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HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT
By John Kendrick Bangs
* * * * *
A LITTLE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS
A LINE O' CHEER FOR EACH DAY O' THE YEAR
HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT
HALF HOURS WITH
THE IDIOT
BY
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917
_Copyright, 1917,_
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES 1
II AS TO THE FAIR SEX 22
III HE GOES CHRISTMAS SHOPPING 43
IV AS TO THE INCOME TAX 65
V A PSYCHIC VENTURE 84
VI ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION 101
VII THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY 119
VIII FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN 137
I
AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES
"I am glad to see that the government is beginning to think seriously of
providing Ambassadors' residences at the various foreign capitals to
which our Ambassadors are accredited," said the Idiot, stirring his
coffee with a small pocket thermometer, and entering the recorded
temperature of 58 degrees Fahrenheit in his little memorandum book.
"That's a thing we have needed for a long time. It has always seemed a
humiliating thing to me to note the differences between the houses of
our government officials of equal rank, but of unequal fortune, abroad.
To leave the home of an Ambassador to Great Britain, a massive
sixteen-story mausoleum, looking like a collision between a Carnegie
Library and a State Penitentiary, with seven baths and four grand pianos
on every floor, with guides always on duty to show you the way from your
bedchamber to the breakfast room, and a special valet for each garment
you wear, from sock to collar, and go over to Rome and find your
Ambassador heating his coffee over a gas-jet in a hall bedroom on the
top floor of some dusty old Palazzo, overlooking the garage of the
Spanish Minister, is disconcerting, to say the least. It may be a
symptom of American fraternity, but it does not speak volumes for
Western Hemispherical equality, and the whole business ought to be
standardized. An American Embassy architecturally should not be either a
twin brother to a Renaissance lunatic asylum, or a replica of a four
thousand dollar Ladies' Home Journal bungalow that can be built by the
owner himself working Sunday afternoons for eight hundred dollars,
exclusive of the plumbing."
"You are right for once, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac approvingly.
"The last time I was abroad traveling with one of those Through Europe
in Ten Days parties, I could not make up my mind which was the more
humiliating to me as an American citizen, the lavish ostentation of one
embassy, or the niggardly squalor of another; and it occurred to me then
that here was a first-class opportunity for some patriot to come along
and do his country's dignity some good by pruning a little in one place,
and fattening things up a bit in another."
"Quite so," said the Idiot, inhaling a waffle.
"And I have been hoping," continued the Bibliomaniac, "that Congress
would authorize the purchase of suitable houses in foreign capitals for
the purpose of correcting the evil."
"That's where we diverge, sir," said the Idiot, "as the lady said to her
husband, when they got their first glimpse of the courthouse at Reno. We
don't want to purchase. We want to build. The home of an American
Ambassador should express America, not the country to which he is sent
to Ambass. There's nothing to my mind less appropriate than to find a
diplomat from Oklahoma named, let us say, Dinkelspiel, housed in a Louis
Fourteenth chateau on the Champs Eliza; or a gentleman from Indiana
dwelling in the palace of some noble but defunct homicidal Duck of the
Sforza strain in Rome; or a leading Presbyterian representing us at
Constantinople receiving his American visitors in a collection of
bargain-counter minarets formerly occupied by the secondary harem of the
Sublime Porte. There is an incongruity about that sort of thing that,
while it may add to the gaiety of nations, leaves Uncle Sam at the wrong
end of the joke. When the thing is done it ought to be done from the
ground up. Uncle Sam should always feel at home in his own house, and I
contend that he couldn't really feel that way in an ex-harem, or in one
of those cold-storage Roman Palazzos where the Borgias used to dispense
cyanide of potassium _frappe_ to their friends and neighbors. He doesn't
fit into that sort of thing any more than he fits into those pink satin
knee-breeches, and the blue cocked hat with rooster feathers that
diplomatic usage requires him to wear when he goes to make a party call
on the Czar. So I am hoping that when Congress takes the matter up it
will consider only the purchase of suitable sites, and then go on to
adopt a standardized residence which from cellar to roof, from state
salon to kitchen, shall express the American idea."
"You talk as if there were an American idea in architecture," said the
Doctor. "If there is such a thing to be found anywhere under the canopy,
let's have it."
"Oh, it hasn't been evolved, yet," said the Idiot. "But it soon would be
if we were to put our minds on it. We can be just as strong on evolution
as we always have been on revolution if we only try. The first thing
would be for us to recognize that in his fullest development up to date
the real American is a composite of everything that is best in all other
nations. Take my humble self for instance."
"What, again?" groaned the Bibliomaniac. "Really, Mr. Idiot, you are
worse than the measles. You can take that only once, but you--why, we've
had you so often that it sometimes seems as if life were just one
idiotic thing after another."
"Oh, all right," said the Idiot. "In that case, let's take you for a
dreadful example. What are you, anyhow, Mr. Bib, but the ultimate result
of a highly variegated international complication in the matter of
ancestry? Your father was English; your mother was German. Your
grandparents were Scotch, Irish, and Manx, with a touch of French on one
side, and a mixture of Hungarian, Danish, and Russian on the other. It
is just possible that without knowing it you also contain traces of
Italian and Spanish. Your love of classic literature suggests that
somewhere back in the ages one of your forbears swarmed about Athens as
a member of that famous clan, the Hoi Polloi. The touch of melancholy in
your nature may be attributed to overindulgence in waffles, but it
suggests also that Scandinavia had a hand in the evolution of your Ego.
In other words, sir, you are a sort of human _pousse-cafe_, a mighty
agreeable concoction, Mr. Bib, though a trifle dangerous to tackle at
breakfast. Now, as I wanted to say in the beginning, when you intimated
that I was in danger of becoming chronic, I am out of the same box of
ancestral odds and ends that you are. I am a mixture of Dutch, French,
English, and Manx, with an undoubted strain of either Ciceronian Roman
or Demosthenesian Greek thrown in--I'm not certain which--as is
evidenced by my overwhelming predilection for the sound of my own
voice."
"That much is perfectly clear," interjected the Bibliomaniac, "though
the too-easy and overcontinuous flow of your speech indicates that your
veins contain some of the torrential qualities of the Ganges."
"Say rather the Mississippi, Mr. Bib," suggested Mr. Brief. "The
Mississippi has the biggest mouth."
"Well, anyhow," continued the Idiot, unabashed, "whether my speech
suggests the unearthly, mystic beauty of the Ganges, or the placid
fructifying flow of the Mississippi, the fact remains that the best
American type is a composite of all the best that human experience has
been able to produce in the way of a featherless biped since Doctor
Darwin's friend, Simian, got rid of his tail, preferring to sleep
quietly on his back in bed rather than spend his nights swinging
nervously to and fro from the limb of a tree. Since we can't deny this,
let's make a virtue of it, and act accordingly. What is more simple,
then, than that a composite people should go in for a composite
architecture to express themselves in marble, stone, and brick? Acting
on this principle let our architecture express the glory that was
Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the utility that was England, the
economy that was Scotch, the _espieglerie_ that was France, the
simplicity that was Holland, and the efficiency that was Germany, not to
mention the philandery that was Constantinople. The problem will be how
to combine all these various strains and qualities in one composite
building, and that, of course, will have to be solved by architects. It
isn't a thing like banking that under the theories of modern
Statesmanship can be settled by chauffeurs, tobacconists, and
undertakers, but will require expert handling. I don't know very much
about architecture myself, but off-hand I should say that the exterior
of the building might be a combination of late Victorian Queen Anne,
softened somewhat with Elizabethan suggestions of neo-Gothic
Graeco-Roman Classicism; with a Byzantine fullness about the eaves,
relieved with a touch of Hebridean French Renaissance manifested in the
rococo quality of the pergola effect at the front, the whole building
welded into a less inchoate mass by a very pronounced feeling of
Georgian decadence, emphasized with a gambrel roof, and the facade
decorated with flamboyant Dutch fire escapes, bringing irresistibly to
mind the predominance in all American art of the Teutonic-Doric, as
shown in our tendency to gables supported by moorish pilasters done in
Hudson River brick. Not being an architect myself I don't know that a
building of that kind could be made to stand up, but we might experiment
on the proposition by erecting a Pan-European building in Washington,
and see whether it would stand or not. If it could stand through one
extra session of Congress without cracking, I don't see why it couldn't
be put up anywhere abroad with perfect confidence that it would stay up
through one administration, anyhow."
"A nightmare of that kind erected in the capital city of a friendly
power would be just cause for war to the knife!" said Mr. Brief.
"Well, I have an alternative proposition," said the Idiot, "and I am not
sure that it isn't far better than the other. Why not erect a Statue of
Liberty in every capital abroad, an exact reproduction of that
monumental affair in New York Harbor, and let our Ambassadors live in
them? They tell me there's as much room inside Liberty's skirts as there
is in any ordinary ten-story apartment house, and there is no reason
why it should not be utilized. My suggestion would be to have all the
offices of the Embassies in the pedestals, and let the Ambassador and
his family live in the overskirt. There'd be plenty of room left higher
up in the torso for guest chambers, and in the uplifted arm for
nurseries for the ambassadorial children, and the whole could be capped
with a magnificent banquet hall on the rim of the torch, at the base of
the brazen flame."
"A plan worthy of the gigantic intellect that conceived it," smiled the
Doctor. "But how would you have this thing furnished, Mr. Idiot? Would
that be done by the Ambassadors themselves, or would the President have
to call a special session of Congress to tackle the job?"
"I was coming to that," said the Idiot. "It has occurred to me that it
would be a fine thing to have forty-eight rooms in the statue, each
named after one of our American States, and then leave it to each State
to furnish its own room. This would lend a pleasing variety to the
inside of the building that could hardly fail to interest the visitor,
and would give the foreigners a very clear insight into our resources
along lines of interior decorations. Think of the Massachusetts Room,
for example--a fine old horse-hair mahogany sofa in one corner; a
rosewood highboy off in another; an old-fashioned four-poster bed
projecting out into the middle of the room, and a blue china wash-bowl
and pitcher on a spindle-legged washstand near by; and on the wall three
steel engravings, one showing John Hancock signing the Declaration of
Independence, another of Charles Sumner preaching emancipation, and a
third showing Billy Sunday trying to sweep back the waves of a damp
Boston from the sand dunes of a gradually drying Commonwealth. Then the
Michigan room would be a corker, lavishly filled with antique furniture
fresh from Grand Rapids, and a bronze statuette of Henry Ford at each
end of the mantelpiece for symmetry's sake, the ceiling given over to a
symbolical painting entitled The Confusion of Bacchus, reproducing
scenes in Detroit when announcement was made that the good old State had
voted for grape-juice as the official tipple. Missouri's room could be
made a thing of beauty and a joy forever, with its lovely wall paper
showing her favorite sons, Dave Francis and Champ Clark alternately,
separated by embossed hound-dogs, rampant, done in gilt bronze, and the
State motto, Show Me, in red, white, and blue tiles over the fireplace.
Really I can't imagine anything more expressive of all-America than that
would be. Florida could take the Palm Room; New York the rather frigid
and formal white and gold reception room; Maine as the leading
cold-water State of the Union could furnish the bathrooms; California
could provide a little cafeteria affair for a quick lunch in mission
style, and owing to her pre-eminence in literature, the library could be
turned over to Indiana with every assurance that if there were not books
enough to go round, any one of her deservedly favorite sons, from George
Ade to George McCutcheon, would write a five-foot shelfful at any time
to supply the deficiency.
"Murally speaking, a plan of this sort could be made historically
edifying also. Florida could supply a handsome canvas showing Ponce de
Leon discovering Palm Beach. In the New Jersey room the Battle of
Trenton could be shown, depicting the retreat of Jim Smith, and the
final surrender of Democracy to General Wilson. Ohio could emphasize in
an appropriate medium the Discovery of the Oil Fields by Mr.
Rockefeller. Pennsylvania could herald her glories with a mural painting
apotheosizing William Penn and Andrew Carnegie in the act of forging her
heart of steel in the fires of immortality, kept burning by a
never-ending stream of bonds poured forth from the end of a cornucopia
by Fortune herself. An heroic figure of Governor Blease defying the
lightning would come gracefully from South Carolina, and Rhode Island,
always a most aristocratic little State, could emphasize the descent of
some of her favorite sons from Darwin's original inspiration by a frieze
depicting a modern tango party at Newport, in which the preservation of
the type, and a possible complete reversion thereto, should be made
imperishably obvious to all beholders.
"Then, to make the thing consistent throughout, the homes of
Ambassadors having been standardized, Congress should order a standard
uniform for her representatives abroad. This would settle once and for
all the vexed question as to what an Ambassador shall wear when
presented to King This, or Emperor That, or the Ponkapog of Thingumbob.
I think it ought to be a definitely established principle that every
nation should be permitted to choose its own official dud, but not the
duds of others. There is no reason in the world why the King of England
should be permitted to dictate the style of garments an American
Ambassador shall wear. Suppose he ordered him to attend a five o'clock
tea clad in yellow pajamas trimmed with red-plush fringe and gold
tassels emerging from green rosettes? It would be enough to set the
eagle screaming and to justify the sending of a Commission of Protest
headed by Mr. Bryan over to London to slap Mr. Lloyd George on the
wrist. Nor should the Kaiser be permitted to say how an American
representative shall dress when calling upon him, compelling him to
appear perhaps in a garb entirely unsuited to his style of
beauty--something like the uniform of a glorified White Wing, for
instance, decorated with peacock feathers, and wearing an alpine hat
with a stuffed parrot lying flat on its back on the peak, on his head.
That sort of thing does not gee with our pretensions. We are a free and
independent nation, and it is time to assert our independence of the
sartorial shackles those foreign potentates would fasten upon us. Let
the fiat go forth that hereafter all American Ambassadors wheresoever
accredited shall wear a long blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons,
and forty-eight stars, lit by electricity from a small battery concealed
in the pistol pocket, appliqued on the tails; red and white-striped
doeskin trousers, skin tight, held down by straps under the boots; and
an embroidered waist-coat, showing a couple of American eagles standing
on their hind legs and facing the world with the defiant cry of We
Pluribus Us; the whole topped off with a bell-crowned, fuzzy beaver hat,
made of silver-gray plush, which shall never be removed in the presence
of anybody, potentate or peasant, plutocrat or Cook tourist. If in
addition to these items the Ambassador were compelled to wear a long,
yellow chin whisker, it would be just the liverest livery that ever came
down the pike of Brummelian splendor. It would emphasize the presence of
the American Ambassador wherever he went, and make the effete nations of
Europe, Asia, Africa, and Pan America sit up and take notice."
"Doubtless," said the Bibliomaniac, rising impatiently. "And do you
suppose the President could find any self-respecting American in or out
of jail who would be willing to wear such a costume as that?"
"Well," said the Idiot, "of course some of 'em might object, but I'll
bet you four dollars and eighty-seven cents' worth of doughnuts against
a Chautauqua rain check that any man who offered you seventeen thousand
five hundred dollars a year for wearing those duds without having the
money to back the offer up would find your name at the head of the list
of his preferred creditors in less than three shakes of a lamb's tail!"
II
AS TO THE FAIR SEX
"I observe with pain," said the Idiot, as he placed the Bibliomaniac's
pat of butter under his top waffle, "that there is a more or less
acrimonious dispute going on as to the propriety of admitting women to
the Hall of Fame. The Immortals already in seem to think that
immortality belongs exclusively to the male order of human beings, and
that the word is really 'Him-mortality', and decline to provide even a
strap for the ladies to hang on in the cars leading to the everlasting
heights, all of which causes me to rejoice that I am not an Immortal
myself. If the one durable joy in life, the joy that neither crocks nor
fades, association with the fair sex, a diversion which age cannot
wither nor custom stale its infinite variety, is something an Immortal
must get along without, it's me for the tall timbers of fameless
existence. I rejoice that I am but a plain, common-garden, everyday
mortal thing, ready for shipment, f. o. b., for the last terminal
station on the road to that well-known Irish settlement, O'Blivion."
"I didn't know that you were such an admirer of the fair sex, Mr.
Idiot," said the Doctor. "Many years' residence in a refined home for
single gentlemen like this would seem to indicate that the allurements
of feminine society were not for you."
"Quite the contrary," said the Idiot. "It proves rather my interest in
the fair sex as a whole. If I had specialized sufficiently upon one
single blessed damozel with pink cheeks, snappy brown eyes, and a
pompadour that might strike a soaring lark as the most desirable nest in
the world, to ask her to share my lot, and go halves with me in an
investment in the bonds of matrimony, it might have been said--I even
hope it would have been said--that the allurements of feminine society
were not for me. Marriage, my dear Doctor, is no symptom that a man is
interested in women. It is merely evidence of the irresistible
attraction of one person for another. It's like sampling a box of
candy--you may find the sample extremely pleasing and gobble it up
ferociously, but if you were to gobble up the whole box with equal
voracity it might prove hateful to you. In my case, I confess that I am
so deeply interested in the whole box of tricks that it is the sample I
fight shy of, and I have remained single all these years because my
heart is no miserable little one-horse-power affair that beats only for
one single individual, but a ninety-million horse-power dynamo that
whirls madly around day and night, on time and overtime, on behalf of
all. I could not possibly bring myself to love only one pair of blue
eyes to the utter exclusion of black, brown, or gray; nor can I be sure
that if in some moment of weakness I were to tie up irrevocably to a
pair of black eyes, somewhere, some day, with the moon just right, and
certain psychological conditions wholly propitious, a pair of
coruscating brown beads, set beneath two roguish eyebrows, would labor
in vain to win a curve of interest from my ascetic upper lip. To put it
in the brief form of a cable dispatch, rather than in magazine language
at fifteen cents a word, I love 'em all! Blonde, brunette, or in
between, in every maid I see a queen, as Shakespeare would have said if
he had thought of it."
"That's rather promiscuous, isn't it?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"No, it's just playing safe, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "It's like a man
with a million dollars to invest. It isn't considered quite prudent for
him to put every red cent of that million into one single stock. If he
put his whole million into U. S. Hot Air Preferred, at 97-7/8, for
instance, and some day Hot Air became so cheap that the bottom dropped
out of the market, and the stock fell to 8-3/8 that man would
practically be a busted community. But if like a true sage he divided
his little million up into twenty fifty-thousand dollar lots, and put
each lot into some separate stock or bond, the general average would
probably maintain itself somewhere around par whether the tariff on
lyonnaise potatoes was removed or not. So it is with my affections. If I
could invest them in some such way as that I might have to move out of
here, and seek some pleasant little domestic Eden where matrimony is not
frowned upon."
"I rather guess you would have to move out of here," sniffed Mrs.
Pedagogy the Landlady. "I might be willing to forego my rules and take
somebody in here with one wife, but when a man talks about having
twenty--why, I am almost disposed to give you notice now, Mr. Idiot."
"Don't you worry your kindly soul about me on that score, Mrs. Pedagog,"
smiled the Idiot. "With ostrich feathers at seventy-five dollars a
plume, and real Connecticut sealskin coats made of angora plush going at
ninety-eight dollars, and any old kind of a falal selling in the open
market at a hundred and fifty per frill, there is no danger of my
startling this company by bringing home one bride, much less twenty. I
was only speculating upon a theoretical ideal of matrimony, a sort of
_e pluribus unum_ arrangement which holds much speculative charm, but
which in practice would undoubtedly land a man in jail."
"I had no idea that any of my boarders could ever bring themselves to
advance a single word in favor of polygamy," said the Landlady sternly.
"Nor I," said the Idiot. "I don't believe even Mr. Bib here would
advocate anything of the sort. I was merely trying to make clear to the
Doctor, my dear lady, why I have never attempted to make some woman
happy for a week and a martyr for the rest of time. It is due to my deep
admiration for the whole feminine sex, and not, as he seemed to think,
to a dislike of feminine society. The trace of polygamy which you seem
to find in my discourse is purely academic, and it is clear to me that
you have quite misunderstood my scheme. A true marriage, one of those
absolutely indestructible companionships that we read about in poetry,
involves so many more things than any ordinary human being is really
capable of, that one who thinks about the matter at all cannot resist
the temptation to speculate on how things might be if they were
different. The active man of affairs these busy times needs many diverse
things in the way of companionship. He needs a helpmate along so many
different lines that no single daughter of Eve can reasonably hope to
supply them all. For example, if a man marries a woman who is deeply
interested in Ibsen and Bernard Shaw abroad, and deep thinkers like
William J. Bryan and Thomas Riley Marshall at home, she no doubt makes
him ecstatically happy in those solemn moments when his mind wishes to
grapple understandingly with the infinite. But suppose that poor chap
comes home some night worn to a frazzle with the worries and
complications of his business affairs, his spirit fairly yearning for
something fluffy and intellectually completely restful, do you suppose
for a moment that he is going to be lifted out of the morass of his woe
by a conversation with that lady of his on the subject of the
Inestimable Infinitude of the Protoplasmic Suffragette as outlined by
Professor Sophocles J. Plato in the latest issue of the _South American
Review_? Not he, my dear Mrs. Pedagog. What he wants on that occasion is
somebody to sit alongside of him while he pulls away on his old
briarwood pipe, holding his tired little paddy in her soft right hand,
while she twitters forth George Ade's latest Fable on 'The Flipper that
Flapped', or something else equally diverting. The reverse of the
picture is equally true. If there is anything in the world that drives a
man to despair it is to have to listen to five o'clock tea gabble when
he happens to be in a mood for the Alexander Hamilton, or Vice-President
Marshall style of discourse. The facts are the same in both cases. The
Bernard Shaw lady is a delight to the heart and soul in his Bernard Shaw
moods. The George Ade lady is a source of unalloyed bliss in a George
Ade mood, but they don't reverse readily, and in most cases they can't
reverse at all. Then there are other equally baffling complications
along other lines. A man may be crazy about poetry, and he falls in
love, as he supposes, with a dainty little creature in gold-rimmed
eyeglasses, who writes the most exquisite lyrics, simply because he
thinks at the moment that those lyrics are going to make his life just
one sweet song after another. He marries the little songbird, and then
what happens?"
"Never having married a canary, I don't know," said the Landlady, with
a glance at her husband.
"Well, I'll tell you," said the Idiot. "He has a honeymoon of lovely
images. He feels like a colt put out to pasture on the slopes of
Parnassus. Life runs along with the lilt of a patter song--and then, to
indulge in a joke worthy of the palmiest days of London Punch, he comes
out of Patter-Song! There dawns a day when he is full chock-a-block up
to his neck with poetry, and the inner man craves the re-enforcement of
the kind of flapjacks his mother used to make. One good waffle would
please him more than sixty-seven sonnets on the subject of 'Aspiration.'
Nothing short of a lustrous, smoking, gleaming stack of fresh buckwheats
can hold him on the pinnacle of joy, and the lovely little lyrist, to
whom he has committed himself, his destinies, and all that he has under
a vow for life, hies herself singing to the kitchen, mixes the
necessary amount of concrete, serves the resulting dishes at the
breakfast table, and gloom, gloom unmitigated, falls upon that house.
After eating two of her cakes poor old hubby begins to feel as if he had
swallowed the corner stone of a Carnegie library. That lyric touch that
Herrick might have envied and Tennyson have viewed with professional
alarm has produced a buckwheat cake of such impenetrable density that
the Navy Department, if it only knew about it, would joyously grant her
the contract for furnishing the armor plate for the new
superdreadnoughts we are about to build so as to be prepared for Peace
after Germany gets through with us. While eating those cakes the victim
speculates on that old problem, Is Suicide a Sin? A cloud rises upon the
horizon of his joy, and without intending any harm whatsoever, his mind
involuntarily reverts to another little lady he once knew, who, while
she couldn't tell the difference between a sonnet and a cabriolet, and
had a dim notion when she heard people speaking of Keats that keats were
some sort of a shellfish found on the rocks of the Hebrides at low tide,
and much relished by the natives, could yet put together a tea biscuit
so delicately tenuous of character that it melted in the mouth like a
flake of snow on the smokestack of a Pittsburgh blast furnace. Thus an
apparently secured joy loses its keen edge, and without anybody being
really to blame, life becomes thenceforward, very gradually, but none
the less surely, a mere test of endurance--a domestic marathon which
must be run to the end, unless the runners collapse before reaching the
finish."
"For both parties!" snapped the Landlady, pursing her lips severely.
"You needn't think that the men are the only ones to suffer--don't you
fool yourself on that point."
"Oh, indeed I don't, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "It's just as bad
for the woman as for the man--sometimes a little worse, for there is no
denying that women are after all more chameleonic, capable of a greater
variety of emotions than men are. A man may find several women in
one--in fact, he generally does. It is her frequent unlikeness to
herself that constitutes the chief charm of some women. Take my friend
Spinks' wife, for instance. She's the most exacting Puritan at home that
you ever met. Poor Spinksy has to toe a straight mark for at least
sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. Mrs. Spinks rules him with a rod
of iron, but when that little Puritan goes to a club dance--well,
believe me, she is the snappiest eyed, most flirtatious little tangoer
in ninety-seven counties. Sundays in church she is the demurest bit of
sartorial impressiveness in sight, but at the bridge table you want to
keep your eyes wide open all the time lest your comfortable little
balance at the bank be suddenly transformed into a howling overdraft. I
should say that on general principles Mrs. Spinks is not less than nine
or ten women, all rolled into one--Joan of Arc, Desdemona, Lucrezia
Borgia, Cleopatra, Nantippe, Juliet, Mrs. Pankhurst, Eve, and the late
Carrie Nation. But Spinks--poor old Spinksy--there's no infinite variety
about him. At most Spinks is only two men--Mr. Henpeck at home and Mr.
Overworked when he gets out."
"I suppose from all of this nonsense," said the Landlady, "that your
matrimonial ideal would be found in a household where a man rejoiced in
the possession of a dozen wives--one frivolous little Hebe for his
joyous moods; one Junoesque thundercloud for serious emergencies; one
capable seamstress to keep his buttons sewed on; one first-class
housekeeper to look after his domestic arrangements; one suffragette to
talk politics to; one blue-stocking for literary companionship; one
highly-recommended cook to preside over his kitchen; one musical wife to
bang on the piano all day; one athletic girl for outdoor consumption,
and a plain, common-garden giggler to laugh at his jokes."
"I think I could be true to such a household, madame," said the Idiot,
"but please don't misunderstand me. I'm not advocating such a scheme. I
am only saying that since such a scheme is impossible under modern
conditions I think it is the best thing that ever happened to my wife
that she and I never met."
"Do you think a household of that sort would be satisfied with you?"
asked the Bibliomaniac.
"The chances are six to one that it wouldn't be," said the Idiot. "I'd
probably get along gloriously with Hebe and the giggler, but I guess the
others would stand a fair show of finding marriage a failure. Wherefore
am I wedded only to my fancies, content that my days should not be
subjected to the strain of trying to be all things to one woman,
preferring as I do to remain one thing to all women instead--their
devoted admirer and willing slave."
"Well, to come back to the Immortals," said the Doctor. "You don't
really think, do you, that we have any women Immortals?"
"Of course, I do," replied the Idiot. "The world is full of them, and
always has been."
Mr. Brief, the lawyer, tapped his forehead significantly.
"I'm afraid that screw has come loose again, Doctor," he said.
"Looks that way," said the Doctor, "but we'll tighten it up again in a
jiffy."
He paused a moment, and then resumed.
"Well, Mr. Idiot," he said, "of course our ideas may differ on the
subject of what makes an Immortal. Now, I should say that it is by their
fruits that ye shall know them."
"A highly original remark," observed the Idiot, with a grin.
"That aside," said the Doctor, coolly, "let's take up, for purposes of
discussion, a few standards. In music, Wagner was an Immortal, and
produced his great trilogy. In poetry, Milton was an Immortal, and
produced 'Paradise Lost.' In the drama, Shakespeare was an Immortal,
and produced 'Hamlet', and, coming down to our own time, let us grant
the obvious fact that Edison is headed toward immortality because of his
wizardry in electricity."
"Sure thing!" said the Idiot.
"It is good to have you grant all I say so readily," said the Doctor.
"Now then--let me ask you where in all history you find four women who
in the matter of their achievement, in the demonstrated fruits of their
labors, even measurably approached any one of these four I have
mentioned?"
"Why, Doctor," grinned the Idiot, "why ask me to steal candy from a
baby? Why suggest that I try to drive a tack with a sledgehammer, or cut
a mold of currant jelly with the whirring teeth of a buzz saw--"
"Sparring for time as usual," cried the Doctor triumphantly. "You can't
name one, and are simply trying to asphyxiate us with that peculiar
variety of natural gas for which you have long been famous."
"I'll fill the roster with examples if you'll sit and listen," said the
Idiot. "I can match every male genius that ever lived from Noah down to
Josephus Daniels with a woman whose product was of equal if not even
greater value. Begin where you please--in any century before or since
the flood, and I'll be your huckleberry--Wagner, Milton, Cromwell,
Roosevelt, Secretary Daniels, Kaiser Wilhelm, Methuselah--I don't care
who or what he is--I'll match him."
"All right," said the Doctor. "Suppose we begin low with that trifling
little frivoler in literature, William Shakespeare!"
"Good!" cried the Idiot. "He'll do--I'll just mark him off with Mrs.
Shakespeare."
"What?" chuckled the Doctor. "Anne Hathaway?"
"No," said the Idiot. "Not Anne Hathaway, but Shakespeare's mother."
"Oh, tush!" ejaculated the Bibliomaniac impatiently. "What rot! A wholly
unknown provincial person of whom the world knows about as much as a
beetle knows about Mars. What on earth did she ever produce?"
"Shakespeare!" said the Idiot, in an impressive basso-profundo tone that
echoed through the room like a low rumble of thunder.
And a silence fell upon that table so deep, so abysmally still, that one
could almost hear the snowflakes falling upon the trolley tracks sixteen
blocks away.
III
HE GOES CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
"Mercy, Mr. Idiot," cried Mrs. Pedagog, as the Idiot entered the
breakfast room in a very much disheveled condition, "what on earth has
happened to you? Your sleeve is almost entirely torn from your coat, and
you really look as if you had been dropped out of an aeroplane."
"Yes, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, wearily, "I feel that way. I
started in to do my Christmas Shopping early yesterday, and what you now
behold is the dreadful result. I went into Jimson and Slithers'
Department Store to clean up my Christmas list, and, seeing a rather
attractive bargain table off at one end of the middle aisle, in the
innocence of my young heart, I tried to get to it. It contained a lot of
mighty nice, useful presents that one could give to his friends and
relatives and at the same time look his creditors in the face--pretty
little cakes of pink soap made of rose leaves for five cents for three;
lacquered boxes of hairpins at seven cents apiece; silver-handled
toothpicks at two for five; French-gilt hatpins, with plate-glass
amethysts and real glue emeralds set in their heads for ten cents a
pair, and so on. Seen from the floor above, from which I looked down
upon that busy hive, that bargain table was quite the most attractive
thing you ever saw. It fairly glittered with temptation, and I went to
it; or at least I tried to go to it. I had been so attracted by the
giddy lure of the objects upon that table that I failed to notice the
maelstrom of humanity that was whirling about it--or perhaps I would
better say the fe-maelstrom of humanity that was eddying about its
boundaries, for it was made up wholly of women, as I discovered to my
sorrow a moment later when, caught in the swirl, I was tossed to and
fro, whirled, pirouetted, revolved, twisted, turned, and generally
whizzed about, like a cork on the surface of the Niagara whirlpool. What
with the women trying to get to the table, and the women trying to get
away from the table, and the women trying to get around the table, I
haven't seen anything to beat it since the day I started to take a
stroll one afternoon out in Kansas, and was picked up by a cyclone and
landed down by the Alamo in San Antonio ten minutes later."
"You ought to have known better than to try to get through such a crowd
as that these days," said the Doctor. "How are your ribs--"
"Know better?" retorted the Idiot. "How was I to know any better? There
the thing was ready to do business, and nothing but a lot of
tired-looking women about it. It looked easy enough, but after I had
managed to get in as far as the second layer from the outside I
discovered that it wasn't; and then I struggled to get out, but you
might as well struggle to get away from the tentacles of an octopus as
to try to get out of a place like that without knowing how. I was caught
just as surely as a fox with his foot in a trap, and the harder I
struggled to get out the nearer I was carried in toward the table
itself. It required all my strategy to navigate my face away from the
multitude of hatpins that surged about me on all sides. Twice I thought
my nose was going to be served _en brochette_. Thrice did the
penetrating points of those deadly pins pierce my coat and puncture the
face of my watch. Three cigars I carried in my vest pocket were shredded
into food for moths, and I give you my word that to keep from being
smothered to death by ostrich feathers I bit off the tops of at least
fifteen hats that were from time to time thrust in my face by that
writhing mass of feminine loveliness. How many aigrettes I inhaled, and
the number of artificial roses I swallowed, in my efforts to breathe and
bite my way to freedom I shall never know, but I can tell you right now,
I never want to eat another aigrette so long as I shall live, and I
wouldn't swallow one more canvas-backed tea rose if I were starving. At
one time I counted eight ladies standing on my feet instead of on their
own; and while I lost all eight buttons off my vest, and six from
various parts of my coat, when I got home last night I found enough
gilt buttons, crocheted buttons, bone buttons, filagree buttons, and
other assorted feminine buttons, inside my pockets to fill an innovation
trunk. And talk about massages! I was rubbed this way, and scourged that
way, and jack-planed the other way, until I began to fear I was about to
be erased altogether. The back breadth of my overcoat was worn
completely through, and the tails of my cutaway thereupon coming to the
surface were transformed into a flowing fringe that made me look like
the walking advertisement of a tassel factory. My watch chain caught
upon the belt buckle of an amazon in front of me, and the last I saw of
it was trailing along behind her over on the other side of that whirling
mass far beyond my reach. My strength was oozing, and my breath was
coming in pants short enough to be worn by a bow-legged four-year-old
pickaninny, when, making a last final herculean effort to get myself out
of that surging eruption, I was suddenly ejected from it, like Jonah
from the jaws of the whale, but alas, under the bargain table itself,
instead of on the outside, toward which I had fondly hoped I was
moving."
"Great Heavens!" said the Poet. "What an experience. And you had to go
through it all over again to escape finally?"
"Not on your life," said the Idiot. "I'd had enough. I just folded my
shredded overcoat up into a pillow, and lay down and went to sleep there
until the time came to close the shop for the night, when I sneaked out,
filled my pockets full of soap, clothespins, and other knickknacks, and
left a dollar bill on the floor to pay for them. They didn't deserve the
dollar, considering the damage I had sustained, but for the sake of my
poor but honest parents I felt that I ought to leave something in the
way of ready money behind me to pay for the loot."
"It's a wonder you weren't arrested for shoplifting," said Mr. Brief.
"They couldn't have proved anything on me," said the Idiot, "even if
they had thought of it. I had a perfectly good defense, anyhow."
"What was that?" asked the Lawyer.
"Temporary insanity," said the Idiot. "After my experience yesterday
afternoon I am convinced that no jury in the world would hold that a man
was in his right mind who, with no compelling reasons save generosity to
stir him to do so, plunged into a maelstrom of that sort. It would be a
clear case of either attempted suicide or mental aberration. Of course,
if I had been dressed for it in a suit of armor, and had been armed
with a battle-axe, or a long, sharp-pointed spear, it might have looked
like a case of highway robbery; but no male human being in his right
mind is going to subject himself to the hazards to life, limb, eye, ear,
and happiness, that I risked when I entered that crowd for the sole
purpose of getting away unobserved with a package of nickel-plated
hairpins, worth four cents and selling at seven, and a couple of
hand-painted fly swatters worth ten cents a gross."
The Landlady laughed a long, loud, silvery laugh, with just a little
touch of derision in it.
"O you men, you men!" she ejaculated. "You call yourselves the stronger
sex, and plume yourselves on your superior physical endurance, and yet
when it comes to a test, where are you?"
"Under the table, Madame, under the table," sighed the Idiot. "I for one
frankly admit the soft impeachment."
"Yes," said the Landlady, "but I'll warrant you never found a woman
under the table. We women, weak and defenseless though we be, go through
that sort of thing day after day from youth to age, and we never even
think of complaining, much less giving up the fight the way you did.
Once a woman gets her eye on a bargain, my dear Mr. Idiot, and really
wants it, it would take a hundred and fifty maelstroms such as you have
described to keep her from getting it."
"I don't doubt it," said the Idiot, "but you see, my dear Mrs. Pedagog,"
he added, "you women are brought up to that sort of thing. You are
trained from infancy to tackle just such problems, while we poor men
have no such advantages. The only practice in domestic rough-housing
that we men ever get in our youth is possibly a season on the football
team, or in those pleasing little games of childhood like
snap-the-whip, and mumbledypeg where we have to dig pegs out of the
ground with our noses. Later in life, perhaps, there will come a war to
teach us how to assault an entrenched enemy, and occasionally, perhaps
around election time, we may find ourselves mixed up in some kind of a
free fight on the streets, but all of these things are as child's play
compared to an assault upon a bargain table by one who has never
practiced the necessary maneuvers. To begin with we are absolutely
unarmed."
"Unarmed?" echoed the Landlady. "What would you carry, a Gatling gun?"
"Well, I never thought of that," said the Idiot, "but if I ever tackle
the proposition again, which, believe me, is very doubtful, I'll bear
the suggestion in mind. It sounds good. If I'd had a forty-two
centimeter machine-gun along with me yesterday afternoon I might have
stood a better chance."
"O you know perfectly well what I mean," said Mrs. Pedagog. "You implied
that women are armed when they go shopping, while men are not."
"Well, aren't they?" asked the Idiot. "Every blessed daughter of Eve in
that melee yesterday was armed, one might almost say, to the teeth.
There wasn't one in the whole ninety-seven thousand of them that didn't
have at least two hatpins thrust through the middle of her head with
their sharp-pointed ends sticking out an inch and a half beyond her dear
little ears; and every time a head was turned in any direction blood was
shed automatically. All I had was the stiff rim of my derby hat, and
even that fell off inside of three minutes, and I haven't seen hide nor
hair of it since. Then what the hatpins failed to move out of their path
other pins variously and strategically placed would tackle; and as for
auxiliary weapons, what with sharp-edged jet and metal buttons sprouting
from one end of the feminine form to the other, up the front, down the
back, across the shoulders, along the hips, executing flank movements
right and left, and diagonally athwart every available inch of
superficial area elsewhere, aided and abetted by silver and steel-beaded
handbags and featherweight umbrellas for purposes of assault, I tell you
every blessed damozel of the lot was a walking arsenal of destruction.
All one of those women had to do was to whizz around three times like a
dervish, poke her head either to the right or to the left, and gain
three yards, while I might twist around like a pinwheel, or an electric
fan, and get nothing for my pains save a skewered nose, or a poke in the
back that suggested the presence of a member of the Black Hand Society.
In addition to all this I fear I have sustained internal injuries of
serious import. My teeth are intact, save for two feathers that are so
deeply imbedded at the back of my wisdom teeth that I fear I shall have
to have them pulled, but every time I breathe one of my ribs behaves as
if in some way it had got itself tangled up with my left shoulder blade.
Why, the pressure upon me at one time was so great that I began to feel
like a rosebud placed inside the family Bible by an old maid whose lover
has evaporated, to be pressed and preserved there until his return. This
little pancake that is about to fulfill its destiny as a messenger from
a cold and heartless outside world to my inner man, is a rotund,
bulgent, balloon-shaped bit of puffed-up convex protuberance compared to
the way I felt after that whirl of feminity had put me through the
clothes-wringer. I was as flat as a joke of Caesar's after its four
thousandth semiannual appearance in London Punch, and in respect to
thickness I was pressed so thin that you could have rolled me around
your umbrella, and still been able to get the cover on."
"You never were very deep, anyhow," suggested the Bibliomaniac.
"Whence the wonder of it grows," said the Idiot. "Normally I am
fathomless compared to the thin, waferlike quality of my improfundity as
I flickered to the floor after that dreadful pressure was removed."
"How about women getting crushed?" demanded the Landlady defiantly. "If
a poor miserable little wisp of a woman can go through that sort of
thing, I don't see why a big, brawny man like you can't."
"Because, as I have already said," said the Idiot, "I wasn't dressed for
it. My clothes aren't divided up into airtight compartments, rendering
me practically unsinkable within, nor have I any steel-constructed
garments covering my manly form to resist the pressure."
"And have women?" asked Mrs. Pedagog.
The Idiot blushed.