authority on the subtle mysteries of feminine raiment, but from what I
see in the shop windows, and in the advertising pages of the magazines,
I should say that the modern woman could go through a courtship with a
grizzly bear and come out absolutely undented. As I pass along the
highways these days, and glance into the shop windows, mine eyes are
constantly confronted by all sorts of feminine under-tackle, which in
the days of our grandmothers were regarded as strictly confidential. I
see steel-riveted contraptions, marked down from a dollar fifty-seven to
ninety-eight cents, which have all the lithe, lissom grace of a Helen of
Troy, the which I am led to infer the women of to-day purchase and
insert themselves into, gaining thereby not only a marvelous symmetry of
figure hitherto unknown to them, but that same security against the
bufferings of a rude outside world as well, which a gilt-edged bond must
feel when it finds itself locked up behind the armor-plated walls of a
Safe Deposit Company. Except that these armorial undergarments are
decorated with baby-blue ribbons, and sporadic, not to say spasmodic,
doodads in filmy laces and chiffon, they differ in no respect from those
wonderful combinations of slats, chest-protectors, and liver pads which
our most accomplished football players wear at the emergent moments of
their intellectual development at college. In point of fact, without
really knowing anything about it, I venture the assertion that the woman
of to-day wearing this steel-lined chiffon figure, and armed with
seventy or eighty different kinds of pins from plain hat to safety,
which protrude from various unexpected parts of her anatomy at the
psychological moment, plus the devastating supply of buttons always
available for moments of aggressive action, is the most powerfully and
efficiently developed engine of war the world has yet produced. She is
not only protected by her unyielding figure from the onslaughts of the
enemy, but she fairly bristles as well with unsuspected weapons of
offense against which anything short of a herd of elephants on stampede
would be powerless. Your modern Amazon is an absolutely irrefragable,
irresistible creature, and it makes me shudder to think of what is going
to happen when this war of the sexes, now in its infancy, really gets
going, and we defenseless men have nothing but a few regiments of
artillery, and a division or two of infantry and cavalry standing
between us and an advancing column of super-insulated shoppers, using
their handbags as clubs, their hatpins glistening wickedly in the
morning light, as they tango onward to the fray. When that day comes,
frankly, I shall turn and run. I had my foretaste of that coming warfare
in my pursuit of Christmas gifts yesterday afternoon, and my motto
henceforth and forever is Never Again!"
"Then I suppose we need none of us expect to be remembered by you this
Christmas," said the Doctor. "Alas, and alas! I shall miss the generous
bounty which led you last year to present me with a cold waffle on
Christmas morn."
"On the contrary, Doctor," said the Idiot. "Profiting from my experience
of yesterday I am going to start in on an entirely new system of
Christmas giving. No more boughten articles for me--my presents will be
fashioned by loving hands without thought of dross. You and all the rest
of my friends at this board are to be remembered as usual. For the
Bibliomaniac I have a little surprise in store in the shape of a copy of
the _Congressional Record_ for December 7th which I picked up on a
street car last Friday morning. It is an absolutely first edition, in
the original wrappers, and will make a fine addition to his collection
of Americana. For Mr. Brief I have a copy of the New York Telephone Book
for 1906, which he will find full of most excellent addresses. For my
dear friend, the Poet, I have set aside a charming collection of
rejection slips from his friends the editors; and for you, Doctor, as an
affectionate memento of my regard, I have prepared a little mixture of
all the various medicines you have prescribed for me during the past
five years, none of which I have ever taken, to the vast betterment of
my health. These, consisting of squills, cod-liver oil, ipecac, quinine,
iron tonic, soothing syrup, spirits of ammonia, horse liniment, himalaya
bitters, and calomel, I have mixed together in one glorious concoction,
which I shall bottle with my own hands in an old carboy I found up in
the attic, on the side of which I have etched the words, When You Drink
It Think of Me!"
"Thanks, awfully," said the Doctor. "I am sure a mixture of that sort
could remind me of no one else."
"And, finally, for our dear Landlady," said the Idiot, smiling
gallantly on Mrs. Pedagog, "I have the greatest surprise of all."
"I'll bet you a dollar I know what it is," said the Doctor.
"I'll take you," said the Idiot.
"You're going to pay your bill!" roared the Doctor.
"There's your dollar," said the Idiot, tossing a silver cartwheel across
the table. "Better hand it right over to Mrs. Pedagog on account,
yourself."
IV
AS TO THE INCOME TAX
"Well, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot cheerfully, as he speared a lonely prune
and put it out of its misery, "have you made your return to the income
tax collector yet?"
"I both rejoice and regret to say that my income is not large enough to
come under the provisions of the act," said the Bibliomaniac, "and
consequently I haven't bothered my head about it."
"Then you'd better get busy and send in a statement of your receipts up
to January first, or you'll find Uncle Sam after you with a hot stick.
For the sake of the fair name of our beloved home here, sir, don't
delay. I'd hate to see a federal patrol wagon rolling up to our door for
the purpose of taking you to jail."
"But I am exempt," protested the Bibliomaniac. "I don't come within a
thousand dollars of the minimum."
"That may be all true enough," said the Idiot. "You know that, and I
know that, but Uncle Sam doesn't know it, and you've got to satisfy him
that you are not a plutocrat trying to pass yourself off as a member of
one of those respectable middle-class financial families in which this
land is so pleasingly rich. You've got to lay a statement of your
financial condition before the government whether your income is
ninety-seven cents a minute or forty-seven thousand dollars an hour.
Nobody is exempt from that nuisance. As I understand it, the government
requires every man, woman, and child to go to confession, and own up to
just how little or how much he or she hasn't got. All men stand equal in
the eyes of the law when it comes to the show-down. There is no
discrimination in favor of the rich in this business, and the
inconvenience of having a minion of authority prying into your private
affairs is as much a privilege of yours as it is of Uncle John's, or
good old Brother Scramble, the Egg King. Uncle Sam is going to put his
eye on every man-jack of us and find out whether we are any good or not,
and if so, for how much. He will have sleuths everywhere about to
estimate the cubic financial contents of your trousers' pockets, and
whether you keep your money in a bank, in a trust company, in a cigar
box, your sock, or your wife's name, he is going right after it, and
he'll get his share or know the reason why. There isn't a solitary
nickel circulating in this land to-day that can hope to escape the eagle
eye of the Secretary of the Treasury and his financial ferrets."
"You surprise me," said the Bibliomaniac. "If what you say is true, it
is a perfect outrage. You don't really mean to tell me that I have got
to give a statement of my receipts to some snoopy-nosed old government
official, do you?"
"Even so," said the Idiot, "or at least that is the way I understand it.
You've not only got to tell how much you've got, but you must also
disclose the sources of your revenue. If you found a cent on the corner
of Main Street and Desdemona Alley on the fifteenth day of December,
1916, thereby adding that much to your annual receipts, you have got to
enter it in your statement, and so clearly that the authorities will
understand just how, when, and where it came into your possession, all
under oath; and you are not allowed to deduct your current living
expenses from it, either. If in stooping over to pick up that cent you
busted your suspenders, and had to go and pay fifty cents for a new
pair, thereby losing forty-nine cents on the transaction, you aren't
allowed to make any deductions on that account. That cent is 'Net'--not
'Nit', but 'Net.' Same way if in a crowded car you put your hand into
what you presumed to be your own pocket, and pulled out unexpectedly a
roll of twenty dollar bills amounting to two hundred dollars in all, and
then in an absent-minded moment got away with it before you realized
that it belonged to the man standing next to you, you'd have to put it
down on your statement just the same as all the rest of the items, under
penalty of prosecution for concealing sources of revenue from the
officers of the law. Oh, it's a fine mess we smart Alexanders of the
hour have got ourselves into in our effort to establish a pipe line
between the plutocratic pocketbook and the United States Treasury. We
all hypnotized ourselves into the pleasing belief that the income tax
was going to be a jolly little club with which to hit old Brother Plute
on the head, and make him fork over, while we Nixicrats sat on the fence
and grinned. It was going to be great fun watching the Plutes disgorge,
and we all had a notion that life was going to be just one exgurgitating
moving picture after another, with us sitting in front row seats
gloating over the Sorrows of Croesus and his coughing coffers. But,
alas for our dreams of joy, it hasn't worked out quite that way. The
vexation of the blooming thing is visited upon every one of us. Them as
has has got to pay. Them as hasn't has got to prove that they don't
have to pay, and I tell you right now, Mr. Bib, it is going to be a
terrific proposition for a lot of chaps in this land of ours who are
skinning along on nothing a year, but making a noise like a
ten-thousand-dollar proposition."
"I fear me their name is legion," said the Bibliomaniac.
"I know one named Smythe," said the Idiot. "If a painter were looking
around for a model for Ready Money in an allegorical picture Smythe
would fill the bill to perfection. You ought to see him. He walks about
the streets of this town giving everybody he meets a fifteen-thousand
per annum look when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't got ten cents to his
name. If he was invited to a submarine masquerade all he'd have to do
would be to swallow a glass of water and go as a sponge. He makes about
as big a splurge on a deficit as you or I could make if our salaries
were raised nine hundred ten per cent., and then some. As a weekender he
is in the A 1 class. He hasn't paid for a Sunday dinner in five years,
nor has he paid for anything else in earned cash for three. His only
sources of revenue are his friends, the pawn-shops, and his proficiency
at bridge and poker. His only hope for staving off eventual disaster is
the possibility of hanging on by his eyelids until he dawns as the last
forlorn hope on the horizon of some freckle-faced, red-haired old maid,
with nine millions in her own right. He owes every tailor, hatter, and
haberdasher in town. When he needs twenty-five dollars he buys a
fifty-dollar overcoat, has it charged, and takes it around the corner
and pawns it, and ekes out the deficiency with a jackpot or a grand
slam, in the manipulation of both of which he is what Socrates used to
call a cracker-jack. If you ever saw him walking on the avenue, or
entering a swagger restaurant anywhere, you'd stop and say to yourself,
'By George! That must be Mr. Idle Rich, of whom I have heard so much
lately. Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be him!'"
"Him?" sniffed the Bibliomaniac, always a stickler for purity of speech.
"Sure thing!" said the Idiot. "You don't stop to think of grammar when
you are dazzled by that spectacle. You just give way, right off, to your
natural, unrestrained, primitive instincts, and speak English in exactly
the same way that the caveman spoke his tongue in those glorious days
before grammar came along to curse education with its artificial
restraints upon ease of expression. 'Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be
him', is what you'd say as old Empty Wallet passed you by disguised as
the Horn of Plenty, and all day long your mind would continue to advert
to him and the carefree existence you'd think to look at him he was
leading; and you, with a four-dollar bill within your reach every
Saturday night, would find yourself positively envying him his wealth,
when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't seen a single red cent he could
properly call his own for ten years."
"Oh, well--what of it?" said the Bibliomaniac. "Of course, there are
sponges and snobs in the world. What are they to us?"
"Why, nothing," said the Idiot, "only I wonder what Smythe and his kind
are going to do when the income tax collector comes along and asks for
his little two per cent. of all this showy exterior. It will be a
terribly humiliating piece of business to confess that all this
ostentatious show of prosperity is nothing but an empty shell, and that
way down inside he is only an eighteen-karat, copper-fastened,
steel-riveted bluff; fact is, he'll have the dickens of a time making
the tax collectors believe it, and then he'll be face to face with a
federal indictment for trying to dodge his taxes. And that business of
dodging--that brings up another phase of this income tax that I don't
believe many of us realized when we were shouting for it as a means of
shackling Mr. Plute. Did you ever realize that it won't be very long
before the government, in order to get this income tax fixed right, will
have a lot of inspectors who will be delegated to do for you and me, and
all the rest of us, what the Custom House inspectors now do for
travelers returning from abroad? Every man and woman traveling upon the
seas of life, Mr. Bib, will be required to enter the port of taxation
and there submit a declaration of the contents of their boxes to the
tax inspectors, which will be followed, as in the case of the traveler
from abroad, by a complete overhauling of their effects by those same
inspectors. The tesselated pave of your safe deposit companies and banks
will look like the floor of an ocean steamship pier on the arrival of a
big liner, only instead of being snowed under by a mass of shirts,
trousers, Paris-made revelations in chiffons, silks, and brocades,
necklaces, tiaras, pearl ropes, snipped aigrettes, and snowy drifts of
indescribable, but in these free days no longer unmentionable, lingerie,
it will be piled high with steel bonds, New Haven deferred dividends,
sinking fund debenture certificates, government five eighths per cent.
bonds, certificates of deposit, miscellaneous stocks, mining,
industrial, railway, gilt-edged and wildcat, in one red unburial blent;
while the poor owner, fearful lest in the excitement of the ordeal he
may have neglected to mention some insignificant item of a million or
two in Standard Oil, will sit by and sweat as the inspector tears his
ruthless way through his accumulated stores for wealth."
"It will be almost enough to make a man sorry he's rich," said the
Doctor.
"Oh, no," said the Idiot, "for the rest of us will be in the same
pickle, only in a more humiliating position as the intruder reveals that
the sum total of out lifetime of endeavor consists chiefly in unpaid
bills labeled Please Remit. The Custom House inspectors are harder on
the man with nothing to declare than they are on those whose boxes are
full. They slam their things all over creation, and insult the owner
with the same abandon with which they greet a recognized past-mistress
in the arts of smuggling. Innocence is no protection when a Custom House
inspector gets after you, and it will be the same way with the new
kind. None of us can hope to escape. The income tax inspectors will come
here just as eagerly as they will go to that palatial mausoleum in which
Mr. Rockernegie dwells on the corner of Bond Avenue and Easy Street, and
they'll rummage through our trunks, boxes, and bureaus in search of such
interest-bearing securities as they may suspect us of trying to get by
with. Mr. Bib will have to dump his bureau drawer full of red neckties
out on the floor to prove to Uncle Sam's satisfaction that he hasn't got
a fourteen-million-dollar bond issue concealed somewhere behind their
lurid glow. The Doctor will have to sit patiently by and unprotestingly
watch the inspectors going through the pockets of his unrivaled
collection of fancy waist-coats in a heart-breaking quest for undeclared
interests in mining enterprises and popular cemeteries. Trunks, chests,
hatboxes, soapboxes, pillboxes, safety razor boxes--in fact, all kinds
of receptacles in this house, from Mrs. Pedagog's ice chest to Mr.
Whitechoker's barrel of sermons--will be compelled to disgorge their
uttermost content in order to satisfy the government sleuths that we who
dwell in this Palace of Truth, Joy, and Waffles, have not a controlling
interest in Standard Oil hidden away lest we be compelled to pay our due
to the treasury."
"You don't mean to say that the law so provides, do you?" said the
Bibliomaniac.
"Not yet," said the Idiot, "but it will--it's bound to come. In the very
nature of the beast it is inevitable. There never was a tax yet that
found a warm spot awaiting it in the hearts of its countrymen. The human
mind with all its diabolical ingenuity has never yet been able to
devise a tax that somebody somewhere--nay, that most people
everywhere--did not try to dodge, and to catch the dodgers the
government is compelled to view everybody with suspicion, and treat hoi
polloi from top to bottom as if they were nothing more nor less than a
lot of unregenerate pickpockets, horse-thieves, and pastmasters in the
gentle art of mendacity."
"Frightful!" said Mr. Whitechoker. "And is not a man's word to be taken
as a guarantee of the accuracy of his return?"
"Not so's anybody would notice it," grinned the Idiot. "When the
government finds it necessary to nab leaders of fashionable society for
trying to smuggle in one-hundred-thousand-dollar pearl necklaces by
sewing them up in the lining of their hats, and to fine the most
eminently respectable citizens in the country as much as five thousand
dollars for returning from abroad portly with five or six-hundred yards
of undeclared lace wound inadvertently about their stomachs, having in
the excitement of their homecoming put it on in the place of the little
flannel bands they have worn to ward off cholera and other pleasing
foreign maladies, it loses some of its confidence in human nature, and
acquires some of that penetrating inquisitiveness of mind which is said
to be characteristic of the native of Missouri. It wants to be shown,
and if the income tax remains in force, we might as well make up our
minds that the inquisitorial inspector will soon be added to the
official pay roll of the United States of America."
"But," protested the Bibliomaniac, "that will be a plain common-garden
espionage of so intolerable a nature that no self-respecting free people
will submit to it. It will be an abominable intrusion upon our rights
of privacy."
The Idiot laughed long and loud.
"It seems to me," said he, after a moment, "that when Colonel John W.
Midas, of the International Hickory Nut Trust, advanced that same
objection against the proposed tax a year or so ago, Mr. Bib, you sat in
that very same chair where you are now and vociferously announced that
there was nothing in it."
"Oh, but that's different," said the Bibliomaniac. "Midas is a rich man,
and I am not."
"Well, I suppose there is a difference between a prune and a Canadian
melon, old man, but after all, they're both fruit, and when it comes to
being squeezed, I guess it hurts a lemon just as much as it does a lime.
I, for one, however, do not fear the inspector. My securities are
exempt, for they all pay their tax at the source."
"What are they, coupon bonds?" grinned the Lawyer.
"No," said the Idiot; "pawn tickets, interest on which is always paid in
advance."
V
A PSYCHIC VENTURE
"I beg your pardon, Doctor," said the Idiot, as he laid aside his
morning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon the
breakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-class home for single
gentlemen. "I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissful
intercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in the
Waffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karat
psychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I need
one in my business."
"Sike whats?" queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting a
sizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.
"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, a
medium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business,
who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again."
"H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor.
"Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot in
double harness?"
"Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said the
Doctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in
all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found
those I know wholly reliable."
"You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't
looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a
chance?" said the Idiot.
"That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A man
may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and
absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet
when he goes off, er--when he goes off--"
"Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good title for a story
that--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?"
"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he
goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so
reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant
patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as
psychlists."
"That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I can
be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other
respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."
"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance."
"What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?"
asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of
pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers
now passed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?"
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider their
utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into
communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get
anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink
pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I
didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of
climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed
his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else.
I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of
ear-tabs and a fur overcoat."
"And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniac
scornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-day
Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him
by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his
countrymen?"
"I've only seen one message from Jefferson," said the Idiot, "and it
seemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up in
Schenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz--whizz--whizz,
buzz--buzz--buzz, whizz--whizz--whizz!' Lots of people considered it
drivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance."
"Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can," said the
Bibliomaniac. "The idea that the greatest political thinker of the ages
could stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous."