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Title: The Inventions of the Idiot
Author: Bangs, John Kendrick, 1862-1922
Language: English
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THE INVENTIONS OF THE IDIOT
by
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Author of "A House-Boat on the Styx"
"The Pursuit of the House-Boat"
"Olympian Nights" Etc. Etc.
New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1904
Copyright, 1903, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published April, 1904
TO
YOU
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE CULINARY GUILD 1
II. A SUGGESTION FOR THE CABLE-CARS 16
III. THE TRANSATLANTIC TROLLEY COMPANY 31
IV. THE INCORPORATION OF THE IDIOT 47
V. UNIVERSITY EXTENSION 64
VI. SOCIAL EXPANSION 79
VII. A BEGGAR'S HAND-BOOK 96
VIII. PROGRESSIVE WAFFLES 112
IX. A CLEARING-HOUSE FOR POETS 127
X. SOME ELECTRICAL SUGGESTIONS 142
XI. CONCERNING CHILDREN 158
XII. DREAMALINE 172
THE INVENTIONS OF THE IDIOT
I
The Culinary Guild
It was before the Idiot's marriage, and in the days when he was nothing
more than a plain boarder in Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's High-class Home for
Single Gentlemen, that he put what the School-master termed his "alleged
mind" on plans for the amelioration of the condition of the civilized.
"The trials of the barbarian are really nothing as compared with the
tribulations of civilized man," he said, as the waitress passed him a
piece of steak that had been burned to a crisp. "In the Cannibal Islands
a cook who would send a piece of broiled missionary to her employer's
table in this condition would herself be roasted before another day had
dawned. We, however, must grin and bear it, because our esteemed
landlady cannot find anywhere in this town a woman better suited for the
labors of the kitchen than the blank she has had the misfortune to draw
in the culinary lottery, familiarly known to us, her victims, as
Bridget."
"This is an exceptional case," said Mr. Pedagog. "We haven't had a steak
like this before in several weeks."
"True," returned the Idiot. "This is a sirloin, I believe. The last
steak we had was a rump steak, and it was not burned to a crisp, I
admit. It was only boiled, if I remember rightly, by mistake; Bridget
having lost her fifth consecutive cousin in ten days the night before,
and being in consequence so prostrated that she could not tell a
gridiron from a lawn-mower."
"Well, you know the popular superstition, Mr. Idiot," said the Poet.
"The devil sends the cooks."
"I don't believe it," retorted the Idiot. "That's one of those proverbs
that haven't a particle of truth in 'em--nor a foundation in reason
either, like 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth.' Of all absurd
advice ever given to man by a thoughtless thinker, that, I think, bears
the palm. I know a man who didn't look a gift horse in the mouth, and
the consequence was that he accepted a horse that was twenty-eight years
old. The beast died in his stables three days later, and the beneficiary
had to pay five dollars to have him carted away. As for the devil
sending the cooks, I haven't any faith in the theory. Any person who had
come from the devil would know how to manage a fire better than
ninety-nine per cent. of the cooks ever born. It would be a good thing
if every one of 'em were forced to serve an apprenticeship with the
Prince of Darkness. However, steak like this serves a good purpose. It
serves to bind our little circle more firmly together. There's nothing
like mutual suffering to increase the sympathy that should exist between
men situated as we are; and as for Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog, I wish her to
understand distinctly that I am criticising the cook and not herself. If
this particular dainty had been prepared by her own fair hand, I doubt
not I should want more of it."
"I thank you," returned the landlady, somewhat mollified by this remark.
"If I had more time I should occasionally do the cooking myself, but,
as it is, I am overwhelmed with work."
"I can bear witness to that," observed Mr. Whitechoker. "Mrs.
Smithers-Pedagog is one of the most useful ladies in my congregation. If
it were not for her, many a heathen would be going without garments
to-day."
"Well, I don't like to criticise," said the Idiot, "but I think the
heathen at home should be considered before the heathen abroad. If your
congregation would have a guild to look after such heathen as the Poet
and the Doctor and myself, I am convinced it would be more appreciated
by those who benefited by its labors than it is at present by the
barbarians who try to wear the misfits it sends out. A Christian whose
plain but honest breakfast is well cooked is apt to be far more grateful
than a barbarian who is wearing a pair of trousers made of calico and a
coat three sizes too small in the body and nine sizes too large in the
arms. I will go further. I believe that if the domestic heathen were
cared for they would do much better work, would earn better pay, and
would, out of mere gratitude, set apart a sufficiently large portion of
their increased earnings to be devoted to the purchase of tailor-made
costumes, which would please the cannibals better, far better, than the
amateur creations they now get. I know I'd contribute some of my
surplus."
"What would you have such a guild do?" queried Mr. Whitechoker.
"Do? There'd be so much for it to do that the members could hardly find
time to rest," returned the Idiot. "Do? Why, my dear sir, take this
house, for instance, and see what it could do here. What a boon it would
be for me if some kind-hearted person would come here once a week and
sew buttons on my clothes, darn my socks--in short, keep me mended. What
better work for one who desires to make the world brighter, happier, and
less sinful!"
"I fail to see how the world would be brighter, happier, or less sinful
if your suspender-buttons were kept firm, and your stockings darned, and
your wardrobe generally mended," said Mr. Pedagog. "I grant that such a
guild would be doing a noble work if it would take you in hand and
correct many of your impressions, revise your well-known facts so as to
bring them more in accord with indubitable truths, and impart to your
customs some of that polish which you so earnestly strive for in your
dress."
"Thank you," said the Idiot, suavely. "But I don't wish to overburden
the kind ladies to whom I refer. If my costumes could be looked after I
might find time to look after my customs, and, I assure you, Mr.
Pedagog, if at any time you will undertake to deliver a course of
lectures on Etiquette, I will gladly subscribe for two orchestra-chairs
and endeavor to occupy both of them. At any rate, to return to the main
point, I claim that the world would be happier and brighter and less
sinful if the domestic heathen were kept mended by such a guild, and I
challenge any one here to deny, even on so slight a basis as the loose
suspender-button, the truth of what I say. When I arise in the morning
and find a button gone, do I make genial remarks about the joys of life?
I do not. I use words. Sometimes one word, which need not be repeated
here. I am unhappy, and, being unhappy, the world seems dark and dreary,
and in speaking impatiently, though very much to the point, as I do, I
am guilty of an offence that is sinful. With such a start in the
morning, I come here to the table. Mr. Pedagog sees that I am not quite
myself. He asks me if I am not feeling well, an irritating question at
any time, but particularly so to a man with a suspender-button gone. I
retort. He re-retorts, until our converse is warmer than the coffee, and
our relations colder than the waffles. Finally I leave the house,
slamming the door behind me, structurally weakening the house, and go to
business, where I wreak my vengeance upon the second clerk, who takes it
out of the office-boy, who goes home and vents his wrath on his little
sister, who, goaded into recklessness, teases the baby until he yells
and gets spanked by his mother for being noisy. Now, why should a loose
suspender-button be allowed to subject that baby to such humiliation,
and who can deny that, if it had been properly sewed on by a guild, such
as I have mentioned, the baby never would have been spanked for the
causes mentioned? What is _your_ answer, Mr. Whitechoker?"
"Truly, I am so breathless at your logic that I cannot reason," said the
Minister. "But haven't we digressed a little? We were speaking of cooks,
and we conclude with a pathetic little allegory about a suspender-button
and a baby that is not only teased but spanked."
"The baby could get the same spanking for reasons based on the
shortcomings of the cooks," said the Idiot. "I am irritated when I am
served with green pease hard enough to batter down Gibraltar if properly
aimed; when my coffee is a warmed-over reminiscence of last night's
demi-tasse, I leave the house in a frame of mind that bodes ill for the
junior clerk, and the effect on the baby is ultimately the same."
"And--er--you'd have the ladies whose energies are now devoted towards
the clothing of the heathen come here and do the cooking?" queried the
School-master.
"I leave if they do," said the Doctor. "I have seen too much of the
effects of amateur cookery in my profession to want any of it. They are
good cooks in theory, but not in practice."
"There you have it!" said the Idiot, triumphantly. "Right in a nutshell.
That's where the cooks are always weak. They have none of the theory and
all of the practice. If they based practice on theory, they'd cook
better. Wherefore let your theoretical cooks seek out the practical and
instruct them in the principles of the culinary art. Think of what
twelve ladies could do; twelve ladies trained in the sewing-circle to
talk rapidly, working five hours a day apiece, could devote an hour a
week to three hundred and sixty cooks, and tell them practically all
they themselves know in that time; and if, in addition to this, twelve
other ladies, forming an auxiliary guild, would make dresses and bonnets
and things for the same cooks, instead of for the cannibals, it would
keep them good-natured."
"Splendid scheme!" said the Doctor. "So practical. Your brain must weigh
half an ounce."
"I've never had it weighed," said the Idiot, "but, I fancy, it's a good
one. It's the only one I have, anyhow, and it's done me good service,
and shows no signs of softening. But, returning to the cooks,
good-nature is as essential to the making of a good cook as are apples
to the making of a dumpling. You can't associate the word dumpling with
ill-nature, and just as the poet throws himself into his work, and as
he is of a cheerful or a mournful disposition, so does his work appear
cheerful or mournful, so do the productions of a cook take on the
attributes of their maker. A dyspeptic cook will prepare food in a
manner so indigestible that it were ruin to partake of it. A
light-hearted cook will make light bread; a pessimistic cook will serve
flour bricks in lieu thereof."
"I think possibly you are right when you say that," said the Doctor. "I
have myself observed that the people who sing at their work do the best
work."
"But the worst singing," growled the School-master.
"That may be true," put in the Idiot; "but you cannot expect a cook on
sixteen dollars a month to be a prima-donna. Now, if Mr. Whitechoker
will undertake to start a sewing-circle in his church for people who
don't care to wear clothing, but to sow the seeds of concord and good
cookery throughout the kitchens of this land, I am prepared to prophesy
that at the end of the year there will be more happiness and less
depression in this part of the world; and once eliminate dyspepsia from
our midst, and get civilization and happiness controvertible terms, then
you will find your foreign missionary funds waxing so fat that instead
of the amateur garments for the heathen you now send them, you will be
able to open an account at Worth's and Poole's for every barbarian in
creation. The scheme for the sewing on of suspender-buttons and the
miscellaneous mending that needs to be done for lone-lorn savages like
myself might be left in abeyance until the culinary scheme has been
established. Bachelors constitute a class, a small class only, of
humanity, but the regeneration of cooks is a universal need."
"I think your scheme is certainly a picturesque one and novel," said Mr.
Whitechoker. "There seems to be a good deal in it. Don't you think so,
Mr. Pedagog?"
"Yes--I do," said Mr. Pedagog, wearily. "A great deal--of language."
And amid the laugh at his expense which followed, the Idiot, joining in,
departed.
II
A Suggestion for the Cable-cars
"Heigh-ho!" sighed the Idiot, rubbing his eyes sleepily. "This is a
weary world."
"What? This from you?" smiled the Poet. "I never expected to hear that
plaint from a man of your cheerful disposition."
"Humph!" said the Idiot, with difficulty repressing a yawn. "Humph! and
I may add, likewise, tut! What do you take me for--an insulated
sun-beam? I can't help it if shadows camp across my horizon
occasionally. I wouldn't give a cent for the man who never had his
moments of misery. It takes night to enable us to appreciate daytime.
Misery is a foil necessary to the full appreciation of joy. I'm glad I
am sort of down in the mouth to-day. I'll be all right to-morrow, and
I'll enjoy to-morrow all the more for to-day's megrim. But for the
present, I repeat, this is a weary world."
"Oh, I don't think so," observed the School-master. "The world doesn't
seem to me to betray any signs of weariness. It got to work at the usual
hour this morning, and, as far as I can judge, has been revolving at the
usual rate of speed ever since."
"The Idiot's mistake is a common one," put in the Doctor. "I find it
frequently in my practice."
"That's a confession," retorted the Idiot. "Do you find out these
mistakes in your practice before or after the death of the patient?"
"That mistake," continued the Doctor, paying apparently little heed to
the Idiot's remark--"that mistake lies in the Idiot's assumption that
he is himself the world. He regards himself as the earth, as all of
life, and, because he happens to be weary, the world is a weary one."
"It isn't a fatal disease, is it?" queried the Idiot, anxiously. "I am
not likely to become so impressed with that idea, for instance, that I
shall have to be put in a padded cell and manacled so that I may not
turn perpetual handsprings under the hallucination that, being the
world, it is my duty to revolve?"
"No," replied the Doctor, with a laugh. "No, indeed. That is not at all
likely to happen, but I think it would be a good idea if you were to
carry the hallucination out far enough to put a cake of ice on your
head, assuming that to be the north pole, and cool off that brain of
yours."
"That is a good idea," returned the Idiot; "and if Mary will bring me
the ice that was used to cool the coffee this morning, I shall be
pleased to try the experiment. Meanwhile, this is a weary world."
"Then why under the canopy don't you leave it and go to some other
world?" snapped Mr. Pedagog. "You are under no obligation to remain
here. With a river on either side of the city, and a New York Juggernaut
Company, Unlimited, running trolley-cars up and down two of our more
prominent highways, suicide is within the reach of all. Of course, we
should be sorry to lose you, in a way, but I have known men to recover
from even greater afflictions than that."
"Thank you for the suggestion," replied the Idiot, transferring four
large, porous buckwheat-cakes to his plate. "Thank you very much, but I
have a pleasanter and more lingering method of suicide right here. Death
by buckwheat-cakes is like being pierced by a Toledo blade. You do not
realize the terrors of your situation until you cease to be susceptible
to them. Furthermore, I do not believe in suicide. It is, in my
judgment, the worst crime a man can commit, and I cannot but admire the
remarkable discernment evinced by the Fates in making of it its own
inevitable capital punishment. A man may commit murder and escape death,
but in the commission of suicide he is sure of execution. Just as Virtue
is its own reward, so is Suicide its own amercement."
"Been reading the dictionary again?" asked the Poet.
"No, not exactly," said the Idiot, with a smile, "but--it's a kind of
joke on me, I suppose--I have just been stuck, to use a polite term, on
a book called Roget's _Thesaurus_, and, if I want to get hold of a new
word that will increase my seeming importance to the community, I turn
to it. That's where I got 'amercement.' I don't hold that its use in
this especial case is beyond cavil--that's another Thesaurian term--but
I don't suppose any one here would notice that fact. It goes here, and I
shall not use it elsewhere."
"I am interested to know how _you_ ever came to be the owner of a
_Thesaurus_," said the School-master, with a grim smile at the idea of
the Idiot having such a book in his possession. "Except on the score of
affinities. You are both very wordy."
"Meaning pleonastic, I presume," retorted the Idiot.
"I beg your pardon?" said the School-master.
"Never mind," said the Idiot. "I won't press the analogy, but I will say
that those who are themselves periphrastic should avoid criticising
others for being ambaginous."
"I think you mean ambiguous," said the School-master, elevating his
eyebrows in triumph.
"I thought you'd think that," retorted the Idiot. "That's why I used the
word 'ambaginous.' I'll lend you my dictionary to freshen up your
phraseology. Meanwhile, I'll tell you how I happened to get a
_Thesaurus_. I thought it was an animal, and when I saw that a New York
bookseller had a lot of them marked down from two dollars to one, I sent
and got one. I thought it was strange for a bookseller to be selling
rare animals, but that was his business, not mine; and as I was anxious
to see what kind of a creature a _Thesaurus_ was, I invested. When I
found out it was a book and not a tame relic of the antediluvian animal
kingdom, I thought I wouldn't say anything about it, but you people here
are so inquisitive you've learned my secret."
"And wasn't it an animal?" asked Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog.
"My dear--my _dear_!" ejaculated Mr. Pedagog. "Pray--ah--I beg of you,
do not enter into this discussion."
"No, Mrs. Pedagog," observed the Idiot, "it was not. It was nothing more
than a book, which, when once you have read it, you would not be
without, since it gives your vocabulary a twist which makes you proof
against ninety-nine out of every one hundred conversationalists in the
world, no matter how weak your cause."
"I am beginning to understand the causes of your weariness," observed
Mr. Pedagog, acridly. "You have been memorizing syllables. Really, I
should think you were in danger of phonetic prostration."
"Not a bit of it," said the Idiot. "Those words are stimulating, not
depressing. I begin to feel better already, now that I have spoken them.
I am not half so weary as I was, but for my weariness I had good cause.
I suffered all night from a most frightful nightmare. It utterly
destroyed my rest."
"Welsh-rarebit?" queried the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally
imbibed, with a tone of reproach. "If so, why was I not with you?"
"That question should be its own answer," replied the Idiot. "A man who
will eat a Welsh-rarebit alone is not only a person of a sullen
disposition, but of reckless mould as well. I would no sooner think of
braving a Welsh-rarebit unaccompanied than I would think of trying to
swim across the British Channel without a lifesaving boat following in
my wake."
"I question if so light a body as you could have a wake!" said Mr.
Pedagog, coldly.
"I am sorry, but I can't agree with you, Mr. Pedagog," said the
Bibliomaniac. "A tugboat, most insignificant of crafts, roils up the
surface of the sea more than an ocean steamer does. Fuss goes with
feathers more than with large bodies."
"Well, they're neither of 'em in it with a cake of soap for real,
bona-fide suds," said the Idiot, complacently, as he helped himself to
his thirteenth buckwheat-cake. "However, wakes have nothing to do with
the case. I had a most frightful dream, and it was not due to
Welsh-rarebits, but to my fatal weakness, which, not having my
_Thesaurus_ at hand, I must identify by the commonplace term of
courtesy. You may not have noticed it, but courtesy is my strong point."
"We haven't observed the fact," said Mr. Pedagog; "but what of it? Have
you been courteous to any one?"
"I have," replied the Idiot, "and a nightmare is what it brought me. I
rode up-town on a trolley-car last night, and I gave up my seat to
sixteen ladies, two of whom, by-the-way, thanked me."
"I don't see why more than one of them should thank you," sniffed the
landlady. "If a man gives up a trolley-car seat to sixteen ladies, only
one of them can occupy it."
"I stand corrected," said the Idiot. "I gave up a seat to ladies sixteen
times between City Hall and Twenty-third Street. I can't bring myself to
sit down while a woman stands, and every time I'd get a seat some woman
would get on the car. Hence it was that I gave up my seat to sixteen
ladies. Why two of them should thank me, considering the rules, I do not
know. It certainly is not the custom. At any rate, if I had walked
up-town, I should not have had more exercise than I got on that car,
bobbing up and down so many times, and lurching here and lurching there
every time the car stopped, started, or turned a corner. Whether it was
the thanks or the lurching I got, I don't know, but the incidents of
the ride were so strongly impressed upon me that I dreamed all night,
only in my dreams I was not giving up car seats. The first seat I gave
up to a woman in the dream was an eighty-thousand-dollar seat in the
Stock Exchange. It was expensive courtesy, but I did it, and mourned so
over the result that I waked up and discovered that it was but a dream.
Then I went to sleep again. This time I was at the opera. I had the best
seat in the house, when in came a woman who hadn't a chair. Same result.
I got up. She sat down, and I had to stand behind a pillar where I could
neither see nor hear. More grief; waked up again, more tired than when I
went to bed. In ten minutes I dozed off. Found myself an ambitious
statesman running for the Presidency. Was elected and inaugurated. Up
comes a Woman's Rights candidate. More courtesy. Gave up the
Presidential chair to her and went home to obscurity, when again I
awoke tireder than ever. Clock struck four. Fell asleep again. This time
I was prepared for anything that might happen. I found myself in a
trolley-car, but with me I had a perforated chair-bottom, such as the
street peddlers sell. Lady got aboard. I put the perforated chair-bottom
on my lap and invited her to sit down. She thanked me and did so. Then
another lady got on. The lady on my lap moved up and made room for the
second lady. She sat down. Between them they must have weighed three
hundred pounds. I could have stood that, but as time went on more ladies
got aboard, and every time that happened these first-comers would move
up and make room for them. How they did it I can't say, any more than I
can say how in real life three women can find room in a car-seat vacated
by a little child. They did the former just as they do the latter,
until finally I found myself flattened into the original bench like the
pattern figure of a carpet. I felt like an entaglio; thirty women by
actual count were pressing me to remain, as it were, but the worst of it
all was they none of them seemed to live anywhere. We rode on and on and
on, but nobody got off. I tried to move--and couldn't. We passed my
corner, but there I was fixed. I couldn't breathe, and so couldn't call
out, and I verily believe that if I hadn't finally waked up I should by
this time have reached Hong-Kong, for I have a distinct recollection of
passing through Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Finally, I
did wake, however, simply worn out with my night's rest, which,
gentlemen, is why I say, as I have already said, this is a weary world."
"Well, I don't blame you," said Mr. Whitechoker, kindly. "That was a
most remarkable dream."
"Yes," assented Mr. Pedagog. "But quite in line with his waking
thoughts."
"Very likely," said the Idiot, rising and preparing to depart. "It was
absurd in most of its features, but in one of them it was excellent. I
am going to see the president of the Electric Juggernaut Company, as you
call it, in regard to it to-day. I think there is money in that idea of
having an extra chair-seat for every passenger to hold in his lap. In
that way twice as many seated passengers can be accommodated, and
countless people with tender feet will be spared the pain of having
other wayfarers standing upon them."
III
The Transatlantic Trolley Company
"If I were a millionaire," began the Idiot one Sunday morning, as he and
his friends took their accustomed seats at the breakfast-table, "I would
devote a tenth of my income to the poor, a tenth to children's fresh-air
funds, and the balance to the education through travel of a dear and
intimate friend of mine."
"That would be a generous distribution of your wealth," said Mr.
Whitechoker, graciously. "But upon what would you live yourself?"
"I should stipulate in the bargain with my dear and intimate friend
that we should be inseparable; that wherever he should go I should go,
and that, of the funds devoted to his education through travel, one-half
should be paid to me as my commission for letting him into a good
thing."
"You certainly have good business sense," put in the Bibliomaniac. "I
wish I had had when I was collecting rare editions."
"Collecting rare books and a good business sense seldom go together, I
fancy," said the Idiot. "I began collecting books once, but I gave it up
and took to collecting coins. I chose my coin and devoted my time to
getting in that variety alone, and it has paid me."
"I don't exactly gather your meaning," said Mr. Whitechoker. "You chose
your coin?"
"Precisely. I said, 'Here! Most coin collectors spend their time looking
for one or two rare coins, for which, when they are found, they pay
fabulous prices. The result is oftentimes penury. I, on the other hand,
will look for coins of a common sort which do not command fabulous
prices.' So I chose United States five-dollar gold pieces, irrespective
of dates, for my collection, and the result is moderate affluence. I
have between sixty and a hundred of them at my savings-bank, and when I
have found it necessary to realize on them I have not experienced the
slightest difficulty in forcing them back into circulation at cost."
"You are a wise Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac, settling back in his
chair in a disgusted, tired sort of way. He had expected some sympathy
from the Idiot as a fellow-collector, even though their aims were
different. It is always difficult for a man whose ten-thousand-dollar
library has brought six hundred dollars in the auction-room to find,
even in the ranks of collectors, one who understands his woes and helps
him bear the burden thereof by expressions of confidence in his sanity.
"Then you believe in travel, do you?" asked the Doctor.
"I believe there is nothing broadens the mind so much," returned the
Idiot.
"But do you believe it will develop a mind where there isn't one?" asked
the School-master, unpleasantly. "Or, to put it more favorably, don't
you think there would be danger in taking the germ of a mind in a small
head and broadening it until it runs the risk of finding itself confined
to cramped quarters?"
"That is a question for a physician to answer," said the Idiot. "But, if
I were you, I wouldn't travel if I thought there was any such danger."
"_Tu quoque_," retorted the School-master, "is _not_ true repartee."
"I shall have to take your word for that," returned the Idiot, "since I
have not a Latin dictionary with me, and all the Latin I know is to be
found in the quotations in the back of my dictionary, like '_Status quo
ante_,' '_In vino veritas_,' and '_Et tu, Brute_.' However, as I said
before, I'd like to travel, and I would if it were not that the sea and
I are not on very good terms with each other. It makes me ill to cross
the East River on the bridge, I'm so susceptible to sea-sickness."
"You'd get over that in a very few days," said the Genial Old Gentleman
who occasionally imbibed. "I have crossed the ocean a dozen times, and
I'm never sea-sick after the third day out."
"Ah, but those three days!" said the Idiot. "They must resemble the
three days of grace on a note that you know you couldn't pay if you had
three years of grace. I couldn't stand them, I am afraid. Why, only
last summer I took a drive off in the country, and the motion of the
wagon going over the thank-ye-marms in the road made me so sea-sick
before I'd gone a mile that I wanted to lie down and die. I think I
should have done so if the horse hadn't run away and forced me to ride
back home whether I wanted to or not."
"You ought to fight that," said the Doctor. "By-and-by, if you give way
to a weakness of that sort, the creases in your morning newspaper will
affect you similarly as you read it. If you ever have a birthday, let us
know, and we'll help you to overcome the tendency by buying you a
baby-jumper for you to swing around in every morning until you get used
to the motion."
"It would be more to the purpose," replied the Idiot, "if you as a
physician would invent a preventive of sea-sickness. I'd buy a bottle
and go abroad at once on my coin collection if you would guarantee it
to kill or to cure instantaneously."
"There is such a nostrum," said the Doctor.
"There is, indeed," put in the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally
imbibes. "I've tried it."
"And were you sea-sick?" asked the Doctor.
"I never knew," replied the Genial Old Gentleman. "It made me so ill
that I never thought to inquire what was the matter with me. But one
thing is certain, I'll take my sea-voyages straight after this."
"I'd like to go by rail," said the Idiot, after a moment's thought.
"That is a desire quite characteristic of you," said the School-master.
"It is so probable that you could. Why not say that you'd like to cross
the Atlantic on a tight-rope?"
"Because I have no such ambition," replied the Idiot. "Though it might
be fun if the tight-rope were a trolley-wire, and one could sit
comfortably in a spacious cab while speeding over the water. I should
think that would be exhilarating enough. Just imagine how fine it would
be on a stormy day to sit looking out of your cab-window far above the
surface of the raging and impotent sea, skipping along at electric
speed, and daring the waves to do their worst--that would be bliss."
"And so practical," growled the Bibliomaniac.
"Bliss rarely is practical," said the Idiot. "Bliss is a sort of mugwump
blessing--too full of the ideal and too barren in practicability."
"Well," said Mr. Whitechoker. "I don't know why we should say that
trolley-cars between New York and London never can be. If we had told
our grandfathers a hundred years ago that a cable for the transmission
of news could be laid under the sea, they would have laughed us to
scorn."
"That's true," said the School-master. "But we know more than our
grandfathers did."
"Well, rather," interrupted the Idiot. "My great-grandfather, who died
in 1799, had never even heard of Andrew Jackson, and if you had asked
him what he thought of Darwin, he'd have thought you were guying him."
"Respect for age, sir," retorted Mr. Pedagog, "restrains me from
characterizing your great-grandfather, if, as you intimate, he knew less
than you do. However, apart from the comparative lack of knowledge in
the Idiot's family, Mr. Whitechoker, you must remember that with the
advance of the centuries we have ourselves developed a certain amount of
brains--enough, at least, to understand that there is a limit even to
the possibilities of electricity. Now, when you say that just because
an Atlantic cable would have been regarded as an object of derision in
the eighteenth century, we should not deride one who suggests the
possibility of a marine trolley-road between London and New York in the
twentieth century, it appears to me that you are talking--er--talking--I
don't like to say nonsense to one of your cloth, but--"
"Through his hat is the idiom you are trying to recall, I think, Mr.
Pedagog," said the Idiot. "Mr. Whitechoker is talking through his hat is
what you mean to say?"
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Idiot," said the School-master; "but when I find
that I need your assistance in framing my conversation, I shall--er--I
shall give up talking. I mean to say that I do not think Mr. Whitechoker
can justify his conclusions, and talks without having given the subject
concerning which he has spoken due reflection. The cable runs along the
solid foundation of the bed of the sea. It is a simple matter,
comparatively, but a trolley-wire stretched across the ocean by the
simplest rules of gravitation could not be made to stay up."
"No doubt you are correct," said Mr. Whitechoker, meekly. "I did not
mean that I expected ever to see a trolley-road across the sea, but I
did mean to say that man has made such wonderful advances in the past
hundred years that we cannot really state the limit of his
possibilities. It is manifest that no one to-day can devise a plan by
means of which such a wire could be carried, but--"
"I fear you gentlemen would starve as inventors," said the Idiot.
"What's the matter with balloons?"
"Balloons for what?" retorted Mr. Pedagog.
"For holding up the trolley-wires," replied the Idiot. "It is perfectly
feasible. Fasten the ends of your wire in London and New York, and from
coast to coast station two lines of sufficient strength to keep the wire
raised as far above the level of the sea as you require. That's simple
enough."
"And what, pray, in this frenzy of the elements, this raging storm of
which you have spoken," said Mr. Pedagog, impatiently--"what would then
keep your balloons from blowing away?"
"The trolley-wire, of course," said the Idiot. Mr. Pedagog lapsed into a
hopelessly wrathful silence for a moment, and then he said:
"Well, I sincerely hope your plan is adopted, and that the promoters
will make you superintendent, with an office in the mid-ocean balloon."
"Thanks for your good wishes, Mr. Pedagog," the Idiot answered. "If they
are realized I shall remember them, and show my gratitude to you by
using my influence to have you put in charge of the gas service.
Meantime, however, it seems to me that our ocean steamships could be
developed along logical lines so that the trip from New York to
Liverpool could be made in a very much shorter period of time than is
now required."
"We are getting back to the common-sense again," said the Bibliomaniac.
"That is a proposition to which I agree. Ten years ago eight days was
considered a good trip. With the development of the twin-screw steamer
the time has been reduced to approximately six days."
"Or a saving, really, of two days because of the extra screw," said the
Idiot.
"Precisely," observed the Bibliomaniac.
"So that, provided there are extra screws enough, there isn't any reason
why the trip should not be made in two or three hours."
"Ah--what was that?" said the Bibliomaniac. "I don't exactly follow
you."
"One extra screw, you say, has saved two days?"
"Yes."
"Then two extra screws would save four days, three would save six days,
and five extra screws would send the boat over in approximately no
time," said the Idiot. "So, if it takes a man two hours to succumb to
sea-sickness, a boat going over in less than that time would eliminate
sea-sickness; more people would go; boats could run every hour, and Mr.
Whitechoker could have a European trip every week without deserting his
congregation."
"Inestimable boon!" cried Mr. Whitechoker, with a laugh.
"Wouldn't it be!" said the Idiot. "Unless I change my mind, I think I
shall stay in this country until this style of greyhound is perfected.
Then, gentlemen, I shall tear myself away from you, and seek knowledge
in foreign pastures."
"Well, I am sure," said Mr. Pedagog--"I am sure that we all hope you
will change your mind."
"Then you want me to go abroad?" said the Idiot.
"No," said Mr. Pedagog. "No--not so much that as that we feel if you
were to change your mind the change could not fail to be for the better.
A mind like yours ought to be changed."
"Well, I don't know," said the Idiot. "I suppose it would be a good
thing if I broke it up into smaller denominations, but I've had it so
long that I have become attached to it; but there is one thing about it,
there is plenty of it, so that in case any of you gentlemen find your
own insufficient I shall be only too happy to give you a piece of it
without charge. Meanwhile, if Mrs. Pedagog will kindly let me have my
bill for last week, I'll be obliged."
"It won't be ready until to-morrow, Mr. Idiot," said the landlady, in
surprise.
"I'm sorry," said the Idiot, rising. "My scribbling-paper has run out. I
wanted to put in this morning writing a poem on the back of it."
"A poem? What about?" said Mr. Pedagog, with an irritating chuckle.
"It was to be a triolet on Omniscience," said the Idiot. "And, strange
to say, sir, you were to be the hero, if by any possibility I could
squeeze you into a French form."
IV
The Incorporation of the Idiot
"How is business these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Poet, as the one
addressed laid down the morning paper with a careworn expression on his
face. "Good, I hope?"
"Fair, only," replied the Idiot. "My honored employer was quite blue
about things yesterday, and if I hadn't staved him off I think he'd have
proposed swapping places with me. He has said quite often of late that I
had the best of it, because all I had to earn was my salary, whereas he
had to earn my salary and his own living besides. I offered to give him
ten per cent. of my salary for ten per cent. of his living, but he said
he guessed he wouldn't, adding that I seemed to be as great an Idiot as
ever."
"I fancy he was right there," said Mr. Pedagog. "I should really like to
know how a man of your peculiar mental construction can be of the
slightest practical value to a banker. I ask the question in all
kindness, too, meaning to cast no reflections whatever upon either you
or your employer. You are a roaring success in your own line, which is
all any one could ask of you."
"There's hominy for you, as the darky said to the hotel guest," returned
the Idiot. "Any person who says that discord exists at this table
doesn't know what he is talking about. Even the oil and the vinegar mix
in the caster--that is, I judge they do from the oleaginous appearance
of the vinegar. But I am very useful to my employer, Mr. Pedagog. He
says frequently that he wouldn't know what not to do if it were not for
me."
"Aren't you losing control of your tongue?" queried the Bibliomaniac,
looking at the Idiot in wonderment. "Don't you mean that he says he
wouldn't know what to do if it were not for you?"
"No, I don't," said the Idiot. "I never lose control of my tongue. I
meant exactly what I said. Mr. Barlow told me, in so many words, that if
it were not for me he wouldn't know what _not_ to do. He calls me his
Back Action Patent Reversible Counsellor. If he is puzzled over an
intricate point he sends for me and says: 'Such and such a thing being
the case, Mr. Idiot, what would you do? Don't think about it, but tell
me on impulse. Your thoughtless opinions are worth more to me than I can
tell you.' So I tell him on impulse just what I should do, whereupon he
does the other thing, and comes out ahead in nine cases out of ten."
"And you confess it, eh?" said the Doctor, with a curve on his lip.
"I certainly do," said the Idiot. "The world must take me for what I am.
I'm not going to be one thing for myself, and build up a fictitious
Idiot for the world. The world calls you men of pretence conceited,
whereas, by pretending to be something that you are not, you give to the
world what I should call convincing evidence that you are not at all
conceited, but rather somewhat ashamed of what you know yourselves to
be. Now, I rather believe in conceit--real honest pride in yourself as
you know yourself to be. I am an Idiot, and it is my ambition to be a
perfect Idiot. If I had been born a jackass, I should have endeavored to
be a perfect jackass."
"You'd have found it easy," said Mr. Pedagog, dryly.
"Would I?" said the Idiot. "I'll have to take your word for it, sir, for
_I_ have never been a jackass, and so cannot form an opinion on the
subject."
"Pride goeth before a fall," said Mr. Whitechoker, seeing a chance to
work in a moral reflection.
"Exactly," said the Idiot. "Wherefore I admire pride. It is a
danger-signal that enables man to avoid the fall. If Adam had had any
pride he'd never have fallen--but speaking about my controlling my
tongue, it is not entirely out of the range of possibilities that I
shall lose control of myself."
"I expected that, sooner or later," said the Doctor. "Is it to be
Bloomingdale or a private mad-house you are going to?"
"Neither," replied the Idiot, calmly. "I shall stay here. For, as the
poet says,
"''Tis best to bear the ills we hov
Nor fly to those we know not of.'"
"Ho!" jeered the Poet. "I must confess, my dear Idiot, that I do not
think you are a success in quotation. Hamlet spoke those lines
differently."
"Shakespeare's Hamlet did. My little personal Shakespeare makes his
Hamlet an entirely different, less stilted sort of person," said the
Idiot.
"You have a personal Shakespeare, have you?" queried the Bibliomaniac.
"Of course I have," the Idiot answered. "Haven't you?"
"I have not," said the Bibliomaniac, shortly.
"Well, I'm sorry for you then," sighed the Idiot, putting a fried potato
in his mouth. "Very sorry. I wouldn't give a cent for another man's
ideals. I want my own ideals, and I have my own ideal of Shakespeare. In
fancy, Shakespeare and I have roamed over the fields of Warwickshire
together, and I've had more fun imagining the kind of things he and I
would have said to each other than I ever got out of his published
plays, few of which have escaped the ungentle hands of the devastators."
"You mean commentators, I imagine," said Mr. Pedagog.
"I do," said the Idiot. "It's all the same, whether you call them
commentors or devastators. The result is the same. New editions of
Shakespeare are issued every year, and people buy them to see not what
Shakespeare has written, but what new quip some opinionated devastator
has tried to fasten on his memory. In a hundred years from now the works
of Shakespeare will differ as much from what they are to-day as to-day's
versions differ from what they were when Shakespeare wrote them. It's
mighty discouraging to one like myself who would like to write works."
"You are convicted out of your own mouth," said the Bibliomaniac. "A
moment since you wasted your pity on me because I didn't mutilate
Shakespeare so as to make him my own, and now you attack the
commentators for doing precisely the same thing. They're as much
entitled to their opinions as you are to yours."
"Did you ever learn to draw parallels when you were in school?" asked
the Idiot.
"I did, and I think I've made a perfect parallel in this case. You
attack people in one breath for what you commiserate me for not doing in
another," said the Bibliomaniac.
"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "I don't object to the commentators for
commentating, but I do object to their putting out their versions of
Shakespeare as Shakespeare. I might as well have my edition published.
It certainly would be popular, especially where, in 'Julius Cæsar,' I
introduce five Cassiuses and have them all fall on their swords
together with military precision, like a 'Florodora' sextette, for
instance."
"Well, I hope you'll never print such an atrocity as that," cried the
Bibliomaniac, hotly. "If there's one thing in literature without excuse
and utterly contemptible it is the comic version, the parody of a
masterpiece."
"You need have no fear on that score," returned the Idiot. "I haven't
time to rewrite Shakespeare, and, since I try never to stop short of
absolute completeness, I shall not embark on the enterprise. If I do,
however, I shall not do as the commentators do, and put on my title-page
'Shakespeare. Edited by Willie Wilkins,' but 'Shakespeare As He Might
Have Been, Had His Plays Been Written By An Idiot.'"
"I have no doubt that you could do great work with 'Hamlet,'" observed
the Poet.
"I think so myself," said the Idiot. "But I shall never write 'Hamlet.'
I don't want to have my fair fame exposed to the merciless hands of the
devastators."
"I shall never cease to regret," said Mr. Pedagog, after a moment's
thought, "that you are so timid. I should very much like to see 'The
Works of the Idiot.' I admit that my desire is more or less a morbid
one. It is quite on a plane with the feeling that prompts me to wish to
see that unfortunate man on the Bowery who exhibits his forehead, which
is sixteen inches high, beginning with his eyebrows, for a dime. The
strange, the bizarre in nature, has always interested me. The more
unnatural the nature, the more I gloat upon it. From that point of view
I do most earnestly hope that when you are inspired with a work you will
let me at least see it."
"Very well," answered the Idiot. "I shall put your name down as a
subscriber to the _Idiot Monthly Magazine_, which some of my friends
contemplate publishing. That is what I mean when I say I may shortly
lose control of myself. These friends of mine profess to have been so
impressed by my dicta that they have asked me if I would allow myself to
be incorporated into a stock company, the object of which should be to
transform my personality into printed pages. Hardly a day goes by but I
devote a portion of my time to a poem in which the thought is
conspicuous either by its absence or its presence. My schemes for the
amelioration of the condition of the civilized are notorious among those
who know me; my views on current topics are eagerly sought for; my
business instinct, as I have already told you, is invaluable to my
employer, and my fiction is unsurpassed in its fictitiousness. What more
is needed for a magazine? You have the poetry, the philanthropy, the
man of to-day, the fictitiousness, and the business instinct necessary
for the successful modern magazine all concentrated in one person. Why
not publish that person, say my friends, and I, feeling as I do that no
man has a right to the selfish enjoyment of the great gifts nature has
bestowed upon him, of course can only agree. I am to be incorporated
with a capital stock of five hundred thousand dollars. One hundred
thousand dollars' worth of myself I am to be permitted to retain; the
rest my friends will subscribe for at fifty cents on the dollar. If any
of you want shares in the enterprise I have no doubt you can be
accommodated."
"I'm obliged to you for the opportunity," said the Doctor. "But I have
to be very careful about things I take stock in, and in general I
regard you as a thing in which I should prefer not to take stock."
"And I," observed Mr. Pedagog--"I have never up to this time taken any
stock in you, and I make it a rule to be guided in life by precedent.
Therefore I must be counted out."
"I'll wait until you are listed at the Stock Exchange," put in the
Bibliomaniac, "while thanking you just the same for the chance."
"You can put me down for one share, to be paid for in poetry," said the
Poet, with a wink at the Idiot.
"You'll never make good," said the Idiot, slyly.
"And I," said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes, "shall
be most happy to take five shares to be paid for in advice and
high-balls. Moreover, if your company needs good-will to establish its
enterprise, you may count upon me for unlimited credit."
"Oh, as for that," said the Idiot, "I have plenty of good-will. Even
Mr. Pedagog supplies me with more of it than I deserve, though by no
means with all that I desire."
"That good-will is yours as an individual, Mr. Idiot," returned the
School-master. "As a corporation, however, I cannot permit you to trade
upon me even for that. Your value is, in my eyes, entirely too
fluctuating."
"And it is in the fluctuating stock that the great fortunes are made,
Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "As an individual I appreciate your
good-will. As a corporation I am soulless, without emotions, and so
cherish no disappointments over your refusal. I think if the scheme goes
through it will be successful, and I fully expect to see the day when
Idiot Preferred will be selling as high, if not higher, than Steel, and
leaving utterly behind any other industrial that ever was known, copper
or rope."
"If, like the railways, you could issue betterment bonds you might do
very well," said the Doctor. "I think ten million dollars spent in
bettering you might bring you up to par."
"Or a consolidated first-mortgage bond," remarked the Bibliomaniac.
"Consolidate the Idiot with a man like Chamberlain or the German
Emperor, and issue a five-million-dollar mortgage on the result, and you
might find people who'd take those bonds at seventy-five."
"You might if they were a dollar bond printed on cartridge-paper," said
Mr. Pedagog. "Then purchasers could paper their walls with them."
"Rail on," said the Idiot. "I can stand it. When I begin paying
quarterly dividends at a ten-per-cent. rate you'll wish you had come
in."
"I don't know about that," said Mr. Pedagog. "It would entirely
depend."
"On what?" queried the Idiot, unwarily.
"On whether that ten per cent. was declared upon your own estimate of
your value or upon ours. On yours it would be fabulous; on ours--oh,
well, what is the use of saying anything more about it. We are not going
in it, and that's an end to it."
"Well, I'll go in it if you change your scheme," said the Doctor. "If
instead of an Idiot Publishing Company you will try to float yourself as
a Consolidated Gas Company you may count on me to take a controlling
interest."
"I will submit the proposition to my friends," said the Idiot, calmly.
"It would be something to turn out an honest gas company, which I
should, of course, try to be, but I am afraid the public will not accept
it. There is little demand for laughing-gas, and, besides, they would
fear to intrust you with a controlling interest for fear that you might
blow the product out and the bills up--coining millions by mere
inflation. They've heard of you, Doctor, and they know that is the sort
of thing you'd be likely to do."
V
University Extension
"I was surprised and gratified last evening, Mr. Idiot," observed the
School-master as breakfast was served, "to see you at the University
Extension Lecture. I did not know that you admitted the necessity of
further instruction in any matter pertaining to human knowledge."
"I don't know that I do admit the necessity," returned the Idiot.
"Sometimes when I take an inventory of the contents of my mind it seems
to me that about everything I need is there."
"There you go again!" said the Bibliomaniac. "Why do you persist in your
refusal to allow any one to get a favorable impression concerning you?
Mr. Pedagog unbends sufficiently to tell you that you have at last done
something which he can commend, and you greet him with an Idiotism which
is practically a rebuff."
"Very well said," observed the School-master, with an acquiescent nod.
"I came to this table this morning encouraged to believe that this young
man was beginning to see the error of his ways, and I must confess to a
great enough interest in him to say that I was pleased at that
encouragement. I saw him at a lecture on literature at the Lyceum Hall
last evening, and he appeared to be interested, and yet this morning he
seems to show that he is utterly incorrigible. May I ask, sir, why you
attended that lecture if, as you say, your mind is already sufficiently
well furnished?"
"Certainly you may ask that question," replied the Idiot. "I went to
that lecture to have my impressions confirmed, that is all. I have
certain well-defined notions concerning University Extension, and I
wished to see if they were correct. I found that they were."
"The lecture was not upon University Extension, but upon Romanticism,
and it was a most able discourse," retorted Mr. Pedagog.
"Very likely," said the Idiot. "I did not hear it. I did not want to
hear it. I have my own ideas concerning Romanticism, which do not need
confirmation or correction. I have already confirmed and corrected them.
I went to see the audience and not to hear Professor Peterkin exploding
theories."
"It is a pity the chair you occupied was wasted upon you," snapped Mr.
Pedagog.
"I agree with you," said the Idiot. "I could have got a much better view
of the audience if I had been permitted to sit on the stage, but
Professor Peterkin needed all that for his gestures. However, I saw
enough from where I sat to confirm my impression that University
Extension is not so much of a public benefit as a social fad. There was
hardly a soul in the audience who could not have got all that Professor
Peterkin had to tell him out of his books; there was hardly a soul in
the audience who could not have afforded to pay one dollar at least for
the seat he occupied; there was not a soul in the audience who had paid
more than ten cents for his seat or her seat, and those for whose
benefit the lecture was presumably given, the ten-cent people, were
crowded out. The lectures themselves are not instructive--Professor
Peterkin's particularly--except in so far as it is instructive to hear
what Professor Peterkin thinks on this or that subject, and his desire
to be original forces him to cook up views which no one else ever held,
with the result that what he says is most interesting and proper to be
presented to the attention of a discriminating audience, but not proper
to be presented to an audience that is supposed to come there to receive
instruction."
"You have just said that you did not listen to the lecture. How do you
know that what you say is true?" put in the Bibliomaniac.
"I know Professor Peterkin," said the Idiot.
"Does he know you?" sneered Mr. Pedagog.
"I don't think he would remember me if you should speak my name in his
presence," observed the Idiot, calmly. "But that is easily accounted
for. The Professor never remembers anybody but himself."
"Well, I admit," said Mr. Pedagog, "that the Professor's lectures were
rather advanced for the comprehension of a person like the Idiot,
nevertheless it was an enjoyable occasion, and I doubt if the
fulminations of our friend here will avail against University
Extension."
"You speak a sad truth," said the Idiot. "Social fads are impervious to
fulmination, as Solomon might have said had he thought of it. As long as
a thing is a social fad it will thrive, and, on the whole, perhaps it
ought to thrive. Anything which gives society something to think about
has its value, and the mere fact that it makes society _think_ is proof
of that value."
"We seem to be in a philosophic frame of mind this morning," said Mr.
Whitechoker.
"We are," returned the Idiot. "That's one thing about University
Extension. It makes us philosophic. It has made a stoic of my dear old
daddy."
"Oh yes!" cried Mr. Pedagog. "You _have_ a father, haven't you? I had
forgotten that."
"Wherein," said the Idiot, "we differ. _I_ haven't forgotten that I have
one, and, by-the-way, it is from him that I first heard of University
Extension. He lives in a small manufacturing town not many miles from
here, and is distinguished in the town because, without being stingy, he
lives within his means. He has a way of paying his grocer's bills which
makes of him a marked man. He hasn't much more money than he needs, but
when the University Extension movement reached the town he was
interested. The prime movers in the enterprise went to him and asked him
if he wouldn't help it along, dilating upon the benefits which would
accrue to those whose education stopped short with graduation from the
high-schools. It was most plausible. The notion that for ten cents a
lecture the working masses could learn something about art, history,
and letters, could gather in something about the sciences, and all that,
appealed to him, and while he could afford it much more ill than the
smart people, the four hundred of the town, he chipped in. He paid fifty
dollars and was made an honorary manager. He was proud enough of it,
too, and he wrote a long, enthusiastic letter to me about it. It was a
great thing, and he hoped the State, which had been appealed to to help
the movement along, would take a hand in it. 'If we educate the masses
to understand and to appreciate the artistic, the beautiful,' he wrote,
'we need have little fear for the future. Ignorance is the greatest foe
we have to contend against in our national development, and it is the
only thing that can overthrow a nation such as ours is.' And then what
happened? Professor Peterkin came along and delivered ten or a dozen
lectures. The masses went once or twice and found the platform occupied
by a man who talked to them about Romanticism and Realism; who told them
that Dickens was trash; who exalted Tolstoi and Ibsen; but who never let
them into the secret of what Romanticism was, and who kept them equally
in the dark as to the significance of Realism. They also found the best
seats in the lecture-hall occupied by the smart set in full
evening-dress, who talked almost as much and as loudly as did Professor
Peterkin. The masses did not even learn manners at Professor Peterkin's
first and second lectures, and the third and fourth found them
conspicuous by their absence. All they learned was that they were
ignorant, and that other people were better than they, and what my
father learned was that he had subscribed fifty dollars to promote a
series of social functions for the diversion of the four hundred and the
aggrandizement of Professor Peterkin. He started in for what might be
called Romanticism, and he got a Realism that he did not like in less
time than it takes to tell of it, and to-day in that town University
Extension is such a fad that when, some weeks ago, the swell club of
that place talked of appointing Thursday evening as its club night, it
was found to be impossible, for the reason that it might interfere with
the attendance upon the University Extension lectures. That, Mr.
Pedagog, is a matter of history and can be proven, and last night's
audience confirmed the impression which I had formed from what my father
had told me. Professor Peterkin's lectures are interesting to you, a
school-master, but they are pure Greek to me, who would like to know
more about letters. I would gather more instruction from your table-talk
in an hour than I could from Professor Peterkin's whole course."
"You flatter me," said Mr. Pedagog.
"No," returned the Idiot. "If you knew how little the ignorant gain from
Peterkin you would not necessarily call it flattery if one should say he
learned more from your conversation over a griddle-cake."
"You misconceive the whole situation, I think, nevertheless," said Mr.
Whitechoker. "As I understand it, supplementary lectures, and
examinations based on them, are held after the lectures, when the
practical instruction is given with great thoroughness."
"I'm glad you spoke of that," said the Idiot. "I had forgotten that part
of it. Professor Peterkin received pay for his lectures, which dealt in
theories only; plain Mr. Barton, who delivered the supplementary
lectures, got nothing. Professor Peterkin taught nothing, but he
represented University Extension. Plain Mr. Barton did the work and
represented nothing. Both reached society. Neither reached the masses.
In my native town plain Mr. Barton's supplementary lectures, which were
simply an effort to unravel the Peterkin complications, were attended by
the same people in smaller crowds--people of social standing who were
curious enough to devote an hour a week to an endeavor to find out the
meaning of what Professor Peterkin had told them at the function the
week before. The students examined were mostly ladies, and I happen to
know that in a large proportion they were ladies whose husbands could
have afforded to pay Professor Peterkin his salary ten times over as a
private tutor."
"As I look at it," said Mr. Pedagog, gravely, "it does not make much
difference to whom your instruction is given, so long as it instructs.
What if these lectures do interest those who are comparatively well
off? Your society woman may be as much in need of an extended education
as your factory girl. The University Extension idea is to convey
knowledge to people who would not otherwise get it. It simply sets out
to improve minds. If the social mind needs improvement, why not improve
it? Why condemn a system because it does not discriminate in the minds
selected for improvement?"
"I don't condemn a system which sets out to improve minds irrespective
of conditions," replied the Idiot. "But I should most assuredly condemn
a man, or a set of men, who induced me to subscribe to a bread fund for
the poor and who afterwards expended that money on cream-cakes for the
Czar of Russia. The fact that the Czar of Russia wanted the cream-cakes
and was willing to accept them would not affect my feelings in the
matter, though I have no doubt the people in charge of the fund would
find themselves far more conspicuous for having departed from the
original idea. Some of them might be knighted for it if the Czar
happened to be passionately fond of cream-cakes."
"Then, having attacked this system, what would you have? Would you have
University Extension stop?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"Not at all," returned the Idiot. "Anything which can educate society is
a good thing, but I should change the name of it from University
Extension to Social Expansion, and I should compel those whose minds
were broadened by it to pay the bills."
"But as yet you have failed to hit the nail on the head," persisted the
Bibliomaniac. "The masses can attend these lectures if they wish to, and
on your own statement they don't. You don't seem to consider that point,
or, if you do, you don't meet it."
"I don't think it necessary to meet it," said the Idiot. "Though I will
say that if you were one of the masses--a girl, say, with one dress,
threadbare, poor, and ill-fitting, and possessed of a natural bit of
pride--you would find little pleasure in attending a lecture your
previous education does not permit of your comprehending, and sitting
through an evening with a lot of finely dressed, smart folk, with their
backs turned towards you. The plebeians have _some_ pride, my dear
Bibliomaniac, and they are decidedly averse to mixing with the swells.
They would like to be educated, but they don't care to be snubbed for
the privilege of being mystified by a man like Professor Peterkin, even
for so small a sum as ten cents an evening."
VI
Social Expansion
"We were talking about University Extension the other day, Mr. Pedagog,"
said the Idiot, as the School-master folded up the newspaper and put it
in his pocket, "and I, as you remember, suggested that it might better
be called Social Expansion."
"Did you?" said Mr. Pedagog, coldly. "I don't remember much about it. I
rarely make a note of anything you may say."
"Well, I did suggest the change of name, whether your memory is
retentive or not, and I have been thinking the matter over a good deal
since, and I think I've got hold of an idea," returned the Idiot.
"In that case," said the Bibliomaniac, "we would better lock the door.
If you have really got hold of an idea you should be very careful not to
let it get away from you."
"No danger of that," said the Idiot, with a smile. "I have it securely
locked up here," tapping his forehead.
"It must be lonesome," said Mr. Pedagog.
"And rather uncomfortable--if it is a real idea," observed the Doctor.
"An idea in the Idiot's mind must feel somewhat as a tall, stout Irish
maid feels when she goes to her bedroom in one of those Harlem
flat-houses."
"You men are losing a great opportunity," said the Idiot, with a
scornful glance at the three professional gentlemen. "The idea of your
following the professions of pedagogy, medicine, and literature, when
the three of you combined could make a fortune as an incarnate comic
paper. I don't see why you don't make a combination like those German
bands that play on the street corners, and go about from door to door,
and crack your jokes just as they crack their music. I am sure you'd
take, particularly in front of barber-shops."
"It would be hard on the comic papers," said the Poet, who was getting a
little unpopular with his fellow-boarders because of his tendency,
recently developed, to take the Idiot's part in the breakfast-table
discussions. "They might be so successful that the barber-shops, instead
of taking the comic papers for their customers to read, would employ one
or more of them to sit in the middle of the room and crack jokes aloud."
"We couldn't rival the comic papers though," said the Doctor, wishing to
save his dignity by taking the bull by the horns. "We might do the
jokes well enough, but the comic papers are chiefly pictorial."
"You'd be pictorial enough," said the Idiot. "Wasn't it you, Mr.
Pedagog, that said the Doctor here looked like one of Cruikshank's
physicians, or as if he had stepped out of Dickens's pages, or something
like it?"
"I never said anything of the sort!" cried the School-master,
wrathfully; "and you know I didn't."
"Who was it said that?" asked the Idiot, innocently, looking about the
table. "It couldn't have been Mr. Whitechoker, and I know it wasn't the
Poet or my Genial Friend who occasionally imbibes. Mr. Pedagog denies
it; I didn't say it; Mrs. Pedagog wouldn't say it. That leaves only two
of us--the Bibliomaniac and the Doctor himself. I don't think the Doctor
would make a personal remark of that kind, and--well, there is but one
conclusion. Mr. Bibliomaniac, I am surprised."
"What?" roared the Bibliomaniac, glaring at the Idiot. "Do you mean to
fasten the impertinence on me?"
"Far from it," returned the Idiot, meekly. "Very far from it. It is
fate, sir, that has done that--the circumstantial evidence against you
is strong; but then, mercifully enough, circumstantial evidence is not
permitted to hang a man."
"Now see here, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac, firmly and
impressively, "I want you to distinctly understand that I am not going
to have you put words into my mouth that I never uttered. I--"
"Pray, don't attack me," said the Idiot. "I haven't made any charge
against you. I only asked who could have said that the Doctor looked
like a creation of Cruikshank. I couldn't have said it, because I don't
think it. Mr. Pedagog denies it. In fact, every one here has a clear
case of innocence excepting yourself, and I don't believe _you_ said
it, only the chain of circumstance--"
"Oh, hang your chain of circumstance!" interrupted the Bibliomaniac.
"It is hung," said the Idiot, "and it appears to make you very
uncomfortable. However, as I was saying, I think I have got hold of an
idea involving a truly philanthropic and by no means selfish scheme of
Social Expansion."
"Heigho!" sighed Mr. Pedagog. "I sometimes think that if I had not the
honor to be the husband of our landlady I'd move away from here. Your
views, sir, are undermining my constitution."
"You only think so, Mr. Pedagog," replied the Idiot. "You are simply
going through a process of intellectual reconstruction at my hands. You
feel exactly as a man feels who has been shut up in the dark for years
and suddenly finds himself in a flood of sunlight. I am doing with you
as an individual what I would have society do for mankind at large--in
other words, while I am working for individual expansion upon the raw
material I find here, I would have society buckle down to the
enlargement of itself by the improvement of those outside of itself."
"If you swim in water as well as you do in verbiage," said the
Bibliomaniac, "you must be able to go three or four strokes without
sinking."
"Oh, as for that, I can swim like a duck," said the Idiot. "You can't
sink me."
"I fancied not," observed Mr. Pedagog, with a smile at his own joke.
"You are so light I wonder, indeed, that you don't rise up into space,
anyhow."
"What a delightful condition of affairs that suggestion opens up!" said
the Idiot, turning to the Poet. "If I were you I'd make a poem on that.
Something like this, for instance:
"I am so very, very light
That gravitation curbs not me.
I rise up through the atmosphere
Till all the world I plainly see.
"I dance about among the clouds,
An airy, happy, human kite.
The breezes toss me here and there,
To my exceeding great delight.
"And when I would return to sup,
To breakfast, or perchance to dine,
I haul myself once more to earth
By tugging on a piece of twine."
Mr. Pedagog grinned broadly at this.
"You aren't entirely without your good points," he said. "If we ever
accept your comic-paper idea we'll have to rely on you for the nonsense
poetry."
"Thank you," said the Idiot. "I'll help. If I had a man like you to give
me the suggestions I could make a fortune out of poetry. The only
trouble is I have to quarrel with you before I can get you to give me a
suggestion, and I despise bickering."
"So do I," returned Mr. Pedagog. "Let's give up bickering and turn our
attention to--er--Social Extension, is it?"
"Yes--or Social Expansion," said the Idiot. "Some years ago the world
was startled to hear that in the city of New York there were not more
than four hundred people who were entitled to social position, and, as I
understand it, as time has progressed the number has still further
diminished. Last year the number was only one hundred and fifty, and, as
I read the social news of to-day, not more than twenty-five people are
now beyond all question in the swim. At dinners, balls, functions of all
sorts, you read the names of these same twenty-five over and over again
as having been present. Apparently no others attended--or, if they did,
they were not so indisputably entitled to be present that their names
could be printed in the published accounts. Now all of this shows that
society is dying out, and that if things keep on as they are now going
it will not be many years before we shall become a people without
society, a nation of plebeians."
"Your statement so far is lucid and logical," said Mr. Pedagog, who did
not admire society--so called--and who did not object to the goring of
an ox in which he was not personally interested.
"Well, why is this social contraction going on?" asked the Idiot.
"Clearly because Social Expansion is not an accepted fact. If it were,
society would grow. Why does it not grow? Why are its ranks not
augmented? There is raw material enough. You would like to get into the
swim; so would I. But we don't know how. We read books of etiquette,
but they are far from being complete. I think I make no mistake when I
say they are utterly valueless. They tell us no more than the funny
journal tells us when it says:
"'Never eat pease with a spoon;
Never eat pie with a knife;
Never put salt on a prune;
Never throw crumbs at your wife.'"
They tell most of us what we all knew before. They tell us not to wear
our hats in the house; they tell us all the obvious things, but the
subtleties of how to get into society they do not tell us. The comic
papers give us some idea of how to behave in society. We know from
reading the funny papers that a really swell young man always leans
against a mantel-piece when he is calling; that the swell girl sits on a
comfortable divan with her feet on a tiger-skin rug, and they converse
in epigram. Sometimes the epigram is positively rude; when it is not
rude it is so dull that no one wonders that the tiger's head on the rug
represents the tiger as yawning. But, while this is instructive, it
teaches us how to behave on special occasions only. You or I might call
upon a young woman who did not sit on a divan, who had no tiger-skin rug
to put her feet on, and whose parlor had a mantel-piece against which we
could not lean comfortably. What are we to do then? As far as they go,
the funny papers are excellent, but they don't go far enough. They give
us attractive pictures of fashionable dinners, but it is always of the
dinner after the game course. Some of us would like to know how society
behaves while the soup is being served. We know that after the game
course society girls reach across the table and clink wine-glasses with
young men, but we do not know what they do before they get to the clink
stage. Nowhere is this information given. Etiquette books are silent on
the subject, and though I have sought everywhere for information, I do
not know to this day how many salted almonds one may consume at dinner
without embarrassing one's hostess. Now, if I can't find out, the
million can't find out. Wherefore, instead of shutting themselves
selfishly up and, by so doing, forcing society finally into dissolution,
why cannot some of these people who know what is what give
object-lessons to the million; educate them in _savoir-faire_?
"Last summer there was a play put on at one of our theatres in which
there was a scene at a race-track. At one side was a tally-ho coach. For
the first week the coach was an utterly valueless accessory, because the
people on it were the ordinary supers in the employ of the theatre. They
did not know how to behave on a coach, and nobody was interested. The
management were suddenly seized with a bright idea. They invited several
swell young men who knew how things were done on coaches to come and do
these things on their coach. The young men came and imparted a realism
to the scene that made that coach the centre of attraction. People who
went to that play departed educated in coach etiquette. Now there lies
my scheme in a nutshell. If these twenty-five, the Old Guard of society,
which dines but never surrenders, will give once a week a social
function in some place like Madison Square Garden, to which the million
may go merely as spectators, not as participators, is there any doubt
that they would fail to be instructed? The Garden will seat eight or ten
thousand people. Suppose, for an instance, that a dozen of your best
exponents of what is what were to give a dinner in the middle of the
arena, with ten thousand people looking on. Do you mean to say that of
all that vast audience no one would learn thereby how to behave at a
dinner?"
"It is a great scheme," said the Doctor.
"It is!" said the Idiot, "and I venture to say that a course of, say,
twelve social functions given in that way would prove so popular that
the Garden would turn away every night twice as many people as it could
accommodate."
"It would be instructive, no doubt," said the Bibliomaniac; "but how
would it expand society? Would you have examinations?"
"Most assuredly," said the Idiot. "At the end of the season I should
have a rigid examination of all who chose to apply. I would make them
dine in the presence of a committee of expert diners, I would have them
pass a searching examination in the Art of Wearing a Dress Suit, in the
Science of Entering a Drawing-room, in the Art of Behavior at Afternoon
Teas, and all the men who applied should also be compelled to pass a
physical examination as an assurance that they were equal to the task of
getting an ice for a young lady at a ball."
"Society would get to be too inclusive and would cease to be exclusive,"
suggested Mr. Whitechoker.
"I think not," said the Idiot. "I should not give a man or a woman the
degree of B.S. unless he or she had passed an examination of one hundred
per cent."
"B.S.?" queried Mr. Pedagog.
"Yes," returned the Idiot. "Bachelor of Society--a degree which, once
earned, should entitle one to recognition as a member of the upper ten
anywhere in Christendom."
"It is superb!" cried Mr. Pedagog, enthusiastically.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "At ten cents a function it would beat University
Extension out of sight, and, further, it would preserve society. If we
lose society we lose caste, and, worse than all, our funny men would
have to go out of business, for there would be no fads or Willieboys
left to ridicule."
VII
A Beggar's Hand-book
"Mr. Idiot," said the Poet one morning, as the waffles were served, "you
are an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a
fortune? The trouble with most methods of making money is that they
involve too much labor."
"I have thought of that," said the Idiot. "And yet the great fortunes
have been made in a way which involved very little labor, comparatively
speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry
that brings you in ten dollars than any of our great railroad magnates
have over a mile of railroad which has brought them in a million."
"Which simply proves that it is ideas that count rather than labor,"
said the Poet.
"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "If you put a hundred ideas into a
quatrain you will get less money for it than you would for a two-volume
epic in which you have possibly only half an idea. It isn't idea so much
as nerve that counts. The man who builds railroads doesn't advance any
particular idea, but he shows lots of nerve, and it is nerve that makes
wealth. I believe that if you literary men would show more nerve force
and spare the public the infliction of what you call your ideas, you
would make more money."
"How would you show nerve in writing?" queried the Bibliomaniac.
"If I knew I'd write and make my fortune," said the Idiot.
"Unfortunately, I don't know how one can show nerve in writing, unless
it be in taking hold of some particularly popular idiosyncrasy of
mankind and treating it so contemptuously that every one would want to
mob you. If you could get the public mad enough at you to want to mob
you they'd read everything you'd write, simply to nourish their wrath,
and you'd soon be cutting coupons for a living, and could then afford to
take up more ideas--coupon-cutters can afford theories. For my own part,
one reason why I do not myself take up literature for a profession is
that I have neither the nerve nor the coupons. I'd probably run along in
the rut like a majority of the writers of to-day, and wouldn't have the
grit to strike out in a new line of my own. Men say, and perhaps very
properly, this is the thing that has succeeded in the past. I'll do
this. Something else that appears alluring enough in the abstract has
never been done, and for that reason I won't do it. There have been
clever men before me, men clever enough to think of this something that
I fondly imagine is original, and they haven't done it. Doubtless they
refrained from doing it for good and sufficient reasons, and I am not
going to be fool enough to set my judgment up against theirs. In other
words, I lack the nerve to go ahead and write as I feel. I prefer to
study past successes, with the result that I am moderately successful
only. It's the same way in every line of business. Precedent guides in
all things, but where occasionally you find a man courageous enough to
cast precedent to the winds, one of two things happens. Either fortune
or ruin follows. Hence, the thing to do if you want to make a fortune is
to eliminate the possibility of ruin as far as may be. You cannot ruin a
man who has nothing. He is down on bed-rock, anyhow; so for a receipt
for fortune I should say, start a pauper, show your nerve, and you'll
make a pile, or you won't make a pile. If you make it you are fortunate.
If you fail to make it you are no more unfortunate than you were before
you started."
"For plausibility, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, "you are to me a
perfect wonder. I do not think that any one can deny, with confidence
born of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted
that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet
your conclusions are almost invariably utterly absurd, if not absolutely
grotesque. Here is a man who says, to make a fortune become a beggar!"
"Precisely," said the Idiot. "There is nothing like having a clean slate
to work on. If you are not a beggar you have something, and having
something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you
have everything to gain and nothing to lose, so you can plunge. You can
swim better in deep water than in the shallow."
"Well," said the Doctor, "enlighten us on this point. You may not know
how to show nerve as a writer--in fact, you confess that you don't. How
would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your
demands and degenerate into a common highwayman, or would you simply go
in for big profits, and ask passers-by for ten dollars instead of ten
cents?"
"He'd probably take a bag of dynamite into a millionaire's office and
threaten to blow him to pieces if he didn't give him a house and lot,"
sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That's cowardice, not nerve. If I went
into a millionaire's office and demanded a million--or a house and lot
even--armed with a bag full of newspapers, pretending it held dynamite,
it might be more like nerve; but my beggar would do nothing contrary to
the law. He'd simply be nervy, that's all--cheeky, perhaps you'd call
it. For instance, I believe that if I were to hire in the elevated cars
one of those advertising spaces above the windows, and were to place in
that space a placard saying that I was by nature too lazy to work, too
fond of life to starve, too poor to live, and too honest to steal, and
would be placed in affluence if every man and woman who saw that sign
would send me ten cents a week in two-cent postage-stamps for five weeks
running, I should receive enough money to enable me to live at the most
expensive hotel in town during that period. By living at that hotel and
paying my bills regularly I could get credit enough to set myself up in
business, and with credit there is practically no limit to the
possibilities of fortune. It is simply honest nerve that counts. The
beggar who asks you on the street for five cents to keep his family from
starving is rebuffed. You don't believe his story, and you know that
five cents wouldn't keep a family from starving very long. But the
fellow who accosts you frankly for a dime because he is thirsty, and
hasn't had a drink for two hours, in nine cases out of ten properly
selected ones will get a quarter for his nerve."
"You ought to write a _Manual for Beggars_," said the Bibliomaniac. "I
have no doubt that the Idiot Publishing Company would publish it."
"Yes," said Mr. Pedagog. "A sort of beggar's _Don't_, for instance. It
would be a benefit to all men, as well as a boon to the beggars. That
mendicancy is a profession to-day there is no denying, and anything
which could make of it a polite calling would be of inestimable value."
"I have had it in mind for some time," said the Idiot, blandly. "I
intended to call it _Mendicancy Made Easy_, or _the Beggar's Don't: With
Two Chapters on Etiquette for Tramps_."
"The chief trouble with such a book I should think," said the Poet,
"would be that your beggars and tramps could not afford to buy it."
"That wouldn't interfere with its circulation," returned the Idiot.
"It's a poor tramp who can't steal. Every suburban resident in creation
would buy a copy of the book out of sheer curiosity. I'd get my
royalties from them; the tramps could get the books by helping
themselves to the suburbanites' copies as they do to chickens,
fire-wood, and pies put out to cool. As for the beggars, I'd have it put
into their hands by the people they beg from. When a man comes up to a
wayfarer, for instance, and says, 'Excuse me, sir, but could you spare
a nickel to a hungry man?' I'd have the wayfarer say, 'Excuse _me_, sir,
but unfortunately I have left my nickels in my other vest; but here is a
copy of the Idiot's _Mendicancy Made Easy, or the Beggar's Don't_.'"
"And you think the beggar would read it, do you?" asked the
Bibliomaniac.
"I don't know whether he would or not. He'd probably either read it or
pawn it," the Idiot answered. "In either event he would be better off,
and I would have got my ten per cent. royalty on the book. After the
_Beggars' Manual_ I should continue my good work if I found the class
for whom it was written had benefited by my first effort. I should
compile as my contribution to the literature of mendicancy for the
following season what I should call _The Beggar's Élite Directory_. This
would enlarge my sphere a trifle. It would contain as complete lists as
could be obtained of persons who give to street beggars, with their
addresses, so that the beggars, instead of infesting the streets at
night might go to the houses of these people and collect their incomes
in a more business-like and less undignified fashion. Added to this
would be two lists, one for tramps, stating what families in the suburbs
kept dogs, what families gave, whether what they gave was digestible or
not, rounding up with a list of those who do not give, and who have
telephone connection with the police station. This would enable them to
avoid dogs and rebuffs, would save the tramp the time he expends on
futile efforts to find work he doesn't want, and as for the people who
have to keep the dogs to ward off the tramps, they, too, would be
benefited, because the tramps would begin to avoid them, and in a short
while they would be able to dispense with the dogs. The other list
would be for organ-grinders, who are, after all, only beggars of a
different type. This list would comprise the names of persons who are
musical and who would rather pay a quarter than listen to a hand-organ.
By a judicious arrangement with these people, carried on by
correspondence, the organ-grinder would be able to collect a large
revenue without venturing out, except occasionally to play before the
house of a delinquent subscriber in order to remind him that he had let
his contract expire. So, by slow degrees, we should find beggars doing
their work privately and not publicly, tramps circulating only among
those whose sympathies they have aroused, and organ-grinding only a
memory."
"The last, I think, would not come about," said Mr. Pedagog. "For there
are people who like the music of hand-organs."
"True--I'm one of 'em. I'd hire a hansom to follow a piano-organ about
the city if I could afford it, but as a rule the hand-organ lovers are
of the one-cent class," returned the Idiot. "The quarter class are
people who would rather not hear the hand-organ, and it is to them that
a grinder of business capacity would naturally address himself. It is
far pleasanter to stay at home and be paid large money for doing nothing
than to undertake a weary march through the city to receive small sums
for doing something. That's human nature, Mr. Pedagog."
"I presume it is," said Mr. Pedagog; "but I don't think your scheme is.
Human nature works, but your plan wouldn't."
"Well, of course," said the Idiot, "you never can tell about ideals. The
fact that an ideal is ideal is the chief argument against its amounting
to much. But I am confident that if my _Beggar's Don't_ and _Élite
Directory_ fail, my other book will go."
"You appear to have the writing of a library in mind," sneered the
Bibliomaniac.
"I have," said the Idiot. "If I write all the books I have in mind, the
public library will be a small affair beside mine."
"And your other book is to be what?" queried Mr. Whitechoker.
"_Plausible Tales for Beggars to Tell_," said the Idiot. "If the beggar
could only tell an interesting story he'd be surer of an ear in which to
whisper it. The usual beggar's tale is commonplace. There's no art in
it. There are no complications of absorbing interest. There is not a
soul in creation, I venture to say, but would be willing to have a
beggar stop right in the middle of his story. The tales I'd write for
them would be so interesting that the attention of the wayfarer would be
arrested at once. His mind would be riveted on the situation at once,
and, instead of hurrying along and trying to leave the beggar behind, he
would stop, button-hole him, and ask him to sit down on a convenient
doorstep and continue. If a beggar could have such a story to tell as
would enable him in the midst of one of its most exciting episodes to
whisper hoarsely into the ear of the man whose nickel he was seeking,
'The rest of this interesting story I will tell you in Central Park at
nine o'clock to-morrow night,' in such a manner as would impel the
listener to meet him in the Park the following evening, his fortune
would be made. Such a book I hope some day to write."
"I have no doubt," said Mr. Whitechoker, "that it will be an
entertaining addition to fiction."
"Nor have I," said the Idiot. "It will make the writers of to-day green
with envy, and, as for the beggars, if it is not generally known that
it is I and not they who are responsible for the work, the beggars will
shortly find themselves in demand as writers of fiction for the
magazines."
"And you?" suggested the Poet.
"I shall be content. Mere gratitude will force the beggars to send me
the magazine orders, and _I'll_ write their articles and be glad of the
opportunity, giving them ten per cent. of the profits. I know a man who
makes fifty dollars a year at magazine work, and one of my ambitions is
to rival the Banker-Poets and Dry Goods Essayists by achieving fame as
the Boarding-house Dickens."
VIII
Progressive Waffles
"I am afraid," said Mr. Pedagog, in a loud whisper to the Bibliomaniac,
"that the Idiot isn't feeling well this morning. He has eaten three
fish-cakes and a waffle without opening his mouth."
The Idiot looked up, and, gazing wearily at Mr. Pedagog for a moment,
shrugged his shoulders and ejaculated, "Tutt!"
"He's off," said the Bibliomaniac. "Whenever he says 'Tutt!' you can
make up your mind that his vocabulary is about to be loosed."
"If my vocabulary were as warped as some other vocabularies I might
mention," said the Idiot, helping himself to another waffle modelled
after the six of hearts, "I'd keep it in a cage. A man who observes that
I have eaten three fish-cakes and a waffle without opening my mouth
hasn't a very good command of language. He simply states as a fact what
is in reality an impossibility, granting that I eat with my mouth, which
I am told I do."
"You know what I mean," retorted Mr. Pedagog, impatiently. "I am so much
in your society that I have acquired the very bad habit of speaking in
the vernacular. When I say you haven't opened your mouth I do not refer
to the opening you make for the receipt of waffles and fish-cakes, but
for those massive openings which you require for your exuberant
loquacity. In other words, I mean that you haven't spoken a word for at
least three minutes, which is naturally an indication to us that you
aren't feeling well. You and talk are synonymous as far as we are
concerned."
"I _have_ been known to speak--that is true," said the Idiot. "That I am
not feeling very well this morning is also true. I have a headache."
"A what ache?" asked the Doctor, scornfully.
"A very bad headache," returned the Idiot, looking about him for a third
waffle.
"How singular!" said the Bibliomaniac. "Reminds me of a story I heard of
a man who had lost his foot. He'd had his foot shot off at Gettysburg,
and yet for years after he could feel the pangs of rheumatism in that
foot from which he had previously suffered."
"Pardon me for repeating," observed the Idiot. "But, as I have already
said, and as I expect often to have to say again, Tutt! I can't blame
you for thinking that I have no head, however. I find so little use for
one here that in most instances I do not obtrude it upon you."
"I haven't noticed any lack of head in the Idiot," put in the
School-master. "As a rule, I can agree to almost anything my friend the
Bibliomaniac says, but in this case I cannot accept his views. You have
a head. I have always said you had a head--in fact, that is what I
complain about chiefly, it is such a big head."
"Thank you," said the Idiot, ignoring the shaft. "I shall never forget
your kindness in coming to my aid, though I can't say that I think I
needed it. Even with a racking headache sustained by these delicious
waffles, I believe I can handle the Doctor and my bookish friend without
assistance. I am what the mathematicians would call an arithmetical
absurdity--I am the one that is equal to the two they represent. At
present, however, I prefer to let them talk on. I am too much absorbed
in thought and waffles to bandy words."
"If I had a headache," said Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog, without, it must be
said, in any way desiring to stem the waffle tide which was slowly but
surely eating into the profits of the week--"if I had a headache I
should not eat so many waffles, Mr. Idiot."
"I suppose I ought not to," replied the Idiot, "but I can't help it,
ma'am. Waffles are my weakness. Some men take to drink, some to gaming;
I seek forgetfulness of woe in waffles. Mr. Whitechoker, will you kindly
pass me that steaming ten of diamonds that is wasting its warmth upon
the desert air before you?"
Mr. Whitechoker, with a sigh which indicated that he had had his eye on
the ten of diamonds himself, did as he was requested.
"Many thanks," said the Idiot, transferring the waffle to his plate.
"Let me see--that is how many?"
"Five," said Mr. Pedagog.
"Eight," said the Bibliomaniac.
"Dear me!" ejaculated the Idiot. "Why can't you agree? I never eat less
than twelve waffles, and now that you have failed to keep tab I shall
have to begin all over again. Mary, bring me one dozen fresh waffles in
squads of four. This is an ideal breakfast, Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog."
"I am glad you are pleased," said the landlady, graciously. "My one aim
is to satisfy."
"You are a better shot than most women," said the Idiot. "I wonder why
it is," he added, "that waffles are so generally modelled after
playing-cards, and also why, having been modelled after playing-cards,
there is not a full pack?"
"Fifty-two waffles," said Mr. Whitechoker, "would be too many."
"Fifty-three, including the joker," said Mr. Pedagog.
"What do _you_ know about cards, John?" asked Mrs. Pedagog, severely.
The Idiot laughed.
"Did you ever hear that pretty little song of Gilbert and Sullivan's,
Mr. Poet, 'Things are seldom what they seem'?" he asked.
"Why shouldn't I know about playing-cards?" said Mr. Pedagog, acridly.
"Mr. Whitechoker seems to be aware that a pack holds fifty-two cards--if
he, why not I?"
"I--ah--I of course have to acquaint myself with many vicious things
with which I have very little sympathy," observed Mr. Whitechoker,
blandly. "I regard cards as an abomination."
"So do I," said Mr. Pedagog--"so do I. But even then I know a full
house--I should say a full pack from a--er--a--er--"
"Bob-tail flush," suggested the Idiot.
"Sir," said Mr. Pedagog, "I am not well up in poker terms."
"Then you ought to play," said the Idiot. "The man who doesn't know the
game has usually great luck. But I am sorry, Mrs. Pedagog, that you are
so strongly opposed to cards, for I was going to make a suggestion which
I think would promote harmony in our little circle on waffle days. If
you regard cards as wholly immoral, of course the suggestion is without
value, since it involves two complete packs of cards--one cardboard pack
and one waffle pack."
"I don't object to cards as cards, Mr. Idiot," said the landlady. "It is
the games people play with cards that I object to. They bring a great
deal of unnecessary misery into the world, and for that reason I think
it is better to avoid them altogether."
"That is quite true," said the Idiot. "They do bring about much
unhappiness. I know a young woman who became a victim of insomnia once
because in a series of ten games of old maid she got the odd card seven
times. Of course it wasn't entirely the cards' fault. Superstition had
something to do with it. In fact, I sometimes think the fault lies with
the people who play, and not with the cards. I owe much to the game of
whist. It taught me to control my tongue. I should have been a regular
talk-fiend if it hadn't been for whist."
Mr. Pedagog looked unutterable things at the Idiot.
"Are you laboring under the delusion that you have any control over your
tongue?" he asked, savagely.
"Most certainly," said the Idiot.
"Well, I'll have to make a note of that," said Mr. Pedagog. "I have a
friend who is making a collection of hallucinations."
"If you'll give me his address," said the Idiot, "I'll send him
thousands. For five dollars a dozen I'll invent hallucinations for him
that people ought to have but haven't."
"No," returned the School-master. "In his behalf, however, I thank you.
He collects only real hallucinations, and he finds there are plenty of
them without retaining a professional lunatic to supply him."
"Very well," said the Idiot, returning to his waffles. "If at any time
he finds the supply running short, I shall be glad to renew my offer."
"You haven't unfolded your Harmony Promoting Scheme for Waffle Days,"
suggested the Poet. "It has aroused my interest."
"Oh, it is simple," said the Idiot. "I have noticed that on waffle days
here most of us leave the table more or less dissatisfied. We find
ourselves plunged into acrimonious discussions, which, to my mind,
arise entirely from the waffles. Mr. Pedagog is a most amiable
gentleman, and yet we find him this morning full of acerbity. On the
surface of things I seem to be the cause of his anger, but in reality it
is not I, but the waffles. He has seen me gradually absorbing them and
it has irritated him. Every waffle that I eat _he_ might have had if I
had not been here. If there had been no one here but Mr. Pedagog, he
would have had all the waffles; as it is, his supply is limited. This
affects his geniality. It makes him--"
"Pardon me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But you are all wrong. I haven't thought
of the things at all."
"Consciously to yourself you have not," said the Idiot. "Subconsciously,
however, you have. The Philosophy of the Unconscious teaches us that
unknown to ourselves our actions are directly traceable to motives we
wot not of. The truth of this is conclusively proven in this case. Even
when I point out to you the facts in the case you deny their truth,
thereby showing that you are not conscious of the real underlying motive
for your irritation. Now, why is that irritation there? Because our
several rights to the individual waffles that are served here are not
clearly defined at the outset. When Mary brings in a steaming platter
full of these delicious creations of the cook, Mr. Pedagog has quite as
much right to the one with the six of hearts on it as I have, but I get
it. He does not. Hence he is irritated, although he does not know it. So
with Mr. Whitechoker. Five minutes ago he was hastening through the four
of spades in order that he might come into possession of the ten of
diamonds that lay smoking before him. As he was about to put the last
spade in his mouth I requested him to hand me the ten of diamonds,
having myself gulped down the deuce of clubs to get ahead of him. He
couldn't decline to give me that waffle because he wanted it himself. He
had to give it to me. He was irritated--though he did not know it. He
sighed and gave me the waffle."
"I did want it," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But I did not know that I
sighed."
"There you are," said the Idiot. "It is the Philosophy of the
Unconscious again. If you are not conscious of so actual a thing as a
sigh, how much the more unconscious must you be of something so subtle
as motive?"
"And your waffle-deck?" said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally
imbibes. "How will that solve the problem? It seems to me to complicate
the problem. As it is, we have about thirty waffles, each one of which
is a germ of irritation in the breast of the man who _doesn't_ eat it.
If you have fifty-two waffles you have twenty-two more germs to sow
discord in our midst."
"You would have but for my scheme," said the Idiot. "I'd have a pack of
cards at the table, and I'd deal them out just as you do in whist. Each
card would represent the corresponding waffle. We'd begin breakfast by
playing one hand after the manner of whist. Each man would keep his
tricks, and when the waffles were served he would receive those, and
those only, represented by the cards in the tricks he had taken. If you
took a trick with the king of diamonds in it, you'd get the waffle with
the king of diamonds on it, and so on. Every man would be clearly
entitled through his skill in the game to the waffles that he ate."
"Very good," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But suppose you had bad luck and
took no tricks?"
"Then," said the Idiot, "you'd have bad luck and get no waffles."
"Tutt!" said Mr. Pedagog.
And that was the sole criticism any of the boarders had to make,
although there is reason to believe that the scheme had objectionable
features to the majority of them, for as yet Progressive Waffles has not
been played at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's.
IX
A Clearing-house for Poets
"How is your Muse these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Bibliomaniac one
Sunday morning while the mush was being served.
"Flourishing," said the Idiot. "Just flourishing--and no more."
"I should think you'd be pleased if she is flourishing," said the
Doctor.
"I'd rather she'd stop flourishing and do a little writing," said the
Idiot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and
graces of an ordinary type-writer with an unconquerable aversion to
work."
"You look upon your Muse as you would upon your type-writer, eh?" said
Mr. Pedagog.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "That's all my Muse is, and she isn't even a
capable type-writer. The general run of type-writers make sense of what
you write, but my Muse won't. You may not believe it, but out of ten
inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication
anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the
matter with her, but when I sit down to dictate a comic sonnet she turns
it into a serious jingle, and _vice versa_. We can't seem to get our
moods to fit. When I want to be serious she's flippant, and when I
become flippant she's serious."
"She must be very serious most of the time," said the Doctor.
"She is," said the Idiot, innocently. "But that's only because I'm
flippant most of the time. I'm going to give her warning. If she doesn't
brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another
Muse, that's all. I can't afford to have my income cut down fifty per
cent. just because she happens to be fickle."
"Maybe she is flirting with somebody else," suggested the Poet. "My Muse
does that occasionally."
"I doubt it," said the Idiot. "I haven't observed any other poet
encroaching upon my particular province. Even you, good as you are,
can't do it. But in any event I'm going to have a change. The day has
gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a
half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these
years that men have been writing poetry no one has thought of that.
People get up grain corners, corners in railway stock, monopolies in gas
and oil and everything else, about, but as yet no poet has cornered the
market in his business."
"That's easily accounted for," said the Bibliomaniac. "The poet
controls only his own work, and if he has any sense he doesn't want to
monopolize that."
"That isn't my scheme at all," said the Idiot. "You have a monopoly of
your own work always if you choose to avail yourself of it, and, as you
say, a man would be crazy to do so. What I'd like to see established is
a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing, for instance,
that I opened an office in Wall Street--a Bank for Poets, in which all
writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw
against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It
would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend
here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put
it in the bank. He'd be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn't have to
bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the
Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft
would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which
would include postage and commissions to the company."
"And suppose the company failed to dispose of it?" suggested the Poet.
"They'd do just as ordinary banks do with checks--stamp it 'Not Good,'"
said the Idiot. "That, however, wouldn't happen very often if the
concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If
the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought
in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand
it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was
comic, and proceed to deposit it with the usual deposit slip. The teller
would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if
it was not what I thought it, would stamp it 'Not Comic' or
'Counterfeit.' It is perfectly simple."
"Very simple," said Mr. Pedagog. "Though I should have used a synonym of
simple to describe it. It's idiotic."
"That's what people said of Columbus's idea that he could discover
America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't have dollars
slathered all over it in plain view is idiotic."
"The word slathered is new to me," said the School-master; "but I fancy
I know what you mean."
"The word slathered may be new to you," said the Idiot, "but it is a
good word. I have used it with great effect several times. Whenever any
one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the
good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word
fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more
than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much
gained."
"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there
is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve
of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."
"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had
every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody
that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a
successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry
than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the
market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his
whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen,
quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a
four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page,
our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of
yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure,
force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the
last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would
enable us to more than meet the losses."
"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr.
Whitechoker.
"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two
dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more
than he gets now. _He_ couldn't complain."
"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what
happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's
still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would
be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us,
they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am
informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers
labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business
for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a
magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash
in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in
a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve
hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets,
ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would
read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the
City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten
Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a
notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at
sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how
many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the
treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our
running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders
anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would
net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."
"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the
profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but
I doubt the security of the loans."
"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot.
"The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a
consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their
obligations."
"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the
Bibliomaniac.
"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself,
sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash
off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately
becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the
lady. _I_ have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself
completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks
burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the
man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze
into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to
tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The
commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his
salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he
could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan
department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in
and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet
to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as
brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or
wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts
of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had
just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could
borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to
the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the
aurora borealis."
"You'd have trouble finding a rhyme to borealis," said the Poet.
"Tutt!" said the Idiot. "What's the matter with 'Glory, Alice,' 'Listen
to my story, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are
a Tory, Alice' (this for a Revolutionary poem), or 'Come rowing in my
dory, Alice'? There's no end to 'em."
"If you'll write a rhyming dictionary I'll buy a copy," was the Poet's
sole comment.
"That will come later," said the Idiot. "Once get our clearing-house
established, we can branch out into a general Poetry Trust and Supply
Company that will make millions. We'll make so much money, by Jove!" he
added, slapping the table enthusiastically, "that we can afford to go
into the publishing business ourselves and bring out volumes of verse
for anybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't
write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and
say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author
and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's
book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if
you'll put out a first-class book of poems under my name I'll pay all
expenses and give you a royalty of twenty per cent. on every copy I give
away!' No money in it? Bah! You gentlemen don't know. If you say fortune
would not wait upon this venture _I_ say you are the kind of men who
would sell government bonds for their value as mere engravings if you
had the chance."
"You certainly do draw a roseate picture," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"I do indeed," said the Idiot, "and the paint is laid on thick."
"Well, I hope it goes," said the Poet. "I'll make a deposit the first
day of three hundred and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and
twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus, and one epic about ten
yards in length, all of which I have in my desk at this moment."
"Very well," said the Idiot, rising, "With that encouragement from you I
feel warranted in ordering the 'Not Good' stamp at least."
X
Some Electrical Suggestions
"If I were beginning life all over again," said the Idiot, "I'd be an
electrician. It seems to me that of all modern pursuits, barring
architecture perhaps, electricity is the most fascinating."
"There's probably more money in it than there is in Idiocy, too, I
fancy," said the Bibliomaniac, dryly.
"Well, I should think so," assented the Idiot. "Idiocy is merely an
intellectual diversion. Electricity is a practical science. Idiocy
cannot be said to be anything more than a luxury, while electricity has
become a necessity. I do not even claim that any real lasting benefit
can come to the world through Idiocy, but in electricity are
possibilities, not yet realized, for which the world will be distinctly
better and happier."
"It is kind of you to speak so highly of electricity," said the Doctor.
"The science may now advance, knowing that you approve."
"Approve?" cried the Idiot. "Approve is not the word, sir. I
enthuse--and why should I not, feeling, as I do, that in the electrical
current lies the germ of the Elixir of Life! I thoroughly believe that a
bottle of liquefied electricity would make us all young."
"Then don't take it!" said the School-master. "You have suffered from an
aggravated case of youngness for as long a time as I have known you.
Pray do nothing to intensify your youth."
"I fear I shall be forced to deny myself that pleasure, Mr. Pedagog,"
returned the Idiot, mildly, "for the unhappy reason that as yet the
formula for the Electrical Elixir has not been discovered; that it will
be discovered before I die I hope and pray, because, unlike the man in
the hymn, I would live always. I'd like to be an immortal."
"An immortal Idiot! Think of it!" said the Doctor.
"I didn't expect much sympathy from you, Dr. Capsule," said the Idiot.
"The man with car-horses to sell does not dote upon the trolley-car."
"The application of the allegory is not entirely apparent," said the
Doctor.
"No?" said the Idiot. "I am surprised. I thought you intellectuals
absorbed ideas more quickly. To deal in plain terms, since it appears to
be necessary, a plan which involves the indefinite extension of mortal
life and the elimination of bodily ills is not likely to receive the
hearty endorsement of the medical profession. If a man could come home
on a stormy night and offset the deleterious effects of wet feet by
swallowing an electric pill, one containing two volts, like a two-grain
quinine pill, for instance, with greater certainty than one feels in
taking quinine, your profession would have to put up the shutters and go
into some such business as writing articles on 'Measles as It Used to
Be,' or 'Disorders of the Ante-Electrical Period.' The fine part of it
all is that we should not have to rely for our medicines upon the state
of the arsenic market, or the quinine supply, or the squill product of
the year. Electric sparks can be made without number whether the sun
shines or not. The failure of the Peruvian Bark Crop, or the destruction
by an early frost of the Castor Oil Wells, would cease to be a hideous
possibility to delicate natures. They could all fail for all mankind
need fear, for electricity can be generated when and wherever one has
need of it. If your electric pills were used up, and the chemist too far
away from your house for you to get the supply replenished at the
moment, you could put on your slippers and by walking up and down your
carpeted floor for ten or fifteen minutes generate enough electricity to
see you through. Of course you'd have to have a pair of
dynamic-storage-reservoir slippers to catch the sparks as they flew, but
I fancy they'd be less costly in the long run than the medicines we have
to-day."
"Why have wet feet at all if electricity is to be so all-powerful?"
suggested Mr. Whitechoker. "Why not devise an electrical foot-protector
and ward off all possibility of damp, cold feet?"
"You couldn't do that with men and women constituted as they are," said
the Idiot. "Your foot-protector would no doubt be a good thing, but so
are rubber overshoes. Nothing will ever be patented to compel a man to
keep his feet dry, and he won't do it except under compulsion, but once
having his feet wet he will seek the remedy. It's the Elixir of Life
that I bank on most, however. I don't believe there is one among us,
excepting Mrs. Pedagog, to whom twenty-five was not the most delightful
period of existence. To Mrs. Pedagog, as to all women, eighteen is
the limit. But men at twenty-five and women at eighteen know so much,
enjoy so much, regard themselves so highly! There is nothing _blasé_
about them then. Disillusion--which I think ought to be called
dissolution--comes later. At thirty a man discovers that the things he
knew at twenty-five aren't so; and as for a woman at twenty-five, if so
be she is unmarried, her life is empty, and if so be she is married, she
has cares in the shape of children and a husband, who as a theory was a
poet, but who as a reality is a mere business machine who is oftentimes
no fonder of staying at home than he was before he was married and went
out to see her every night."
"What a wise little pessimist he is!" said Mr. Pedagog to the Doctor.
"Very. But I fail to comprehend why he branches off into Pessimism when
Electricity was his text," said the Doctor.
"Because he's the Id--" began the Bibliomaniac, but the Idiot
interrupted him.
"Don't jump fences, gentlemen, before you know whether they are made of
barbed wire or not. I'm coming to the points you are bringing up, and if
you are not careful they may puncture you," he said. "I am not in any
sense a pessimist. Quite the contrary. I am an optimist. I'm not old
enough or cross-grained enough as yet to be a pessimist, and it's
because I don't want to be a pessimist that I want this Elixir of
Electricity to hurry up and have itself patented. If men when they
reached the age of twenty-five, and women at eighteen, would begin to
take this they might live to be a thousand and yet retain all the spirit
and feelings of twenty-five and eighteen. That's the connection, Dr.
Capsule. If I could be twenty-five all my life I'd be as happy as a
bird--and if I were the Poet here I'd immortalize that idea in verse--
"A man's the biggest thing alive
When he has got to twenty-five;
And as for woman, she's a queen
Whose summers number just eighteen."
"That's a good idea," returned the Poet. "I'll make a note of that, and
if I sell it I'll give you a commission."
"No, don't do that," said the Idiot, slyly. "I shall be satisfied to see
your name in print."
The Poet having accepted this sally in the spirit in which it was
intended, the Idiot resumed:
"But of course the Elixir and the Electrical Pills are as yet all in the
air. We haven't even taken a step in that direction. Mr. Edison and
other wizards have been too much occupied with electric lights and
telephones and phonographs and transatlantic notions to pay any
attention to schemes to prolong life and keep us, despite our years,
perpetually young."
"I fancy they are likely to continue to do so," said the Doctor.
"Whatever motive you may attribute to me for pooh-poohing your notions,
I do so. No sane person wants to live forever, and if it were possible
that all men might live forever, you'd soon find the world so crowded
that the slighter actors in the human comedy would be shoved off the
stage. There are enough people in the world now, without man's adding
all future generations to their number and making death an
impossibility."
"That's all nonsense," said the Idiot. "My Elixir wouldn't make death an
impossibility. Any man who thought he'd had enough at the end of a
thousand years could stop taking the Elixir and shuffle off the mortal
coil. As a matter of fact, not more than ten per cent. of the people in
the world would have any faith in the Elixir at all. I know people
to-day who do not take advantage of the many patent remedies that are
within their reach, preferring the mustard-plaster and catnip-tea of
their forefathers. There's where human nature works again. I believe
that if I were myself the discoverer of the formula for my mixture, and
for an advertisement secured a letter from a man saying, 'I was dying of
old age, having reached the advanced period of ninety-seven; I took two
bottles of your Electrical Elixir and am now celebrating my
twenty-fifth birthday again,' ninety-nine per cent. of the people who
read it would laugh and think it had strayed out of the funny column.
People lack confidence in their fellow-men--that's all; but if they were
twenty-five and eighteen that would all be changed. We are very trustful
at twenty-five and eighteen, which is one of the things I like about
those respective ages. When I was twenty-five I believed in everybody,
including myself. Now--well, I'm older. But enough of schemes, which I
must admit are somewhat visionary--as the telephone would have seemed
one hundred years ago. Let us come down to realities in electricity. I
can't see why more is not made of the phonograph for the benefit of the
public. Take a man like Chauncey M. De Choate. He goes here and he goes
there to make speeches, when I've no doubt he'd much prefer to stay at
home cutting coupons off his bonds. Why can't the phonograph voice do
_his_ duty? Instead of making the same speech over and over again, why
can't some electrician so improve the phonograph that De Choate can say
what he has to say through a funnel, have it impressed on a cylinder,
duplicated and reduplicated and scattered broadcast over the world? If
Mr. Edison could impart what poets call stentorian tones to the
phonograph, he'd be doing a great and noble work. Again, for smaller
things, like a dance, Why can't the phonograph be made useful at a ball?
I attended one the other night, and when I wanted to dance the two-step
the band played the polka; if I wished the polka it played a waltz. Some
men can only dance the two-step--they don't know the waltz, the polka,
or the schottische. Now why can't the phonograph come to the rescue? In
almost any hotel in New York you can drop a nickel in a slot and hear
Sousa's band on the phonograph. Why not extend the principle and have a
phonograph for men who can dance nothing but the two-step, charged with
'The Washington Post March,' and supplied with four tubes with receivers
to put in the ears of the listeners? Make it small enough for a man to
carry in his pocket; then at a ball he could go up to a young lady, ask
her to dance, put two of the receivers in her ears, two in his, and trip
the light fantastic toe utterly independently of what other people were
dancing. It's possible. Mr. Edison could do it in five minutes, and
every one would be satisfied. It might be rather droll to see two people
dancing the two-step while eight others were fastened on to a lanciers
phonograph, and a dozen or more other couples were dancing respectively
the waltz, schottische, and Virginia reel, but we'd soon get used to
that, and no man need become a wall-flower because he couldn't dance the
dance that happened to be on. Furthermore, you'd be able to do away with
the musicians, who always cast a pall over dances because of their
superiority to the rest of the world in general and the dancers in
particular."
"How about your couple that prefer to sit out the dance on the stairs?"
said the Poet, who, in common with the Idiot, knew several things about
dances that Messrs. Pedagog and Whitechoker did not.
"It would be particularly attractive to them," said the Idiot. "They
could sit on the stairs and wax sentimental over any dreamy air the man
happened to have in his vest-pocket. He could arrange all that
beforehand--find out what song she thought divinest, and go loaded
accordingly. And as for the things that usually happen on stairs at
dances, as well as in conservatories at balls, with the aid of a
phonograph a man could propose to a girl in the presence of a thousand
people, and nobody but the maiden herself would be the wiser. I tell
you, gentlemen," the Idiot added, enthusiastically, as he rose to
depart, "if the phonograph people only knew their power they'd do great
things. The patent vest-pocket phonograph for music at balls and
proposals for bashful men alone would make their fortunes if they only
could see it. I almost wish I were an electrician and not an Idiot."
With which he left the room, and Mr. Pedagog whispered to Mrs. Pedagog
that while he considered the Idiot very much of an idiot, there was no
denying that at times he did get hold of ideas that were not wholly bad.
"That's true," said the good landlady. "I think if you had proposed to
me through a phonograph I should not have had to guess at what you meant
and lead you on to express yourself more clearly. I didn't want to say
yes until I was fully convinced that you meant what you didn't seem able
to say."
XI
Concerning Children
The Poet had been away for a week, and on his return to his accustomed
post at the breakfast-table seemed but a shadow of his former self. His
eyes were heavy and his long locks appeared straggly enough for a man of
far more extended reputation as a singer of melodious verse.
"To judge from your appearance, Mr. Poet," said the Idiot, after
welcoming his friend, "you've had a lively vacation. You certainly do
not look as if you had devoted much of it to sleep."
"I haven't," said the Poet, wearily, "I haven't averaged more than two
hours of sleep daily since I went away."
"I thought you told me you were going off into the country for a rest?"
observed the Idiot.
"I did--and this is what comes of it," returned the Poet. "I went to
visit my sister up in Saratoga County. She has seven children."
"Aha!" smiled the Idiot. "That's it, is it--well, I can sympathize with
you. I've had experience with youngsters myself. I love 'em, but I like
to take 'em on the instalment plan--very little at a time. I have a
small cousin with a capacity for play and impudence that can't be
equalled. His mother wrote me once and asked if I thought Hagenbeck, the
wild-animal tamer, could be induced to take him in hand."
"That's the kind," put in the Poet, his face lighting up a little upon
discovering that there was some one at least at the board who could
sympathize with him. "My sister's seven are all of the wild-animal
variety. I'd rather fall in with seven tigers than put in another week
with my beloved nephews and nieces."
"Did they play Alp with you?" the Idiot asked, with a grin.
"Alp?" said the Poet. "No--not that I know of. They may have, however. I
was hardly conscious of what they were doing the last two days of my
stay there. They simply overpowered me, and I gave in and became a toy
for the time."
"It isn't much fun being a toy," said the Idiot. "I think I'd rather
play Alp."
"What on earth is Alp?" asked Mr. Pedagog, his curiosity aroused. "I've
heard enough absurd names for games in the last five years, but I must
say, for pure idiocy and lack of suggestiveness, the name of Alp
surpasses all."
"That's as it should be," said the Idiot. "My small cousin invented
Alp, and anything that boy does is apt to surpass all. He takes after me
in some things. But Alp, while it may seem to lack suggestiveness as a
name, is really just the name for the game. It's very simple. It is
played by one Alp and as many chamois as desire to take a hand. As a
rule the man plays the Alp and the children are the chamois. The man
gets down on his hands and knees, puts his head on the floor, and has a
white rug put on his back, the idea being that he is an Alp and the rug
represents its snow-clad top."
"And the chamois?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.
"The chamois climbs the Alp and jumps about on the top of it," said the
Idiot. "My experience, based upon two hours a day of it for ten
consecutive days, is that it's fun for the chamois but rough on the
Alp; and I got so after a while that I really preferred business to
pleasure and gave up playing Alp to return to work before my vacation
was half over."
"How do you score in this game of Alp?" said Mr. Pedagog, smiling
broadly as he thought of there being an embryo idiot somewhere who could
discomfit the one fate had thrown across his path.
"I never had the strength to inquire," said the Idiot. "But my
impression is that the game is to see which has the greater endurance,
the chamois or the Alp. The one that gets tired of playing first loses.
I always lost. My small cousin is a storehouse of nervous energy. I
believe he could play choo-choo cars with a real engine and last longer
than the engine--which being the case, I couldn't hope to hold out
against him."
"My nephews didn't play Alp," said the Poet. "I believe Alp would have
been a positive relief to me. They made me tell them stories and poems
from morning until night, and all night too, for one of them shared his
room with me, and the worst of it all was that they all had to be new
stories and new poems, so I was kept composing from one week's end to
the other."
"Why weren't you firm with them and say you wouldn't, and let that end
it?" said Mr. Pedagog.
"Ha--ha!" laughed the Idiot. "That's fine, isn't it, Mr. Poet? It's very
evident, Mr. Pedagog, that you're not acquainted with children. Now, my
small cousin can make the same appeal over and over again in a hundred
and fifty different ways. You may have the courage to say no a hundred
and forty-nine times, but I have yet to meet the man who could make his
no good with a boy of real persistent spirit. I can't do it. I've
tried, but I've had to give in sooner or later."
"Same way with me, multiplied by seven," said the Poet, with difficulty
repressing a yawn. "I tried the no business on the morning of the third
day, and gave it up as a hopeless case before the clock struck twelve."
"I'd teach 'em," said Mr. Pedagog.
"You'd have to learn 'em first," retorted the Idiot. "You can't do
anything with children unless you understand them. You've got to
remember several things when you have small boys to deal with. In the
first place, they are a great deal more alert than you are. They are a
great deal more energetic; they know what they want, and in getting it
they haven't any dignity to restrain them, wherein they have a distinct
advantage over you. Worst of all, down in your secret heart you want to
laugh, even when they most affront you."
"I don't," said Mr. Pedagog, shortly.
"And why? Because you don't know them, cannot sympathize with them, and
look upon them as evils to be tolerated rather than little minds to be
cultivated. Hard a time as I have had as an Alp, I'd feel as if a great
hole had been punched in my life if anything should deprive me of my
cousin Sammie. He knows it and I know it, and that is why we are chums,"
said the Idiot. "What I like about Sammie is that he believes in me," he
added, a little wistfully. "I wouldn't mind doing that myself--if I
could."
"You might think differently if you suffered from seven Sammies the way
the Poet does," said the Bibliomaniac.
"There couldn't be seven Sammies," said the Idiot. "Sammie is unique--to
me. But I am not at all narrow in this matter. I can very well imagine
how Sammie could be very disagreeable to some people. I shouldn't care
much for Alp, I suppose, if when night came on Sammie didn't climb up on
my lap and tell me he thought I was the greatest man that ever lived
next to his mother and father. That's the thing, Mr. Pedagog, that makes
Alp tolerable--it's the sugar sauce to the batter pudding. There's a
good deal of plain batter in the pudding, but with the sauce generously
mixed in you don't mind it so much. That boy would be willing to go to
sleep on a railway track if I told him I'd stand between him and the
express train. If I told him I could hammer down Gibraltar with putty
he'd believe it, and bring me his putty-blower to help along in the
great work. That's why I think a man's so much better off if he is a
father. Somebody has fixed a standard for him which, while he may know
he can't live up to it, he'll try to live up to, and by aiming high he
won't be so apt to hit low as he otherwise might. As Sammie's father
once said to me: 'By Jove, Idiot,' he said, 'if men could _only_ be what
their children think them!'"
"Nevertheless they should be governed, curbed, brought up!" said the
Bibliomaniac.
"They should, indeed," said the Idiot. "And in such a fashion that when
they are governed, curbed, and brought up they do not realize that they
have been governed, curbed, and brought up. The man who plays the tyrant
with his children isn't the man for me. Give me the man who, like my
father, is his son's intimate, personal friend, his confidant, his chum.
It may have worked badly in my case. I don't think it has--in any event,
if I were ever the father of a boy I'd try to make him feel that I was
not a despot in whose hands he was powerless, but a mainstay to fall
back on when things seemed to be going wrong--fountain-head of good
advice, a sympathizer--in short, a chum."
"You certainly draw a pleasant picture," said Mr. Whitechoker, kindly.
"Thank you," said the Idiot. "It's not original with me. My father drew
it. But despite my personal regard for Sammie, I do think something
ought to be done to alleviate the sufferings of the parent. Take the
mother of a boy like Sammie, for instance. She has him all day and
generally all night. Sammie's father goes to business at eight o'clock
and returns at six, thinking he has worked hard, and wonders why it is
that Sammie's mother looks so confoundedly tired. It makes him slightly
irritable. She has been at home taking things easy all day. He has been
in town working like a dog. What right has she to be tired? He doesn't
realize that she has had to entertain Sammie at those hours of the day
when Sammie is in his best form. She has found him trying to turn
somersaults at the top of the back stairs; she has patiently borne his
musical efforts on the piano, upon which he practises daily for a few
minutes, generally with a hammer or a stick, or something else equally
well calculated to beautify the keys; she has had to interfere in
Sammie's well-meant efforts to instruct his small brother in the art of
being an Indian who can whoop and scalp all in the same breath, thereby
incurring for the moment Sammie's undying hatred; she has heard Sammie
using language which an inconsiderate hired man has not scrupled to use
in Sammie's presence; she has, with terror in her soul, watched him at
play with a knife which some friend of the family who admires Sammie had
given him, and has again incurred his enmity by finally, to avoid
nervous prostration, taken that treasure from him. In short, she has
passed a day of real tragedy. Sammie is farce to me, comedy to his
father, and tragedy to his mother. Cannot something be done for her? Is
there no way by means of which Sammie can be entertained during the day,
for entertained he must be, that does not utterly destroy the nervous
system of his mother? Can't some inventive genius who has studied the
small boy, who knows the little ins and outs of his nature, and who,
above all, sympathizes with those ins and outs, put his mind on the life
of the woman of domestic inclination, and do something to make her life
less of a burden and more of a joy?"
"You are the man to do it," said the Bibliomaniac. "An inventive genius
such as you are ought to be able to solve the problem."
"Perhaps he ought to be," said the Idiot; "but we are not all what we
ought to be, I among the number. Almost anything seems possible to me
until I think of the mother at home all day with a dear, sweet, bright,
energetic boy like Sammie. Then, I confess, I am utterly at a loss to
know what to do."
And then, as none of the boarders had any solution of the problem to
suggest, I presume there was none among them who knew "How To Be
Tranquil Though A Mother."
Perhaps when women take up invention matters will seem more hopeful.
XII
Dreamaline
"Well, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, as the guests gathered about the
table, "how goes the noble art of invention with you? You've been at it
for some time now. Do you find that you have succeeded in your
self-imposed mission and made the condition of the civilized less
unbearable?"
"Frankly, Mr. Pedagog, I have failed," said the Idiot, sadly. "Failed
egregiously. I cannot find that of all the many schemes I have evolved
for the benefit of the human race any single one has been adopted by
those who would be benefited. Wherefore, with the exception of
Dreamaline, which I have not yet developed to my satisfaction, I shall
do no more inventing. What is the use? Even you, gentlemen, here have
tacitly declined to accept my plan for the elimination of irritation on
Waffle Days, a plan at once simple, picturesque, and efficacious. With
such discouragement at home, what hope have I for better fortune
abroad?"
"It is dreadful to be an unappreciated genius!" said the Bibliomaniac,
gruffly. "It's better to be a plain lunatic. A plain lunatic is at least
free from the consciousness of failure."
"Nevertheless, I'd rather be myself than any one else at this board,"
rejoined the Idiot. "Unappreciated though I be, I am at least happy.
Consciousness of failure need not necessarily destroy one's happiness.
If I do the best I can with the tools I have I needn't weep because I
fail, and with his consciousness of failure the unappreciated genius
always has the consolation of knowing that it is not he but the world
that is wrong. If I am a philanthropist and offer a thousand dollars to
a charity, and the charity declines to accept it because I happen to
have made it out of my interest in 'A Widows' and Orphans' Speculation
Company, Large Losses a Surety,' it is the charity that loses, not I. So
with my plans. Social expansion is not taken up by society--who dies, I
or society? Capitalists decline to consider my proposition for a General
Poetry Trust and Supply Company. Who loses a fine chance, I or the
capitalists? I may be a little discouraged for the time being, but what
of that? Invention isn't the only occupation in the world for me. I can
give up Philanthropy and take up Misanthropy in a moment if I want
to--and with Dreamaline I can rule the world."
"Ah--just what is this Dreamaline?" asked Mr. Whitechoker, interested.
"That, sir, is the question which I am now trying to answer for myself,"
returned the Idiot. "If I could answer it, as I have said, I could rule
the world--everybody could rule the world; that is to say, his own
world. It is based on an old idea which has been found by some to be
practicable, but it has never been developed to the point which I hope
to attain."
"Wake me up when he gets to the point, will you, kindly?" whispered the
Doctor to the Bibliomaniac.
"If you sleep until then you'll never wake," said the Bibliomaniac. "To
my mind the Idiot never comes to a point."
"You are a little too mysterious for me," observed Mr. Whitechoker. "I
know no more about Dreamaline now than I did when you began."
"Which is my case exactly," said the Idiot. "It is a vague, shadowy
something as yet. It is only a germ lost in my cerebral wrinkles, but I
hope by a persistent smoothing out of those wrinkles with what I might
call the flat-iron of thought, I may yet lay hold of the microbe, and
with it electrify the world. Once Dreamaline is discovered all other
discoveries become as nothing; all other inventions for the amelioration
of the condition of the civilized will be unnecessary, and even
Progressive Waffles will cease to fascinate."
"Perhaps," said the Bibliomaniac, "if you will give us a hint as to the
nature of your plan in general we may be able to help you in carrying it
out."
"The Doctor might," said the Idiot. "My genial friend who occasionally
imbibes might--even the Poet, with his taste for Welsh rarebits,
might--but from you and Mr. Pedagog and Mr. Whitechoker I fear I should
receive little assistance. Indeed, I am not sure but that Mr.
Whitechoker might disapprove of the plan altogether."
"Any plan which makes life happier and better is sure to meet with my
approval," said Mr. Whitechoker.
"With that encouragement, then," said the Idiot, "I will endeavor to lay
before you my crowning invention. Dreamaline, as its name may suggest,
should be a patent medicine, by taking which man should become oblivious
to care."
"What's the matter with champagne for that?" interrupted the Genial Old
Gentleman who occasionally imbibes.
"Champagne has some good points," said the Idiot. "But there are two
drawbacks--the effects and the price. Both of these drawbacks, so far
from making us oblivious to our cares, add to them. The superiority of
Dreamaline over champagne, or even over beer, which is comparatively
cheap, is that one dose of Dreamaline, costing one cent, will do more
for the patient than one case of champagne or one keg of beer; it is not
intoxicating or ruinous to the purse. Furthermore, it is more potent for
good, since, under its genial influences, man can do that to which he
aspires, or, what is perhaps better yet, merely imagine that he is doing
that to which he aspires, and so avoid the disappointment which I am
told always comes with ambition achieved.
"Take, for instance, the literary man. We know of many cases in which
the literary man has stimulated his imagination by means of drugs, and
while under the influence has penned the most marvellous tales. That man
sacrifices himself for the delectation of others. In order to write
something for the world to rave over, he takes a dose which makes him
rave, and which ultimately kills him. Dreamaline will make this
entirely unnecessary. Instead of the writers taking hasheesh, the reader
takes Dreamaline. Instead of one man having to smoke opium for millions,
the millions take Dreamaline for themselves as individuals. I would have
the scientists, then, the chemists, study the subject carefully, decide
what quality it is in hasheesh that makes a writer conceive of these
horrible situations, put this into a nostrum, and sell it to those who
like horrible situations, and let them dream their own stories."
"Very interesting," said the Bibliomaniac, "but all readers do not like
horrible situations. We are not _all_ morbid."
"For which we should be devoutly thankful," said the Idiot. "But your
point is not well taken. On each bottle of what I should call 'Literary
Dreamaline,' to distinguish it from 'Art Dreamaline,' 'Scientific
Dreamaline,' and so on, I should have printed explicit directions
showing consumers how the dose should be modified to meet the consumer's
taste. One man likes a De Maupassant story. Let him take his Dreamaline
straight, lie down and dream. He'd get his De Maupassant story with a
vengeance. Another likes the modern story in realism--a story in which a
prize might be offered to the reader who finds a situation, an incident
in the three hundred odd pages of the book he reads. This man could take
a spoonful of Dreamaline and dilute it to his taste. A drop of
Dreamaline, which taken raw would give a man a dream like Doctor Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, put into a hogshead of pure water would enable the man who
took a spoonful of it before going to bed to fall asleep and walk
through a three-volume novel by Henry James. Thus every man could get
what he wanted at small expense. Dreamaline for readers sold at a
dollar a quart would give every consumer as big and varied a library as
he wished, and would be a great saving to the eyes. People would have
more time for other pleasures if by taking a dose of Dreamaline before
retiring they could get all their literature in their sleeping hours.
Then every bottle would pay for itself ten times over if on awakening
the next morning the consumer would write out the story he had dreamed
and publish it for the benefit of those who were afraid to take the
medicine."
"You wouldn't make much money out of it, though," said the Poet. "If one
bottle sufficed for a library you wouldn't find much of a demand."
"That could be got around in two ways," said the Idiot. "We could
copyright every bottle of Dreamaline and require the consumers to pay us
a royalty on every book inspired by it, or we could ourselves take what
I would call Financial Dreamaline, one dose of which would make a man
feel like a millionaire. Life is only feeling after all. If you feel
like a millionaire you are as happy as a millionaire--happier, in fact,
because in reality you do not have to wear your thumbs out cutting
coupons on the first of every month. Then I should have Art Dreamaline.
You could have it arranged so that by a certain dose you could have old
masters all over your house; by another dose you could get a collection
of modern French paintings, and by swallowing a whole bottle you could
dream that your walls were lined with mysteries that would drive the
Impressionists crazy with envy. In Scientific Dreamaline you would get
ideas for invention that would revolutionize the world."
"How about the poets and the humorists?" asked the Poet.
"They'd be easy," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't have any hasheesh in the
mixture for them. Welsh rarebit would do, and you'd get poems so
mysterious and jokes so uproarious that the whole world would soon be
filled with wonder and with laughter. In short, Dreamaline would go into
every walk of life. Music, letters, art, poetry, finance. Every man
according to his bent or his tastes could partake. Every man could make
with it his own little world in which he was himself the prime mover,
and so harmless would it be that when next morning he awoke he would be
as tranquil and as happy as a babe. I hope, gentlemen, to see the day
when Dreamaline is an established fact, when we cannot enter a household
in the land that does not have hanging on its walls, after the manner of
those glass fire hand-grenades, a wire rack holding a row of bottles
labelled Art, Letters, Music, and so on, instead of libraries,
picture-galleries, music-rooms, and laboratories. The rich and the poor
alike may have it. The child who loves to have stories told to him will
cry for it; the poor wanderer who loves opera and cannot afford even to
pass the opera-house in a cable-car, can go into a drug-store, and for a
cent, begged of a kind-hearted pedestrian on the street, purchase a
sufficient quantity to imagine himself a box-holder; the ambitious
statesman can through its influences enjoy the sensation of thinking
himself President of the United States. Not a man, woman, or child lives
but would find it a boon, and as harmless as a Graham cracker. That,
gentlemen, is my crowning invention, and until I see it realized I
invent no more. Good-morning."
And in a moment he was gone.
"Well!" said Mr. Pedagog. "That's the cap to the climax."
"Yes," said Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog.
"Where do you suppose he got the idea?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"I don't know," said the Doctor. "But I suspect that without knowing it
he's had some of the stuff he describes. Most of his schemes indicate
it, and Dreamaline, I think, proves it."
THE END
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