me to be traces of the alkali of irony mixed in with the tincture of
derision in that question of yours. When you ask a Wall Street man who
declines to carry speculation accounts these days if he isn't going to
take a vacation shortly, it is like asking a resident of the Desert of
Sahara why he doesn't sprinkle a little sand around his place.
"Life on Wall Street for my kind, my good sir, of late has been just one
darned vacation after another. The only business I have done in three
months was to lend one of our customers a nickel, taking a subway
ticket and a baseball rain check as collateral security."
The Idiot shook his head ruefully and heaved a heart-rending sigh.
"What we cautious Wall Street fellows need," said he, "is not a
VA-cation, but a VO-cation."
"Oh, well, a man of your fertility of invention ought not to have any
trouble about that," said Mr. Brief. "You should be able without killing
yourself to think up some new kind of trade that will keep you busy
until the snow-shoveling season begins anyhow."
"Yes," said the Idiot. "Ordinary by the exercise of some ingenuity and
the use of these two brazen cheeks with which nature has endowed me, I
can always manage to pull something resembling a living out of a
reluctant earth. If a man slips up on being a Captain of Industry he can
lecture on a sight-seeing coach, or if that fails him under present
conditions in this old town, by a little economy he can live on his
tips."
"And at the worst," said the Bibliomaniac, "you always have Mrs. Pedagog
to fall back on."
"Yes," said the Idiot. "The state of my bill at this very moment shows
that I have credit enough with Mrs. Pedagog to start three national
banks and a trust company. But, fortunately for me, I don't have to do
either. I have found my opportunity lying before me in the daily
newspapers, and I am about to start a new enterprise which is not only
going to pull a large and elegant series of chestnuts out of the fire
for me but for all my subscribers as well. If I can find a good lawyer
somewhere to draw up the papers of incorporation for my United States
Telephonic Aid Society, I'll start in business this very morning at the
nearest pay station."
"If you want a good lawyer, what's the matter with me?" asked Mr. Brief.
"I never was any good at riddles," said the Idiot, "and that one is too
subtle for me. If I want a good lawyer, what is the matter with you? Ha!
Hum! Well, I give it up, but I'm willing to be what the ancients used to
call the Goat. If I want a good lawyer, Brudder Bones, what IS the
matter with you? I ask the question--what's the answer?"
"I don't know," grinned the Lawyer.
"Well, I guess that's it," said the Idiot. "If I want a good lawyer I
want one who does know."
"But what's this new society going to do?" interrupted the Poet. "I am
particularly interested in any sort of a scheme that is going to make
you rich without forgetting me. If there's any pipe-line to prosperity,
hurry up and let me know before it is too late."
"Why, it is simplicity itself," said the Idiot. "The U. S. Telephonic
Aid Society is designed to carry First Aid to the Professionally
Injured. You have doubtless read recently in the newspapers how Damon, a
retired financier, desirous of helping his old friend Pythias, an
equally retired attorney, back into his quondam practice--please excuse
that word quondam, Mrs. Pedagog; it isn't half as profane as it
sounds--went to the telephone and impersonating J. Mulligatawny Solon,
Member of Congress from the Chillicothe District, rang up Midas,
Croesus, and Dives, the eminent bankers, and recommended Pythias as
the only man this side of the planet Mars who could stave off the
ruthless destruction of their interests by an uncontrolled body of
lawmakers."
"Yes," said Mr. Brief. "I read all that, and it was almost as unreal as
a page out of the Arabian Nights."
"Wasn't it!" said the Idiot. "And yet how simple! Well, that's my scheme
in a nutshell, only I am going to do the thing as a pure matter of
business, and not merely to show the purity of my affection for any
Pythian dependent.
"To show just how the plan will work under my supervision let us take
your case first, Mr. Poet. Here you are this morning with your board
bill already passed to its third reading, with Mrs. Pedagog tacking
amendments on to the end of it with every passing day. Unfortunately for
you in your emergent hour, the editors either view your manuscripts with
suspicion or, what is more likely, refuse to look at them at all. They
care nothing for your aspirations or your inspirations.
"Your immediate prospect holds nothing in sight save the weary parcel
postman, with his bent form, delivering daily at your door eleven-pound
packages of unappreciated sonnets. You do not dare think on the morrow,
what ye shall eat, and wherewithal shall ye be clothed, because no man
liveth who can purchase the necessities of life with rejection
slips--those checks on the Banks of Ambition, payable in the editors'
regrets."
"By George," blurted the Poet feelingly, "you're dead right about that,
old man. If editors' regrets were legal tender, I could pay off the
national debt."
"Precisely," said the Idiot. "And it is just here, my dear friend, that
the U. S. Telephonic Aid Society rushes to your assistance. Your case is
brought to the society's attention, and I, as President, Secretary,
Treasurer, and General Manager of the institution, look into the matter
at once.
"I find your work meritorious. No editor has ever rejected it because it
lacked literary merit. He even goes so far as to print a statement of
that fact upon the slip he sends back with it on its homeward journey.
Like most other poets you need a little food once in awhile. A roof to
cover your head is essential to your health, and under the existing laws
of society you simply must wear clothes when you appear in public, and
it becomes the Society's worthy job to aid you in getting all these
things.
"So we close a contract providing that for ten dollars down and fifteen
per cent. of the gross future receipts, I, or the Society, agree to
secure the publication of your sonnets, rondeaux, limericks, and
triolets in the Hyperion Magazine."
"That would be bully if you could only pull it off," said the Poet,
falling naturally into the terminology of Milton. "But I don't just see
how you're going to turn the trick."
"On the regular 'Damon and Pythias' principle, as set forth in the
newspapers," said the Idiot. "Immediately the contract between us is
signed, I rush to the nearest pay station and ring up the editor of the
Hyperion Magazine, and when I get him on the line we converse as
follows:
"Me--Is this the editor of the Hyperion Magazine?
"Editor--Ubetcha. Who are you?
"Me--I'm President Wilson, down at the White House.
"Editor--Glad to hear from you, Mr. President. Got any more
of that new Freedom stuff on hand? We are thinking of
running a Department of Humor in the Hyperion, and with a
little editing I think we could use a couple of carloads of
it.
"Me--Why, yes, Mr. Bluepencil. I think I have a bale or two
of remnants in cold storage down at Trenton. But really that
isn't what I am after this morning. I wanted to say to you
officially, but confidentially, of course, that my
Ambassador to Great Britain has just cabled his resignation
to the State Department. What with a little breakfast he
gave last week to the President of France and his tips at
his own presentation to the King, he has already spent four
years' salary, and he does not feel that he can afford to
stay over there much after the first of September.
"Editor--I'm on. I getcha.
"Me--Now, of course, I've got to fill his place right away,
and it struck me that you were just the man for the job. In
the first place you are tolerably familiar with the language
they speak in and about the Court of St. James's. I am told
by mutual friends that you eat peas with a fork, can use a
knife without cutting your lip, and have an intuitive
apprehension of the subtle distinctions between a
finger-bowl and a sauterne glass. It has also been brought
to my attention that your advertising pages have for years
been consistent advocates, in season and out, of the use of
grape juice as a refreshing beverage for nervous
Ambassadors.
"Editor--That's right, Mr. President.
"Me--Well, of course, all of this makes you unquestionably
_persona grata_ to us, and I think it should make you a
novel and interesting feature of diplomatic life along
Piccadilly.
"Editor--It sounds good to me, Mr. President.
"Me--Now to come to the difficulties in our way--and that is
what I have rung you up to talk about. There seems to be but
one serious objection to your appointment, Mr. Bluepencil.
At a Cabinet meeting called yesterday to discuss the matter,
Mr. McAdoo expressed the fear that if you go away for four
years the quality of the poetry in the Hyperion Magazine
will fall off. In this contention, Mr. McAdoo was supported
by the Secretary of Agriculture, whose name escapes me at
this moment, with the Postmaster General and the Secretary
of War on the fence. Mr. Daniels was not present, having
gone West to launch a battleship at Omaha. But in any event
there is where the matter rests at this moment.
"For my own part, however, after giving the matter prayerful
consideration, I think I can see a way out. The whole
Cabinet is very much interested in the poems of Willie
Wimpleton Spondy, the boy Watson. McAdoo is constantly
quoting from him. The Postmaster General has even gone so
far as to advocate the extension of the franking privilege
to him, and as for myself, I have made it a practice for the
last five years to begin every day by reciting one of his
limericks before my assembled family.
"Editor--I never heard of the boob.
"Me--Well, you hear of him now, and the whole thing comes
down to this: Mr. Spondy will call at your office with a
couple of bales of his stuff at ten o'clock to-morrow
morning, and you might have something besides a pink
rejection slip dripping with regrets ready for him. I don't
know what his rates are, but his stuff runs about ninety
pounds to the bale, and what that comes to at fifty per you
can figure out for yourself.
"Editor--How does Champ Clark stand on this thing?
"Me--He and Tommie Marshall are with us to the last
tintinnabulation of the gong.
"Editor--Then I am to understand just what, Mr. President?
"Me--That you don't go to England on our account until we
are absolutely assured beyond peradvanture that there will
be no deterioration in the quality of Hyperion poetry during
your absence.
"Editor--All right. Send the guy around this afternoon. He
can send the bale by slow freight. We always pay in advance
anyhow."
The Idiot paused to take breath.
"Then what?" asked the Poet dubiously.
"You go around and get what's coming to you," said the Idiot. "Or
perhaps it would be better to send a messenger boy for it. The more
impersonal we make this business the better."
"I see," said the Poet dejectedly. "But even at that, Mr. Idiot, when
the Hyperion man doesn't get the Ambassadorship, won't he sue me to
recover?"
"Oh, well," said the Idiot wearily, "you've got to assume some of the
burdens of the business yourself. We can't do it all, you know. But
suppose they do sue you? You never heard of a magazine recovering
anything from a poet, did you? You'd get a heap of free advertising out
of such a lawsuit, and if you were canny enough to put out a book of
your verses while the newspapers were full of it, they'd go off like hot
cakes, and you could retire with a cool million."
"And where do I come in?" asked the Doctor. "Don't I get any of these
plums of prosperity your Telephonic Aid Society is to place within the
reach of all?"
"On payment of the fee of ten dollars, and signing the regular
contract," said the Idiot. "I'll do my best for you. In your case I
should impersonate our good old friend Andrew Rockernegie. Acting in
that capacity I would ring up Mr. John D. Reddymun, and you'd hear
something like this:
"Me--Hello, Reddy--is this you?
"Reddymun--Yes. Who's this?
"Me--This is Uncle Andy. How's the leg this morning?
"Reddymun--Oh, so so.
"Me--Everybody pulling it, I suppose?
"Reddymun--About the same as usual. It's curious, Andrew,
how many people are attached to my limb, and how few are
attached to me.
"Me--Yes, it's a cold and cruel world, John. But I'm
through. I've found the way out. They'll never pull my leg
again.
"Reddymun--By George, old man, I wish I could say as much.
"Me--Well, you can if you'll only do what I did.
"Reddymun--What's that?
"Me--Had it cut off.
"Reddymun--No!
"Me--Yep!
"Reddymun--When?
"Me--Just now.
"Reddymun--Hurt?
"Me--Never knew what was happening.
"Reddymun--Who did it?
"Me--Old Doctor Squills. He charged me ten thousand dollars
for the job, but I figure it out that it has saved me six
hundred and thirty three million dollars.
"Reddymun--Send him around, will you?
"Me--Ubetcha!"
"And then?" said the Doctor.
"And then?" echoed the Idiot. "Well, if you don't know what you would
do if you were offered ten thousand dollars to cut a man's leg off I
can't teach you, but I have one piece of advice to give you. When you
get the order don't go around there with a case full of teaspoons and
soup-ladles, when all you need is a good sharp carving knife to land you
in the lap of luxury!"
"And do you men think for one single moment," cried the Landlady, "that
all this would be honest business?"
"Well, in the very nature of the case it would be a trifle 'phoney',"
said the Idiot, "but what can a man do these days, with his bills
getting bigger and bigger every day?"
"I'd leave 'em unpaid first!" sniffed the Landlady contemptuously.
"Oh, very well," smiled the Idiot. "With your permission, ma'am, we
will. You don't know what a load you have taken off my mind."
VIII
FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN
"Poor old Binks!" said the Idiot sympathetically, as he put down a
letter just received from his friend and turned his attention to the
waffles. "He's spending the good old Summer time in a sanitarium, just
because he thinks he's got nervous prostration, and the Lord knows when
he'll be back in harness again."
"Who's Binks?" asked the Lawyer. "You talk as if the name of Binks were
a household word."
"Well, it is, in a way," said the Idiot. "Binks is one of those tired
business men that we hear so much of these days. The kind they write
comic operas and popular novels for, with all the thought taken out so
that he may not have to burden his mind with anything worth thinking
about. He's one of these billionaire slaves who's lost his thumb cutting
off coupons and employs seventeen clerks with rubber stamps to sign his
checks for him. He's succumbed to the strain of it all at last, and now
the gobelins have got him. Do you approve of these sanitariums, Doctor?"
"I most certainly do," said the Doctor. "Sanitariums are the greatest
blessings of modern life, and, for my part, I'd like to see a law passed
requiring everybody to spend a month in one of them every year of his
life, where he could be under constant scientific supervision. It would
add ten years to the lives of every one of us."
"Well, I hope you are right, but I don't know," said the Idiot
dubiously. "Seems to me there's too much coddling going on at those
places, and mighty few people get well on coddling. I've given the
matter some thought, and I've known a lot of men who had nothing but a
pain in their toe who got so much sympathy over it that they became
hopeless invalids inside of a year. There's more truth than humor in
that joke about the little Irish boy who was asked how his mother was
and replied that she was enjoying poor health this year."
"O, that's all tommyrot," said the Doctor. "Perfect nonsense--"
"I hope so," said the Idiot, "but after all nobody can deny that there
are a great many people in this world who really do enjoy bad health who
wouldn't if it weren't for the perquisites."
"Perquisites?" frowned the Bibliomaniac. "Great Heavens, Mr. Idiot, you
don't mean to insinuate that there is graft in ill health, just as there
is in everything else, do you?"
"I sure do," replied the Idiot. "Take me, for instance--"
"I for one must decline to take you until I know whether you are a
chronic disorder, or merely a temporary epidemic," grinned Mr. Brief.
"Idiocy is pretty contagious," smiled the Idiot, in reply, "but in this
case I wish to be taken as a patient. Let us say, for instance, that I
am off in the country at a popular hotel, and all of a sudden some fine
morning I come down with a headache--"
"That's a debatable hypothesis," said the Lawyer. "Is it possible for
the Idiot to have a headache, Doctor?"
"I have known similar cases," said the Doctor. "I knew an old soldier
once who lost his leg at Gettysburg, and years afterward could still
feel the twinges of rheumatism in one of his lost toes."
"Thanks for the vindication, Doctor," said the Idiot. "Nevertheless,
just to please our learned brother here, I will modify the hypothesis.
"Let us suppose that I am off in the country at a popular summer hotel,
and all of a sudden some fine morning I come down with a violent pain in
that anatomical void where my head would be if, like Mr. Brief, I always
suffered from one. I am not sick enough to stay in bed, but just badly
enough off to be able to loll around the hotel piazzas all morning and
look forlorn.
"Everybody in the place, of course, is immediately sympathetic. All are
sorry for me, and it is such an unusual thing for one of my volatile,
not to say fluffy, nature to suffer that a vast amount of commiseration
is manifested by my fellow guests, especially by the ladies.
"They turn me at once into a suffering hero. As I lie listlessly in my
steamer-chair they pass me by on tip-toe, or pause and inquire into the
progress of my aches and show a great deal more interest in my condition
than they do in bridge or votes for women. One fetching young creation
in polka-dotted dimity, aged twenty-three, offers to stay home from a
picnic and read Robert W. Chambers aloud to me. Another goes to her room
and brings me down a little jar of mint jelly, which she feeds to me on
the end of a macaroon or a lady finger, while still a third, a pretty
little widow of twenty-seven summers, now and then leaves her embroidery
to put a cool little hand on my forehead to see if I have any fever--"
"A most alluring picture," said the Doctor.
"It almost makes my head ache to think of it!" said the Idiot. "But to
continue, this goes on all morning, and then when afternoon comes they
hang a nice little hammock for me, filled with dainty sofa cushions, out
under the trees, and as they gently swing me to and fro a charming
creature from Wellesley or Vassar sits alongside of me and fans my
fevered brow, driving away dull care, flies, and mosquitoes until
twilight, when, after feeding me on more macaroons, washed down with
copious libations of sparkling lemonade, a bevy of elfin maids sit
around in a circle and sing 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean', while the
aforesaid little widow comes now and then to brush my scalp-lock back
from my brow with the aforesaid pink paddy."
"Oh, well, what of it?" interrupted the Doctor. "I've known many a
stronger man than you made a fool of--"
"What of it?" demanded the Idiot. "What of it? There's a lot of it. Do
you suppose for one minute that I am going to get well under those
circumstances?"
"I wouldn't," said the Lawyer.
"Not on your faith in the Materia Medica!" cried the Idiot. "That
headache would become immortal. As undying as a poet's fame. Life would
become for me one blissful eternity of cerebellian suffering under those
conditions. Rather that lose my job as the cynosure of all that lovely
solicitude I'd hire a bellboy to come to my room in the morning with a
croquet mallet and hammer my head until it split, if I couldn't get one
in any more legitimate fashion.
"The quiet joy of lying off there with all those ministering angels
about me, secretly enjoying the discomfiture of all the other men about
the place--they nursing their wrath; their sisters, cousins, aunts,
rich grandmothers, and best girls nursing me--get well? me? never,
Doctor!
"But if, on the other hand, nobody came near me all day long save a
horse marine of a landlady armed with a bottle of squills, with the
request that I go to bed until I felt better, why then I'd be a well man
in just seven and a half minutes, dancing the tango, and challenging all
the rheumaticky old beaux about the place to a hundred yards' dash for
the fifteenth turkey trot with the little widow at the Saturday night
hop."
"Yes, I admit that there is such a thing as too much coddling," said the
Doctor. "There are people who are inclined to hug their troubles, and
for whom too much sympathy is a positive deterrent in the process of
recuperation, but after all, my dear fellow, until we find something
better the sanitarium must serve its purpose, and a great many people
are unquestionably helped along by its beneficent operations."
"I haven't a doubt of that," said the Idiot, "and here's to them! Long
may they wave! I quaff this pony of maple syrup to the health of the
sanitariums of the land--but just the same, for the tired business man,
and his name is not only Smith, but Legion, there should be some other
kind of an institution where this coddling process is frowned upon."
"Why not devote that massive brain of yours to the working out of the
idea?" suggested the Bibliomaniac. "The great trouble with you, Mr.
Idiot, is that you are prolific in thinking out things that ought to be
done, but there you stop. How to do them you never tell us. Why don't
you give us a constructive notion once in awhile?"
"Thank you, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, with a grateful smile. "I've been
fishing for that particular nibble for the past eighteen minutes, and I
was beginning to fear the shad were shy this morning. You have saved the
day, Sir. Speaking of Mr. Bib's idea that we ought to have something to
take the place of the sanitarium for the tired business man, Doctor, how
do you think an irritarium would pay?"
"A what?" cried the Doctor, holding his waffle like Mohammed's coffin,
suspended in midair.
"An irritarium," repeated the Idiot. "An institution of aggravation,
where, instead of being coddled into permanent invalidism, we should be
constantly irritated, provoked, exacerbated, or, as my old friend
Colonel Thesaurus says in his Essay on Excitation, exasperated into a
cantankerously contentious pugnacity!"
"And for what purpose, pray?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
"As an anti-coddling resource for the restoration of our pristine
powers," said the Idiot. "Just take our old friend, the tired business
man, for example. He has been working forty-eight hours a day all winter
long, and with the coming of spring he is first cousin to the frazzle,
and in the matter of spine twin brother to the jellyfish. His middle
name is Flabby, and his nerve has succumbed to the superior numbers of
nerves.
"He is headed straight for the Down-and-Out Club. His lip quivers when
he talks, and his hand is the center of a seismic disturbance that turns
his autograph into a cross between a dress pattern and a futurist
conception of a straight line in the cold gray dawn of the morning
after. He has prolonged fits of weeping, and when it comes to making up
his mind on any definite course of action he vacillates between two
possibilities until it is too late, and then decides wrong.
"Now, under present conditions they railroad this poor wreck off to a
sanitarium, where the very atmosphere that he breathes is the dread
thing that has haunted his sleepless hours all winter long--that of
retirement. He is made to believe that he is a vurry, vurry sick man,
and the only real pleasure that is left to him is bragging about his
symptoms to some other unfortunate incarcerated with him; and after each
period of boastful exposure of these symptoms in the exchange provided
for the swapping of these things in the sanitariums of the day, he goes
back to his room more than ever convinced that his case is hopeless;
and, confronted by the bogey of everlasting ill health, he lets go of
himself altogether and a long, long, tedious period of rehabilitation
begins which may or may not get him into shape again in time for the
fall season."