Two men with good brains could do the thinking for 60,000,000 of people
and feel perfectly fresh and rested the next day. Take four men, we will
say, two to do the day thinking and two more to go on deck at night, and
see how much time the rest of the world would have to go fishing. See
how politics would become simplified. Conventions, primaries, bargains
and sales, campaign bitterness and vituperation--all might be wiped out.
A pair of political thinkers could furnish 100,000,000 of people with
logical conclusions enough to last them through the campaign and put an
unbiased opinion into a man's house each day for less than he now pays
for gas. Just before election you could go into your private office,
throw in a large dose of campaign whisky, light a campaign cigar,
fasten your buttonhole to the wall by an elastic band, so that there
would be a gentle pull on it, and turn the electricity on your
mechanical thought supply. It would save time and money, and the result
would be the same as it is now. This would only be the beginning, of
course, and after a while every qualified voter who did not feel like
exerting himself so much, need only give his name and proxy to the
salaried thinker employed by the National Think Retort and Supply Works.
We talk a great deal about the union of church and state, but that is
not so dangerous, after all, as the mixture of politics and independent
thought. Will the coming voter be an automatic, legless, hairless
mollusk with an abnormal ear constantly glued to the tube of a big tank
full of symmetrical ideas furnished by a national bureau of brains in
the employ of the party in power?
UTAH
BY EUGENE FIELD
Bowed was the old man's snow-white head,
A troubled look was on his face,
"Why come you, sir," I gently said,
"Unto this solemn burial place?"
"I come to weep a while for one
Whom in her life I held most dear,
Alas, her sands were quickly run,
And now she lies a sleeping here."
"Oh, tell me of your precious wife,
For she was very dear, I know,
It must have been a blissful life
You led with her you treasure so?"
"My wife is mouldering in the ground,
In yonder house she's spinning now,
And lo! this moment may be found
A driving home the family cow;
"And see, she's standing at the stile,
And leans from out the window wide,
And loiters on the sward a while,
Her forty babies by her side."
"Old man, you must be mad!" I cried,
"Or else you do but jest with me;
How is it that your wife has died
And yet can here and living be?
"How is it while she drives the cow
She's hanging out her window wide,
And loiters, as you said just now,
With forty babies by her side?"
The old man raised his snowy head,
"I have a sainted wife in Heaven;
I am a Mormon, sir," he said,
"My sainted wife on earth are seven."
TALK
BY JOHN PAUL
It seems to me that talk should be,
Like water, sprinkled sparingly;
Then ground that late lay dull and dried
Smiles up at you revivified,
And flowers--of speech--touched by the dew
Put forth fresh root and bud anew.
But I'm not sure that any flower
Would thrive beneath Niagara's shower!
So when a friend turns full on me
His verbal hose, may I not flee?
I know that I am arid ground,
But I'm not watered--Gad! I'm drowned!
A WINTER FANCY
(_Little Tommy Loq_)
BY R.K. MUNKITTRICK
My father piles the snow-drifts
Around his rosy face,
And covers all his whiskers--
The grass that grows apace.
And then he runs the snow-plough
Across his smiling lawn,
And all the snow-drifts vanish
And then the grass is gone.
JACK BALCOMB'S PLEASANT WAYS
BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON
There comes a time in the life of young men when their college
fraternity pins lie forgotten in the collar-button box and the spiking
of freshmen ceases to be a burning issue. Tippecanoe was one of the few
freshwater colleges that barred women; but this was not its only
distinction, for its teaching was sound, its campus charming and the
town of which it was the chief ornament a quiet place noted from the
beginning of things for its cultivated people.
It is no longer so very laudable for a young man to pay his way through
college; and Morris Leighton had done this easily and without caring to
be praised or martyrized for doing so. He had enjoyed his college days;
he had been popular with town and gown; and he had managed to get his
share of undergraduate fun while leading his classes. He had helped in
the college library; he had twisted the iron letter-press on the
president's correspondence late into the night; he had copied briefs for
a lawyer after hours; but he had pitched for the nine and hustled for
his "frat," and he had led class rushes with ardor and success.
He had now been for several years in the offices of Knight, Kittredge
and Carr at Mariona, only an hour's ride from Tippecanoe; and he still
kept in touch with the college. Michael Carr fully appreciated a young
man who took the law seriously and who could sit down in a court room
on call mornings, when need be, and turn off a demurrer without
paraphrasing it from a text-book.
Mrs. Carr, too, found Morris Leighton useful, and she liked him, because
he always responded unquestioningly to any summons to fill up a blank at
her table; and if Mr. Carr was reluctant at the last minute to attend a
lecture on "Egyptian Burial Customs," Mrs. Carr could usually summon
Morris Leighton by telephone in time to act as her escort. Young men
were at a premium in Mariona, as in most other places, and it was
something to have one of the species, of an accommodating turn, and very
presentable, within telephone range. Mrs. Carr was grateful, and so, it
must be said, was her husband, who did not care to spend his evenings
digging up Egyptians that had been a long time dead, or listening to
comic operas. It was through Mrs. Carr that Leighton came to be well
known in Mariona; she told her friends to ask him to call, and there
were now many homes besides hers that he visited.
It sometimes occurred to Morris Leighton that he was not getting ahead
in the world very fast. He knew that his salary from Carr was more than
any other young lawyer of his years earned by independent practice; but
it seemed to him that he ought to be doing better. He had not drawn on
his mother's small resources since his first year at college; he had
made his own way--and a little more--but he experienced moments of
restlessness in which the difficulties of establishing himself in his
profession loomed large and formidable.
An errand to a law firm in one of the fashionable new buildings that had
lately raised the Mariona sky-line led him one afternoon past the office
of his college classmate, Jack Balcomb. "J. Arthur Balcomb," was the
inscription on the door, "Suite B, Room 1." Leighton had seen little of
Balcomb for a year or more, and his friend's name on the ground-glass
door arrested his eye.
Two girls were busily employed at typewriters in the anteroom, and one
of them extended a blank card to Morris and asked him for his name. The
girl disappeared into the inner room and came back instantly followed by
Balcomb, who seized Morris's hand, dragged him in and closed the door.
"Well, old man!" Balcomb shouted. "I'm glad to see you. It's downright
pleasant to have a fellow come in occasionally and feel no temptation to
take his watch. Sink into yonder soft-yielding leather and allow me to
offer you one of these plutocratic perfectos. Only the elect get these,
I can tell you. In that drawer there I keep a brand made out of car
waste and hemp rope, that does very well for ordinary commercial
sociability. Got a match? All right; smoke up and tell me what you're
doing to make the world a better place to live in, as old Prexy used to
say at college."
"I'm digging at the law, at the same old stand. I can't say that I'm
flourishing like Jonah's gourd, as you seem to be."
Morris cast his eyes over the room, which was handsomely furnished.
There was a good rug on the floor and the desk and table were of heavy
oak; an engraving of Thomas Jefferson hung over Balcomb's desk, and on
the opposite side of the room was a table covered with financial
reference books.
"Well, I tell you, old man," declared Balcomb, "you've got to fool all
the people all the time these days to make it go. Those venerable
whiskers around town whine about the good old times and how a young
man's got to go slow but sure. There's nothing in it; and they wouldn't
be in it either, if they had to start in again; no siree!"
"What is your game just now, Jack, if it isn't impertinent? It's hard to
keep track of you. I remember very well that you started in to learn the
wholesale drug business."
"Oh tush! don't refer to that, an thou lovest me! That is one of the
darkest pages of my life. Those people down there in South High Street
thought I was a jay, and they sent me out to help the shipping clerk.
Wouldn't that jar you! Overalls,--and a hand truck. Wow! I couldn't get
out of that fast enough. Then, you know, I went to Chicago and spent a
year in a broker's office, and I guess I learned a few up there. Oh,
rather! They sent me into the country to sell mining stock and I made a
record. They kept the printing presses going overtime to keep me
supplied. Say, they got afraid of me; I was too good!"
He stroked his vandyke beard complacently, and flicked the ash from his
cigar.
"What's your line now? Real estate, mortgages, lending money to the
poor? How do you classify yourself?"
"You do me a cruel wrong, Morris, a cruel wrong. You read my sign on the
outer wall? Well, that's a bluff. There's nothing in real estate, _per
se_, as old Doc Bridges used to say at college. And the loan business
has all gone to the bad,--people are too rich; farmers are rolling in
real money and have it to lend. There was nothing for little Willie in
petty brokerages. I'm scheming--promoting--and I take my slice off of
everything that passes."
"That certainly sounds well. You've learned fast. You had an ambition to
be a poet when you were in college. I think I still have a few pounds of
your verses in my traps somewhere."
Balcomb threw up his head and laughed in self-pity.
"I believe I _was_ bitten with the literary tarantula for a while, but
I've lived it down, I hope. Prexy used to predict a bright literary
future for me in those days. You remember, when I made Phi Beta Kappa,
how he took both my hands and wept over me. 'Balcomb,' he says, 'you're
an honor to the college.' I suppose he'd weep again, if he knew I'd only
forgotten about half the letters of the Greek alphabet,--left them, as
one might say, several thousand parasangs to the rear in my mad race for
daily sustenance. Well, I may not leave any vestiges on the sands of
time, but, please God, I shan't die hungry,--not if I keep my health.
Dear old Prexy! He was a nice old chump, though a trifle somnolent in
his chapel talks."
"Well, we needn't pull the planks out of the bridge we've crossed on. I
got a lot out of college that I'm grateful for. They did their best for
us," said Morris.
"Oh, yes; it was well enough, but if I had it to do over, Tippecanoe
wouldn't see me; not much! It isn't what you learn in college, it's the
friendships you make and all that sort of thing that counts. A western
man ought to go east to college and rub up against eastern fellows. The
atmosphere at the freshwater colleges is pretty jay. Fred Waters left
Tippecanoe and went to Yale and got in with a lot of influential fellows
down there,--chaps whose fathers are in big things in New York. Fred has
a fine position now, just through his college pull, and first thing you
know, he'll pick up an heiress and be fixed for life. Fred's a winner
all right."
"He's also an ass," said Leighton. "I remember him of old."
"An ass of the large gray and long-eared species,--I'll grant you that,
all right enough; but look here, old man, you've got to overlook the
fact that a fellow occasionally lifts his voice and brays. Man does not
live by the spirit alone; he needs bread, and bread's getting hard to
get."
"I've noticed it," replied Leighton, who had covered all this ground
before in talks with Balcomb and did not care to go into it further.
"And then, you remember," Balcomb went on, in enjoyment of his own
reminiscences, "I wooed the law for a while. But I guess what I learned
wouldn't have embarrassed Chancellor Kent. I really had a client once. I
didn't see a chance of getting one any other way, so I hired him. He was
a coon. I employed him for two dollars to go to the Grand Opera House
and buy a seat in the orchestra when Sir Henry Irving was giving _The
Merchant of Venice_. He went to sleep and snored and they threw him out
with rude, insolent, and angry hands after the second act; and I brought
suit against the management for damages, basing my claim on the idea
that they had spurned my dusky brother on account of his race, color and
previous condition of servitude. The last clause was a joke. He had
never done any work in his life, except for the state. He was a very
sightly coon, too, now that I recall him. The show was, as I said, _The
Merchant of Venice_, and I'll leave it to anybody if my client wasn't at
least as pleasing to the eye as Sir Henry in his Shylock togs. I suppose
if it had been _Othello_, race feeling would have run so high that Sir
Henry would hardly have escaped lynching. Well, to return. My client got
loaded on gin about the time the case came up on demurrer and gave the
snap away, and I dropped out of the practice to avoid being disbarred.
And it was just as well. My landlord had protested against my using the
office at night for poker purposes, so I passed up the law and sought
the asphodel fields of promotion. _Les affaires font l'homme_, as old
Professor Garneau used to say at college. So here I am; and I'm glad I
shook the law. I'd got tired of eating coffee and rolls at the Berlin
bakery three times a day.
"Why, Morris, old man," he went on volubly, "there were days when the
loneliness in my office grew positively oppressive. You may remember
that room I had in the old Adams and Harper Block? It gave upon a
courtyard where the rats from a livery stable came to disport themselves
on rainy days. I grew to be a dead shot with the flobert rifle; but
lawsy, there's mighty little consideration for true merit in this world!
Just because I winged a couple of cheap hack horses one day, when my
nerves weren't steady, the livery people made me stop, and one of my
fellow tenants in the old rookery threatened to have me arrested for
conducting a shooting gallery without a license. He was a dentist, and
he said the snap of the rifle worried his victims."
The two typewriting machines outside clicked steadily. Some one knocked
at the door.
"Come in!" shouted Balcomb.
One of the typewriter operators entered with a brisk air of business and
handed a telegram to Balcomb, who tore it open nonchalantly. As he read
it, he tossed the crumpled envelope over his shoulder in an
absent-minded way.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, slapping his leg as though the news were
important. Then, to the girl, who waited with note-book and pencil in
hand: "Never mind; don't wait. I'll dictate the answer later."
"How did it work?" he asked, turning to Leighton, who had been looking
over the books on the table.
"How did what work?"
"The fake. It was a fake telegram. That girl's trained to bring in a
message every time I have a caller. If the caller stays thirty minutes,
it's two messages,--in other words I'm on a fifteen-minute schedule. I
tip a boy in the telegraph office to keep me supplied with blanks. It's
a great scheme. There's nothing like a telegram to create the
impression that your office is a seething caldron of business. Old Prexy
was in town the other day. I don't suppose he ever got a dose of
electricity in his life unless he had been sorely bereft of a member of
his family and was summoned to the funeral baked meats. Say, he must
have thought I had a private wire!"
Leighton sat down and fanned himself with his hat.
"You'll be my death yet. You have the cheek of a nice, fresh, new
baggage-check, Balcomb."
"Your cigar isn't burning well, Morris. Won't you try another? No? I
like my guests to be comfortable."
"I'm comfortable enough. I'm even entertained. Go ahead and let me see
the rest of the show."
"Oh, we haven't exactly a course of stunts here. Those are nice girls
out there. I've broken them of the chewing-gum habit, and they can
answer anxious inquiries at the door now without danger of
strangulation."
"They seem speedy on the machine. Your correspondence must be something
vast!"
"Um, yes. It has to be. Every cheap skate of a real estate man keeps one
stenographer. My distinction is that I keep two. They're easy
advertising. Now that little one in the pink shirt-waist that brought in
the message from Mars a moment ago is a wonder of intelligence. Do you
know what she's doing now?"
"Trying to break the machine I should guess, from the racket."
"Bah! It's the Lord's Prayer."
"You mean it's a sort of prayer machine."
"Not on your life. Maude hasn't any real work to do just now and she's
running off the Lord's Prayer. I know by the way it clicks. When she
strikes 'our daily bread' the machine always gives a little gasp. See?
The rule of the office is that they must have some diddings doing all
the time. The big one with red hair is a perfect marvel at the
Declaration of Independence. She'll be through addressing circulars in a
little while and will run off into 'All men are created equal'--a
blooming lie, by the way--without losing a stroke."
"You _have_ passed the poetry stage, beyond a doubt. But I should think
the strain of keeping all this going would be wearing on your sensitive
poetical nature. And it must cost something."
"Oh, yes!" Balcomb pursed his lips and stroked his fine soft beard. "But
it's worth it. I'm not playing for small stakes. I'm looking for
Christmas trees. Now they've got their eyes on me. These old Elijahs
that have been the bone and sinew of the town for so long that they
think they own it, are about done for. You can't sit in a bank here any
more and look solemn and turn people down because your corn hurts or
because the chinch-bugs have got into the wheat in Dakota or the czar
has bought the heir apparent a new toy pistol. You've got to present a
smiling countenance to the world and give the glad hand to everybody
you're likely to need in your business. I jolly everybody!"
"That comes easy for you; but I didn't know you could make an asset of
it."
"It's part of my working capital. Now you'd better cut loose from old
man Carr and move up here and get a suite near me. I've got more than I
can do,--I'm always needing a lawyer,--organizing companies, legality of
bonds, and so on. Dignified work. Lots of out-of-town people come here
and I'll put you in touch with them. I threw a good thing to Van Cleve
only the other day. Bond foreclosure suit for some fellows in the East
that I sell stuff to. They wrote and asked me the name of a good man. I
thought of you--old college days and all that--but Van Cleve had just
done me a good turn and I had to let him have it. But you'd better come
over. You'll never know the world's in motion in that musty old hole of
Carr's. You get timid and afraid to go near the water by staying on
shore so long. But say, Morris, you seem to be getting along pretty well
in the social push. Your name looks well in the society column. How do
you work it, anyhow?"
"Don't expect me to give the snap away. The secret's valuable. And I'm
not really inside; I am only peering through the pickets!"
"Tush! Get thee hence! I saw you in a box at the theater the other
night,--evidently Mrs. Carr's party. There's nothing like mixing
business with pleasure. Ah me!"
He yawned and stroked his beard and laughed, with a fine showing of
white teeth.
"I don't see what's pricking you with small pins of envy. You were there
with about the gayest crowd I ever saw at a theater; and it looked like
your own party."
"Don't say a word," implored Balcomb, putting out his hand. "Members of
the board of managers of the state penitentiary, their wives, their
cousins and their aunts. Say, weren't those beauteous whiskers! My eye!
Well, the evening netted me about five hundred plunks, and I got to see
the show and to eat a good supper in the bargain. Some reformers were to
appear before them that night officially, and my friends wanted to keep
them busy. I was called into the game to do something,--hence these
tears. Lawsy! I earned my money. Did you see those women?--about two
million per cent. pure jay!"
"You ought to cut out that sort of thing; it isn't nice."
"Oh, you needn't be so virtuous. Carr keeps a whole corps of rascals to
spread apple-butter on the legislature corn-bread."
"You'd better speak to him about it. He'd probably tell Mrs. Carr to ask
you to dinner right away."
"Oh, that will come in time. I don't expect to do everything at once.
You may see me up there some time; and when you do, don't shy off like a
colt at the choo-choos. By the way, I'd like to be one of the bright
particular stars of the Dramatic Club if you can fix it. You remember
that amateur theatricals are rather in my line."
"I do. At college you were one of the most persistent Thespians we had,
and one of the worst. But let social matters go. You haven't told me how
to get rich quick yet. I haven't had the nerve to chuck the law as you
have."
"Well," continued Balcomb, expansively, "a fellow has got to take what
he can when he can. One swallow doesn't make a summer; one sucker
doesn't make a spring; so we must catch the birdling _en route_ or _en
passant_, as our dear professor of modern languages used to try to get
us to remark. Say, between us old college friends, I cleared up a couple
of thousand last week just too easy for any use. You know Singerly, the
popular undertaker,--Egyptian secret of embalming, lady and gentleman
attendants, night and day,--always wears a spray of immortelles in his
lapel and a dash of tuberose essence on his handkerchief. Well, Singerly
and I operated together in the smoothest way you ever saw. Excuse me!"
He lay back and howled. "Well, there was an old house up here on High
Street just where it begins to get good; very exclusive--old families
and all that. It belonged to an estate, and I got an option on it just
for fun. I began taking Singerly up there to look at it. We'd measure
it, and step it off, and stop and palaver on the sidewalk. In a day or
two those people up there began to take notice and to do me the honor to
call on me. You see, my boy, an undertaking shop--even a fashionable
one--for a neighbor, isn't pleasant; it wouldn't add, as one might say,
to the _sauce piquante_ of life; and as a reminder of our mortality--a
trifle depressing, as you will admit."
He took the cigar from his mouth and examined the burning end of it
thoughtfully.
"I sold the option to one of Singerly's prospective neighbors for the
matter of eleven hundred. He's a retired wholesale grocer and didn't
need the money."
"Seems to me you're cutting pretty near the dead-line, Jack. That's not
a pretty sort of hold-up. You might as well take a sandbag and lie in
wait by night."
"Great rhubarb! You make me tired. I'm not robbing the widow and the
orphan, but a fat old Dutchman who doesn't ask anything of life but his
sauerkraut and beer."
"And you do! You'd better give your ethical sense a good tonic before
you butt into the penal code."
"Come off! I've got a better scheme even than the Singerly deal. The
school board's trying to locate a few schools in up-town districts. Very
undesirable neighbors. I rather think I can make a couple of turns
there. This is all strictly _inter nos_, as Professor Morton used to say
in giving me, as a special mark of esteem, a couple of hundred extra
lines of Virgil to keep me in o' nights."
He looked at his watch and gave the stem-key a few turns before
returning it to his pocket.
"You'll have to excuse me, old man. I've got a date with Adams, over at
the Central States Trust Company. He's a right decent chap when you know
how to handle him. I want to get them to finance a big apartment house
scheme. I've got an idea for a flat that will make the town sit up and
gasp."
"Don't linger on my account, Jack. I only stopped in to see whether you
kept your good spirits. I feel as though I'd had a shower bath. Come
along."
Several men were waiting to see Balcomb in the outer office and he shook
hands with all of them and begged them to come again, taking care to
mention that he had been called to the Central States Trust Company and
had to hurry away.
He called peremptorily to the passing elevator-car to wait, and as he
and Leighton squeezed into it, he continued his half of an imaginary
conversation in a tone that was audible to every passenger.
"I could have had those bonds, if I had wanted them; but I knew there
was a cloud on them--the county was already over its legal limit. I
guess those St. Louis fellows will be sorry they were so
enterprising--here we are!"
And then in a lower tone to Leighton: "That was for old man Dameron's
benefit. Did you see him jammed back in the corner of the car? Queer old
party and as tight as a drum. When I can work off some assessable and
non-interest bearing bonds on him, it'll be easy to sell Uncle Sam's
Treasury a gold brick. They say the old man has a daughter who is finer
than gold; yea, than much fine gold. I'm going to look her up, if I ever
get time. You'd better come over soon and pick out an office. _Verbum
sat sapienti_, as our loving teacher used to say. So long!"
Leighton walked back to his office in good humor and better contented
with his own lot.
THE WICKED ZEBRA[3]
BY FRANK ROE BATCHELDER
The zebra always seems malicious,--
He kicks and bites 'most all the time;
I fear that he's not only vicious,
But guilty of some dreadful crime.
The mere suggestion makes me falter
In writing of this wicked brute;
Although he has escaped the halter,
He wears for life a convict's suit.
[Footnote 3: Lippincott's Magazine.]