried, her life is empty, and if so be she is married, she
has cares in the shape of children and a husband, who as a theory was a
poet, but who as a reality is a mere business machine who is oftentimes
no fonder of staying at home than he was before he was married and went
out to see her every night."
"What a wise little pessimist he is!" said Mr. Pedagog to the Doctor.
"Very. But I fail to comprehend why he branches off into Pessimism when
Electricity was his text," said the Doctor.
"Because he's the Id--" began the Bibliomaniac, but the Idiot
interrupted him.
"Don't jump fences, gentlemen, before you know whether they are made of
barbed wire or not. I'm coming to the points you are bringing up, and if
you are not careful they may puncture you," he said. "I am not in any
sense a pessimist. Quite the contrary. I am an optimist. I'm not old
enough or cross-grained enough as yet to be a pessimist, and it's
because I don't want to be a pessimist that I want this Elixir of
Electricity to hurry up and have itself patented. If men when they
reached the age of twenty-five, and women at eighteen, would begin to
take this they might live to be a thousand and yet retain all the spirit
and feelings of twenty-five and eighteen. That's the connection, Dr.
Capsule. If I could be twenty-five all my life I'd be as happy as a
bird--and if I were the Poet here I'd immortalize that idea in verse--
"A man's the biggest thing alive
When he has got to twenty-five;
And as for woman, she's a queen
Whose summers number just eighteen."
"That's a good idea," returned the Poet. "I'll make a note of that, and
if I sell it I'll give you a commission."
"No, don't do that," said the Idiot, slyly. "I shall be satisfied to see
your name in print."
The Poet having accepted this sally in the spirit in which it was
intended, the Idiot resumed:
"But of course the Elixir and the Electrical Pills are as yet all in the
air. We haven't even taken a step in that direction. Mr. Edison and
other wizards have been too much occupied with electric lights and
telephones and phonographs and transatlantic notions to pay any
attention to schemes to prolong life and keep us, despite our years,
perpetually young."
"I fancy they are likely to continue to do so," said the Doctor.
"Whatever motive you may attribute to me for pooh-poohing your notions,
I do so. No sane person wants to live forever, and if it were possible
that all men might live forever, you'd soon find the world so crowded
that the slighter actors in the human comedy would be shoved off the
stage. There are enough people in the world now, without man's adding
all future generations to their number and making death an
impossibility."