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Title: The Asbestos Society of Sinners, detailing the diversions of Dives and others on the playground of Pluto
Author: Fogg, Lawrence Daniel
Language: English
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SINNERS, DETAILING THE DIVERSIONS OF DIVES AND OTHERS ON THE PLAYGROUND
OF PLUTO ***
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged. In particular the spelling of proper
names viz. Catharine of Arragon remain.
In chapter XI:
"By the bye," I put in, "it seems to me the
Morman has the biggest kick coming against
his wives' mothers, yet I've never heard a word....
Morman is almost certainly Mormon or Mormon man.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.
THE ASBESTOS SOCIETY
OF SINNERS
The Asbestos
Society
of Sinners
Detailing the Diversions of Dives and others on the Playground
of Pluto, with some broken threads of Drop-stitch
History, picked up by a Newspaper man
in Hades and woven into a Stygian Nights’
Entertainment.
BY
LAWRENCE DANIEL FOGG
MAYHEW PUBLISHING COMPANY
92-100 Ruggles Street
Boston, Mass.
Copyright, 1906
by
Lawrence Daniel Fogg
_All Rights Reserved._
Dedicated to
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Who first made Hades a pleasant place of abode and aroused
in his reader a desire to go cruising on the Styx
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER. PAGE.
I. THE SUMMONS FROM SATAN 3
II. SHADY SINNERS OF THE STYX 15
III. JOHN BROWN’S BODY AND THE BONES
OF JOHN PAUL JONES 31
IV. HENRY THE EIGHTH AND HIS HAREM
IN HADES 47
V. WHAT METHUSELAH THINKS OF
DR. OSLER 63
VI. THE VIRGIN THRONED IN THE WEST:
A TABLOID TANGLE OF LOVE
AND HISTORY 75
VII. “BOSS” TWEED ON TAINTED MONEY,
WITH SOME NONSENSE DEFINITIONS
OF FADS AND FINANCE 95
VIII. HOW THE CREATION CENTERED ABOUT
A PETTICOAT: A REVISED VERSION OF
DARWIN’S “ASCENT OF MAN” 107
IX. WHEN ADAM WAS A BOY: RANDOM
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE OLDEST
INHABITANT 119
X. ELECTION DAY BEYOND THE STYX 129
XI. NOAH’S PERSONALLY-CONDUCTED
EXCURSION TO EARTH 143
XII. THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE 153
EPILOGUE. THE LAND OF FULFILLED DESIRE 167
_Pleasantries in Passing._
_John Kendrick Bangs, House-boat-on-the-Styx, care The Century
Association, New York—Perhaps you, as self-elected jester at the court
of the Son of the Morning, will wonder that a newspaper man should
deliberately set out on a pilgrimage to Hades. I have often been told I
ought to go there, but I pause on the banks of the Styx for reflection
ere I rush in where all but fools fear to tread. Yet in mirroring
forth the doings of the diocese of Bishop Beelzebub, I shall cast no
reflections save on the dead, who can reflect no more, and like that
other clown, more famous than I, will “use the devil himself with
courtesy.” Having been an iconoclast, and as it is only a step from the
breaking of idols to the smashing of trusts, I have had the temerity to
dream of ending the monopoly of the particular section of the universe
hitherto sacred to Lucifer and Bangs. As you have a copyright on Hades,
you could make it hot for me if I invaded your territory without
permission, so I ask you for a “dead head” pass. I don’t claim more
than my rightful share; there will still be room enough for both of us
to roast chestnuts on the other side of the Styx._
_Pardon this discomfiture of sense by nonsense, yet I am not going
to make an excuse for this abuse of absurdities, for what is nonsense
but the flower of sense, the wine of wit, the harmony of humor sounded
by an organ crankless, the pipe of Pan replaced by one of briar
wood? But as Princess Scheherazade might have said: “That’s another
kind of a smoke as well as another kind of a story.” Even in this
“Stygian Nights’ Entertainment,” I cannot hope to equal her record of
a “Thousand Nights and One”—whether I mean spent in story-telling or
smoking in Hades I leave to your imagination. But then, I am not a
woman!_
_As Hell has ceased to have a place in theology, there is no reason
why the devil should not get his due in fiction. Emigration will set
his way as soon as the character of the Cimmerian climate becomes
definitely ascertained, but my trip to Hades will be more than a
climatological tour. While in the interest of science, my subterranean
explorations ought to point a pun and tangle a tale._
_Your “farthest south” was to the Styx. I shall not linger there, but
if I can elude Cerberus, I shall slip through the gates where we are
told to “abandon hope,” and take up my habitation in Hades, with daily
commutation to New York. Methinks the inquisitor of the fountain pen
ought to have as much fun from a frolic with the heroes of history in
their present abode as the inquisitor of the fork and flame._
_Nor do I fear that this Stygian sequel to “the history that is
written” will be shunned as something sacrilegious, for the average
American is so generous regarding bookmakers that he will buy anything,
concerning anything, at any time and in any place. He will not even
register a protest on the ledger of the Hotel Hereafter!_
_If you will permit a newspaper man to go on a second “Pursuit of the
Houseboat,” I would like to dedicate this account of a trip to the
playground of Pluto to the man who blazed the way to Hell. May I have
a shady corner in Hades, with the degree—three above zero—of A. S. S.,
meaning, of course, member of the Asbestos Society of Sinners?_
_Till death do us unite beyond the Styx, and assuring you of a warm
reception, weatherwise and otherwise, when you too shall get a summons
from Satan, believe me, happy to go_
_After you, my dear Bangs_,
_LAWRENCE DANIEL FOGG_.
_Castle Craig,
The Hanging Hills,
Meriden, Connecticut.
All Fools’ Day (April 1)._
* * * * *
_My dear Mr. Fogg—Although many critics have given me Hades, I have
never recorded any exclusive claim to its possession. You are therefore
wholly at liberty to go there yourself—for literary purposes only, I
hope—in so far as I am concerned. As for the dedication, I feel highly
honored and send you my most cordial thanks for the compliment._
_Faithfully yours_,
_JOHN KENDRICK BANGS_.
_The Century Association,
New York, N. Y.
Moving Day (May 1)._
THE SUMMONS FROM SATAN.
CHAPTER I.
The Summons from Satan.
While waiting for an assignment, in the local room of the New York
Universe, I began to while away the time by reading the fulsome
effusions of the press agent of Greater Luna Park. They aroused in me
the spirit of covetousness—I envied the press agent his vocabulary,
which put the supply of superlatives into bankruptcy; and I was jealous
of the success of Thompson & Dundy, whom I hoped some day to rival.
Their first success had come with “A Trip to the Moon;” why might not I—
“Go to Hell,” I read on the paper which the “copy” boy just then thrust
into my hand. Before I could question him, the “devil” had gone.
I glanced suspiciously at my fellow-scribes to see who had perpetrated
the joke, if such it was, but no one seemed to be watching what effect
the command had upon me. I again examined the odd message. It was in
the handwriting of Mr. Burroughs, the city editor, so to him I went.
Holding out the slip of paper, I said:
“I have just received an assignment to ‘cover’ a certain subterranean
resort named after the box in which printers throw battered type, but
as the route there is unfamiliar, I have come to you for instructions.”
The “czar” of the city room frowned, but on reading the missive the
frown was succeeded by an amused smile.
“Who gave you this?” he asked.
“The ‘devil’.”
“That is evident from its contents. It must have been that new boy
Jake, who took the slip off my desk when a telephone call interrupted
me as I was writing. Had I completed the message it would have read ‘Go
to Hellgate.’ A wreck has just occurred there and our marine reporter
has telephoned for assistance. However, you are aware that I have made
it a rule never to change an assignment. I make no exception in your
case to-night.”
“What!” I gasped.
“Remember also that this paper never accepts an excuse. You must either
hand in your story or your resignation. Perhaps I ought to explain
further, though the Universe has no place for the newspaper man who
cannot achieve the impossible or for the reporter who wants a reason
for what he is told to do. We want men who can carry ‘a message to
Garcia’—or to Lucifer, if need be.
“The ting-a-ling of my desk telephone at the psychological moment when
I had unconsciously consigned you to a colder climate than that of New
York, was a summons from Satan. Why it didn’t come through the medium
of the ‘printer’s devil’ is a mystery, unless His Majesty desired
to show me that he is up-to-date in having a system of telephones
installed by a famous electrician who recently crossed his wires and
the Styx. I tried to transfer him to the managing editor by telling him
that he had got a wrong connection, as my jurisdiction is limited, but
he assured me that Hades is less than a hundred miles from New York,
which makes me responsible for what happens there! Not a very pleasant
thought, is it?
“Lucifer wants you to go to Cimmeria and interview Henry the Eighth.
His much-married Majesty is angry at the liberties the historical
novelists have taken with his wives and wants to divorce himself of
his wrath through the columns of the Universe. Satan also wishes us to
decide a dispute between Adam and Methuselah as to whom is the oldest
inhabitant.”
“But how in the name of—”
“Don’t say it,” warned the city editor. “That word is always expressed
by a blank in the paper, so you might as well leave it blank in your
speech. Besides, to say it would be justification for keeping you
down there, and we want that interview without fail, even if you have
to write it on asbestos and deliver it to mortals at a seance of the
Society for Psychic Research. We want the work well done, so you will
have to take your chances of being scorched.
“Discussions regarding Hades have waxed almost as hot as the subject
of dispute itself. Most people believe it is built on the Turkish bath
plan with departments of varying temperature. Those are the kind of
people who swallow the thermometer of Dr. Doubt and die by degrees. If
you find it as pleasant as John Kendrick Bangs did, you will want to
stay and join the Stygian smart set, so I’ll transfer your insurance
from the Equality to the Rock of Gibraltar and see to it that your
sister does not starve or freeze, whatever may be the climatic fate of
her brother.
“Don’t take the subway route to the under world, for then your chances
of coming back would be grounded. You are to take the Twenty-third
Street Ferry for the Jersey shore. New York and Hell are said to be
convertible terms, but I’ve never before heard New Jersey given that
distinction. However, Bangs says that’s the route, and as he plays golf
with good intentions over there every summer, he ought to know.
“Don’t take any baggage, except perhaps your sister’s sunshade, as only
shades and shady characters are permitted to cross the River Styx. You
more nearly come under the second category than any other member of the
staff, so I have chosen you. As you may need ‘money to burn,’ call on
the cashier for a ‘sinking fund’ before you start on your journey.
“By-the-by, while you are in Hades you might ask John Paul Jones
whether he would prefer burial in New York, Washington, Annapolis,
Philadelphia or Ocean Grove. That would be a ‘scoop’ worth more than
the marital intemperance of the Mormon king. Get his signature so
that if ‘our friends, the enemy,’ cry fake we can show them ‘what’s
in a name.’ As Mr. Bangs, by the exercise of his imagination, was
enabled to penetrate the Stygian regions, a newspaper man should have
no difficulty in doing likewise by the exercise of his nerve; but if
Charon bars the gate owing to your being still in the flesh, this will
admit you. It’s a skeleton key.”
Half an hour later I stood on the deck of a ferryboat which was plowing
the waters of the North River. Obedience to the commands of the “czar”
of the city room soon becomes second nature to a newspaper man, and I
had often boasted that I would go anywhere on earth or under the earth
if sent there by Mr. Burroughs. I squared my shoulders to the breeze
from the bay and resolved that I would not fail now that I had been put
to the test, even if—A shudder finished the sentence; my mind stood
palsied as I faced the Unknown.
It was a night of Stygian blackness, just the one to be chosen for such
a dark mission. We were now nearing the Jersey shore and could hear the
lap of the waves on the piling in the slip. A blaze of light astern
showed that one of the boats was on its return trip. The hands of the
clock on the ferry building pointed to midnight.
Out of the inky blackness suddenly loomed a great battleship which
struck as much terror to our hearts as if it had been the Flying
Dutchman. Had it been a merchantman we should have thought it was
indeed the famous phantom ship, for it displayed no lights and the
decks were deserted. Our captain signalled to reverse engines, but the
order came too late. The two vessels collided with a mighty crash.
There was a rending of timbers, an inrushing of water, a cry of despair
from the passengers, then a stampede for the life preservers.
I had no sooner got a cork belt properly adjusted, as I thought, than
the ferryboat sank. The suction drew me down and down and down; then
I shot up to the surface again, feet foremost. I expected that the
life belt would right me as soon as I came to the surface, but as I
continued to hang head downward, the awful truth flashed over me—the
belt had not been sufficiently tightened under my arms and had slipped
down. Convulsively I struggled, but in the effort only succeeded in
swallowing more water. The blur of a thousand lights danced before my
eyes in the floating bubbles of the phosphorescent water, a roar as of
a mighty artillery thundered in my ears—then all became a blank; in
newspaper parlance, I had ceased to be “live matter.”
That sinking fund with which I had provided myself before leaving the
mundane earth must have carried me a long distance downward, for when
I opened my eyes I was upon the banks of the River Styx. Presently
Charon’s yacht came in sight. There was no one on board but Captain
Charon himself, for with the exception of Lazarus, John Kendrick Bangs,
and myself, no round trip tickets have ever been issued to Hades.
“Step lively, please,” yelled Charon, who had evidently been a Broadway
trolley conductor earlier in his career. His success in knocking down
fares had prompted Satan to employ him to transfer “fares” over the
River Styx. The American invasion has extended downward as well as
outward. To hear the motto of New York on the banks of the Styx made me
feel quite at home, especially when Charon added: “Plenty of room up
front.”
A number of shades had stepped aboard the yacht. I was following them
when Charon halted me.
“Stop your whistling,” he commanded. “Do you think this is a Sunday
school picnic or a political rally? I don’t believe you are eligible
for the journey, anyway. Hades is the only place within the fifty-mile
limit that is not a side show for New York tourists. This yacht
transports shades only.”
“Well, you see,” I began hesitatingly, “Lorimer says clothes don’t make
the man, but that they make three-fourths of him, and this suit is of
the very latest shade of blue.”
“I’ve been told gray is fashionable just now,” he commented,
critically. “Everybody in Hades has the blues, so you won’t be off
color,” he added, somewhat mollified.
“Then you know my ancestors are all shades,” I pleaded, “and our city
editor says I have a shady reputation.”
“A newspaper man!” Charon gasped, his face growing pale. “I’ll have to
let you come aboard, or you will go back and ‘roast’ me, and I get all
the ‘roasting’ I can stand in Hades between trips. A newspaper man!
“Nuff said. Jump aboard.”
“Where is the house-boat?” I asked, ever on the lookout for “copy.”
“Everyone nowadays asks that fool question,” Charon retorted, angrily.
“I believe John Bangs, like George Eliot, is a woman, for he can’t keep
a secret, while Harper & Brothers offer him royalties for it. Shortly
after the ‘Pursuit of the House-boat’ that craft disappeared from the
river and Sherlock Holmes with it. He went back to haunt Conan Doyle, I
guess. I hope he won’t come back again in a hurry, for he made no end
of trouble with his inferences and his deductions.”
“What—”
“No more questions, if you please. I am not on the witness stand, nor
will I consent to be interviewed. Besides, talking is an infraction of
the rules of the Asbestos Society.”
“Do they seek to muzzle the press?” I asked indignantly.
“So few newspaper men come this way that that isn’t necessary,”
returned Charon. “We have a free press. It is said that ‘the devil
frequently becomes a publisher by way of diversion.’ This is the Styx,
not the Delaware, and we are going to Hades, not to Philadelphia, thank
goodness! The order was framed to muzzle some one more formidable than
reporters or devils—woman!”
“The Asbestos Society is quite a suggestive name.”
“Its formation was quite recent. A learned scientist up on the earth,
by tapping on the ground to invoke Pluto, discovered extensive deposits
of asbestos in Hades. As soon as the news reached the Styx, nothing
would satisfy ‘Boss’ Tweed but the formation of a society for the
purpose of robbing cremation of its traditional terrors. As to wish is
to have, every denizen of the domain of the departed is now wearing
an asbestos suit. Dives must have his diversion, even if the devil is
cheated out of his own.”
We had crossed over the Styx. Charon quickly made fast to a wharf and
prepared to disembark. As I landed I noticed on the dock a legend which
read: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
At last I was in Hades!
SHADY SINNERS OF THE STYX.
CHAPTER II.
Shady Sinners of the Styx.
I was in the region of Outer Darkness to which the dead are banished to
await the judgment. All about me was a misty blackness so oppressive
that one felt as if wedged between mountains. My feet sank in the soft
earth, composed of those good intentions with which I had helped to
pave the road to Hell. Voices of other days seemed to sound in my ears;
out of the shadowy mist forms of ghostly men and women emerged and
then were lost to sight, swallowed up in the darkness. Perceiving a
glimmering light in the distance I hastened toward it. A phantom house
barred my path, but I flitted through it as though it were not. A pale
twilight now made objects discernible and I breathed more freely, for
I no longer stumbled over the good resolutions, which, being broken,
blocked the pavement.
A troop of spectres surrounded me and tried to stop my progress. Shades
though they were, their attentions were annoying and I tried to brush
them aside. My hands passed through shadows and the phantoms laughed in
derision.
“What’s the news?” they cried again and again.
I hadn’t come to Hades to be interviewed, and knowing from the inside
some of its perils, I declined to relate what the upper world was
doing. This enraged the shades, who gathered about me threateningly.
Just then one of my companions on the Styx yachting trip came to my
aid. His appearance seemed to inspire the spectres with terror, for
they all fled. The newcomer was talkative.
“Did you recognize in the leader of that band our old friend,
Diogenes?” he asked.
“No, I never met the gentleman. Up on earth when any one is looking
for an honest man, he doesn’t come to a newspaper office: he goes to a
detective agency.”
My companion gave a scarcely perceptible start.
“Diogenes is no longer looking for an honest man. Poor fellow, he knows
it’s no use. He thought he had an honest man a few years ago in ‘Boss’
Tweed, but the politician fell from the high pedestal of the ‘man
higher up’ when he consented to pose for a caricature of himself by
Nast. Our friend of the tub and lantern has begun to wonder if when he
finds an honest man it will prove to be a bachelor girl! Not long ago
President Harper sent a professor from the University of Chicago to
tell Diogenes that he could have an honest man as soon as he had bled
him for another hundred million. So the philosopher is waiting for—”
“John D. Rockefeller!”
“Your deduction, my dear journalist, does you credit.”
Somewhat piqued that I did not reply, the stranger said:
“Why don’t you express wonder that I knew you were a journalist? Watson
always does.”
“There is only one Watson,” I protested. “Besides, it has always
seemed to me that he was singularly obtuse. Unless you lent him
your spectacles, Watson couldn’t hold down a job in the city room
of a New York daily for twenty-four hours. I’m not a journalist,
but I acknowledge that ‘newspaper man’ is written all over me, from
the pencil in my pocket to my ‘nose for news,’ which is abnormally
developed. It’s the easiest thing in the world to tell a newspaper man
by his nose, an actor by his clothes and a detective by his cocaine
syringe. For instance, you are—”
“The shade of Sherlock Holmes, just returned from a trip to earth. But
I really died when I fell over the cliff. That fall made Conan Doyle
a Sir. He thought that if he could bring me back to life I would make
him an Earl. He tried to breathe in me the breath of life, but while
the dear public wept at my death, they viewed my resurrection with
indifference. Ghost stories have been exorcised for all time, so I’m
back here for good.”
“Did Satan send for you?”
“Yes, to assist him in ultimately securing the three persons on earth
whom he is most eagerly awaiting—David Belasco, John Kendrick Bangs,
and Marie Corelli.
“The author of the ‘Darling of the Gods,’ in order to lend realism to
the final scene, made a compact with Satan to reproduce Hades on the
New York stage; in return he is to give his soul—or his salary—as soon
as the play has run its course. That’s the reason Belasco prolonged the
run of ‘The Darling of the Gods,’ even after it ceased to pay expenses.
A theatrical advance agent, who is to transfer the entire production
to Hades, was here several weeks ago and said that the thousandth
performance had been reached. Yo San, who is serving her thousand years
of penance—a year for each day of the play’s run—says she never would
have thought of being wicked if Belasco had not prompted her from the
wings. The man who could write ‘To lie a little is better than to be
unhappy much’ deserves a place alongside of George Washington.”
“What! Is the father of his country here, too?”
“Oh, yes! they’re all here. Washington is more of a father than ever.
He had no family in life, but he has one here larger than he likes—the
children of the only woman he never loved. It’s strange how many women
go out of their way to remind George how he met defeat at their hands
long before he fought the British.”
“Evidently women of those days didn’t appreciate veracity.”
“Don’t throw that cherry tree at his head when you see him or he’ll
think you have an axe to grind. He has never been able to find out who
wrote that fable, Æsop being dead and George Ade unborn. When he does,
Hades will be too hot to hold both of them, although of course there’s
no change of weather to speak of, as the mercury never seeks the bulb.
It is always trying to knock the roof off its glass house; that’s the
reason there is no throwing of stones in the under world.”
“But what has Satan against John Kendrick Bangs?”
“His Majesty likes to be taken seriously. Most practical jokers, you
know, resent a joke at their own expense. While he delights in playing
with men, to make fun of him is an offense which Satan cannot condone.
Then you know Bangs sent me in ‘Pursuit of the House-boat’ and I
frustrated a great many plans of His Majesty.
“Lucifer describes woman—to disabuse your mind of the impression that
I have held converse with his Satanic Highness, I will state that I
am quoting Marie Corelli, his press agent—Lucifer describes woman as
a frivolous doll of pink and white with long hair frequently not her
own. He hates women, for they have made him what he is and keep him so,
according to Marie. ‘Women,’ he says, ‘are much less sensitive than men
and infinitely more heartless. They are mothers of the human race and
the faults of the race are chiefly due to them.’ Considering that the
eternal feminine is so fond of him, I am surprised that the Evil One
does not reciprocate, but then Lucifer was once an angel and we all
know that however angelic she of infinite variety may appear, she is
not an angel. I have heard men of moods and appetite talk of women in
the same strain as Lucifer and so have ceased to wonder that each woman
knows one particular man—usually her husband—whom she describes as a
devil.
“Lucifer had found out the truth of the Latin proverb which says ‘Trust
not a woman, even when dead,’ and as he didn’t want any divided skirt
rule, he had planned to have Capt. Kidd take them to Paris or to Italy,
which Robert Burton says is a hell for women. Satan thought he was well
rid of them until after the day of judgment, so you can imagine his
burning rage when, following Bangs’ orders, I brought them safely back
to Hades. When the humorist leaves the earth it will be jumping out of
the frying pan of a vivid imagination into a very hot fire of reality.”
“And Marie Corelli? I thought her ‘Sorrows of Satan’—”
“That’s just it. Through all the centuries Lucifer lacked a champion
until Marie Corelli sat in judgment on the world and gave it fits after
reading ‘Paradise Lost’ and losing her heart as well as her head—as
many another girl has done—to the angel who ‘fell, never to rise
again.’ Lucifer would have had no attraction for most women if he had
not fallen. Milton made him a hero, many persons have embraced him, but
no one ever fully understood him except Marie, and great shall be her
reward.”
“How can there be rewards in Hades?”
“Oh, we have our society here just as in the upper region, only the
world asks who a man is; here the Smart Set asks who he was. Caste is
as strong here as in your Four Million and in our upper Ten Thousand.”
“But even yet I do not understand how the champion of His Satanic
Majesty is to be rewarded.”
“Lucifer has long wanted a wife. Marie Corelli alone pleases his fancy,
besides possessing the necessary qualifications for the position. Here
she will be supreme; she will rule even the arch fiend himself. To her
kings will bow and princes kneel. Won’t she make it hot for some of the
reviewers who ‘roasted’ her on earth! There is only one place where
reviews live—in Hell. There is a torridness of climate here which
agrees with them. After all, Hades is no more than a caricature of your
world and the doings of men.
“Your society is but vanity; what, then, shall be said of the
festivities of Hades? We dine, and our Barmecide feast leaves a
nauseating feeling of emptiness. Here amusement is the lash of
correction. All is illusion; nothing is real. The fashions of all
the centuries flourish here at one time, for every fashion which has
had its day straightway goes to Hell. I sometimes think that is the
principal reason why women are dissatisfied here; they had to follow
the fashion in vogue while they were on the earth and when a late comer
appears in a new style hat or dress the other women suffer torments
worse than any Satan could devise, especially on Easter Sunday.
“The twilight of Hades forms a sort of X-ray which passes through the
clothes and flesh and enables us to see into the heart and mind of one
another. The other day Paul Jones met George Washington, walking arm in
arm with King George the Fourth. He stopped to say:
“Admiral, I’m glad my children are giving you the honors which are
justly yours.” Yet as his mind was as an open book, Jones read his
thoughts thus:
“‘Why couldn’t that meddlesome Porter let well enough alone, instead of
bringing a mummy from France to oust me from my place as first in the
hearts of my countrymen?’”
Sherlock Holmes puffed reflectively on the shade of a cigar for a few
moments; then knocking off an imaginary ash, he continued:
“Whether matches are made in Heaven is a question, but they certainly
are not made in Hell, despite the abundance of brimstone and the
presence of Lucifer. Courtship is impossible where the heart betrays
and fine words are belied by revealed thoughts, where the naked truth
cannot be clothed in ‘fig’ language. When all reality has vanished,
there can be no delusion, so that men who seldom spoke in the other
world save to utter a falsehood have come to speak the truth here.
There is only one exception—George Washington.”
“You are rather hard on—”
“Remember that Hades is the only land which holds the mirror up to
nature. In the flash of the earth’s footlights, we act our part in the
play of life to dazzle other men and blind them to our faults. Life is
a series of poses, each like the film of a moving picture which by the
juggling of the operator suggests continuous action, though composed
of many lifeless photographs. Our life is an optical illusion. We are
judged by what men see us do and yet they perhaps never see us when the
mask is off and we have forgotten to pose. We strike our attitude and
the world applauds or jeers. Only when life’s candle is snuffed out
do we forget to pose, for then a great awe is upon us. What a haunting
thought it is that ‘the evil that men do lives after them’! In life we
hugged our sins to ourselves, guarding them zealously; so in death, why
cannot they, like the good we do, be decently interred with our bones?
When we are laid low, why must our sins go on a rampage of their own,
both in the upper and the under worlds? In Hades the mask has been torn
away and we see man as he is, not as he would have us see him.”
“That must be diverting.”
“Hades is the best place in the universe for the study of history.
Socrates is here but his philosophy, as well as his wife, has deserted
him; he is now a chronic kicker. Moses strikes his rod on the rocks in
vain, for molten lava flows instead of water; the result of his rage
is seen at Vesuvius, the devil’s chimney. Pontius Pilate is forever
washing his hands, but the red blood flows afresh. Shakespeare tells
him that the damned spot will not out. Eve is setting the fashion in
fig leaves and serpentine dresses, but like her earthly descendants, is
discontented, although she takes a certain spiteful satisfaction in the
fact that the number of women in Hades is on the increase. Methuselah
is hunting for the fountain of perpetual youth. He wants to be a boy
again and his favorite poem is ‘Backward, turn backward, O Time, in
thy flight.’ He suffers a periodic attack of second childishness every
thousand years.”
“And John Paul Jones?”
“Poor Paul! he never will forgive me for disturbing his bones.”
“I thought Ambassador Porter—”
“Do you mean to say that Watson hasn’t told the world about my last
and greatest case? Why, that was the very reason I returned to earth!
Ambassador Porter came over to England and besought Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle to find the dead sea dog. Only one man could do it—myself.
Lucifer refused to give me up, but Dr. Doyle matched his cunning with
that of His Satanic Majesty, gave him a dose of cocaine, and won.
Watson says each case is more difficult than the last, but I do pride
myself that this exploit would have baffled every one save the great
Sherlock Holmes. By a series of deductions I came to the conclusion
that the bones of John Paul Jones would be found wrapped in tinfoil,
encased in a leaden coffin, swimming in alcohol under a stable. With
this information it was easy for Porter to do the rest. As Watson says:
‘It was all so absurdly simple!’”
“Tell me your story.”
At sight of my note book the detective shook his head.
“I commissioned Watson to do that, but Conan Doyle, who owns the
copyright, may wish to give the Ambassador the credit until he comes
to join us on the banks of the Styx. I never did seek notoriety, but
Dr. Doyle, while waiting for patients who never came, reversed the
usual practice of physicians; he brought a dead man to life, and of
course I was so grateful that I took cocaine to drug my modesty and—the
literary market.”
“The latest news we had of you on earth was that you had retired to
study bee-farming on Sussex Downs.”
“Bee-farming? That is the most unkind sting of all! Then Sussex must
reach down to Hades, for here I am, Oslerized and ostracized. James
Payne calls books the chloroform of the mind and so I have been
embalmed between covers, and ‘finis’ written for my epitaph. Never
mind, it is a matter of indifference to me now that I have had my
revenge on that pirate.”
“Pirate!” I gasped.
Holmes laughed at my horrified tone.
“You forget that I’m English,” he said. “When I pointed out to Porter
that the way to fame lay in a dead man’s shoes I paid off a score of
more than a century’s standing. Maybe you are not aware that when a
body is disturbed after being once buried, its soul must inhabit the
Outer Darkness a thousand years longer than the original decree. Let us
see how the admiral bears up under the shock. In Wishland that is an
easy matter. Paul Jones, I desire your presence.”
A moment’s pause, then out of the twilight flitted the spectre of a
man in naval dress. A husky voice came to us as from the throat of a
phonograph:
“A thousand years more! No quarter! No quarter! ‘I had only just begun
to fight!’”
The detective laughed mirthlessly.
“What a merry place is Hades! Imagine a thing and you have it. Think,
and at once the thought takes visible form. Truly, this is a land of
magic that needs no Aladdin’s lamp. Behold the jugglery of fulfilled
desire—that is John Paul Jones!”
JOHN BROWN’S BODY AND THE
BONES OF JOHN PAUL JONES.
CHAPTER III.
John Brown’s Body and the Bones of John Paul Jones.
That Paul Jones was not alone soon became evident. With his coming,
other ghostly forms had taken shape in the semi-gloom and the admiral
became the centre of a throng which included the greatest men of all
time—the only great men, in fact, for one must die before he can be
accorded any measure of greatness. Only in the perspective of the past
does a man loom large in the vision of the present.
“It were better to be a live politician than a dead hero,” observed
Paul Jones, reading my thoughts. Then he sighed.
“But you are honored on earth and even here,” I said, with a glance
around the circle at the illustrious members of the Asbestos Society of
Sinners.
“Earthly honor is but hysteria,” Jones replied wearily. “Yet, ‘twas
ever thus. One is usually crushed by the honors showered upon him, as
were the Romans in attending the banquet of Emperor Elagabalus, who
rained roses upon his guests until all were buried and smothered by
the flowers. Like them ‘bouquets’ are thrown at me when I am dead, of
which I would have been more appreciative while living. Yet ‘bouquets’
are preferable to ‘brickbats,’ even though they do not make so lasting
an impression. Hades, as you will soon learn, is more of a news centre
than London, and so I have heard that in recent years the city hall
of New York was draped in mourning for Hiram Cronk, last survivor of
the War of 1812, whose only claim to fame was that he did not die
sooner. If earthly honors died on earth I wouldn’t complain, but they
are all reproduced in Hades, which is a burlesque of the upper world.
Ever since Ambassador Porter found a body which he thought might have
looked like me had I looked like that body, I have been given homage by
every man in Hades. The joke of the matter—if a Scotchman may take an
Irish bull by the horns and joke at his own funeral—is that there is no
certainty about the body being mine.”
“Do you doubt it in the face of—”
“When face to face with a dead doubt, don’t look a gift corpse in the
mouth,” interrupted the admiral dryly. “Had Porter done so, he would
have discovered two gold teeth, and I really must insist that if that
body is mine, those teeth were filled after I died. In the old days,
before the doctors invented appendicitis, I did not mind swallowing all
the grape sent with the enemy’s compliments, but I always did draw the
line at the dentist’s chair, and any manipulator of the forceps would
have struck a snag had he investigated my corpse too closely. Perhaps
I ought not to complain, for it may be that if I keep my mouth shut I
shall get a decent funeral, and unfortunately this is supposed to be my
funeral.”
“But the proofs,” I remonstrated.
“My dear fellow, it is easy to pile up proofs on a dead man, for he
cannot rise up to refute them. Here is a dead body; Paul Jones is
dead: therefore, this must be Paul Jones. That may be logic but it is
not common-sense. Yet this text-book reasoning is no more absurd than
the ‘proofs.’ First of all, there was the absence of a coffin plate;
had the body been missing instead of the name it would have been more
worthy of notice. An autopsy has revealed traces of the disease of
which I died, and this after a hundred years! If they were as expert
in diagnosing the living as they are in cutting up the dead, fewer of
the mistakes of the doctors would have to be buried from sight and
mind. Then these learned savants triumphantly point to the height as
a sure proof that this is the body of Jones and not of Smith, though
both families are so numerous that the bones of one more or less
doesn’t matter save as a museum exhibit—from which fate may the Stars
and Stripes protect me! It seems from this deduction that I was the
only person ever born into the world who ever attained to a stature of
five feet and seven inches. That’s what a man gets for measuring up to
the standard! The most remarkable coincidence of all is that neither
uniform nor sword was found. Evidently Paris makes it a custom to bury
its dead, civilian and officer alike, in a shroud of mystery, epaulets
and gold stripes.
“Really, the only proof distilled is that the body was found floating
in alcohol. I was so fond of that preservative in life, according to
the historical novelists, that if a dead body can move of its own
volition, I know mine would have sought out the alcohol. It may be the
body of John Jones or John Smith, or it may be the remains of some
Johnny Craupaud of a century ago; who knows? A slip of genealogy has
lost thrones and made more than one man get off the earth.”
“At least you must concede it is not often that many cities squabble
over the honor of giving sepulture to a man’s remains.”
“After a century of neglect,” retorted Jones, “‘history repeats
itself,’ as my friend Tom Heyward will tell you.”
“‘Seven cities warred for Homer being dead
Who living had no roof to shroud his head!’”
“It’s a wonder some of those cities did not foresee the coming events
of which Homer was the shadow and make a play for Jones. Now, Seward,
it’s your turn. Come, Tom, speak your little piece.”
“‘Great Homer’s birthplace seven rival cities claim;
Too mighty such monopoly of fame.’”
Paul Jones was about to speak when he was interrupted by a newcomer who
chanted:
“‘Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.’”
“That is Mr. Anon,” whispered Lord Bacon. “Shakespeare is quite jealous
of him, for Anon claims to be the most voluminous author in the world
and, like Byron’s reviewer, has ‘just enough learning to misquote.’ He
seldom quotes anyone correctly, not even excepting himself, but in this
he is not unlike those other authors whom excess of egotism persuades
into signing their names to that which would be their own had not some
one said it before.”
“‘Heed him not, gentle sirs,
’Tis but the fool,’”
observed Shakespeare.
“I ought to give you a pension for making my sayings so well known;
I notice you never quote your own sentiments because mine answer all
purposes so much better.”
It was Lord Bacon who spoke.
“I was talking of you, I grant that,” retorted Shakespeare. “Shall I
repeat it? My wife says that it’s only by a hair—”
“You two men are always quarreling,” interrupted Anon. “Please keep the
age of Anne from his lordship’s notice, for she hath a way to fry his
Bacon. My lord, you should never judge a poet by his hair.”
“Nor yet by his feet,” interrupted Longfellow; “although if a poet
looks well to his feet there are no heights to which he cannot climb.”
“I accept the measure of your judgment,” went on Anon calmly. “As for
the lady, Delilah’s barber stunt convinced Samson it isn’t wise to tell
the truth to a woman.”
“Yet I must insist,” continued Lord Bacon, “that Shakespeare is rather
shy of hair to be a real poet. Of course, I have heard the story that
Anne Hathaway, after a conference with Delilah, sought to reduce the
strength of the Samson of letters by cutting his name from Shakespeare
to Shakspeare and trimming his hair to make assurance doubly sure, but
Lot’s wife, in looking backward, has recommended that the pig-tale be
swallowed with a grain of salt. My dear Willie, your poetry has pains
in its feet, your rhyme has received the absent treatment, and your
rythm, like your hair, is lacking.”
“Oh, well, hair doesn’t grow on brains,” retorted the claimant to
“Hamlet.”
But Anon was not to be out-argued, and continued:
“A hirsute chrysanthemum growing on a man’s head is more likely to
indicate a quarterback Freshman on the gridiron than a hunchback poet
on the Mount of Parnassus. As for the poet’s other extreme, metrical
feet are not always symmetrical.”
“You’ve told it all—so for a spell
For more rhymes where’s the reason?
Besides, just now we are in h—”
“That’s blank verse,” interrupted Shakespeare.
“You mean damn!” interjected Lord Bacon, profanely. “Let me lend you
the metres, Bill, so that you may measure up to my standard, or else
cork the rythmic bottle and spill no more mimic blood of red ink.”
“The gas man is the only person who controls my metre,” said the
Bard of Avon, chuckling at his own wit. “You quite sweep me off my
metaphorical feet. That may not be original, but I have no aspirations
in the direction of originality.”
“The last broker who arrived from Wall Street says that you are too
full of quotations to be original,” sneered Lord Bacon.
“Have you forgotten that you once said ‘a man that hath no virtue in
himself ever envieth virtue in others?’ Bartlett allows you seven
pages, while he gives me more than a hundred. Familiarity breeds
imitators. Even in quotations, you follow after me.”
“If you wear so long a face, you’ll stub your toe on your chin,”
observed Anon, noting that Lord Bacon was getting the worst of his
controversy with Shakespeare. “Never mind Bill’s raving. Burton
tells him he larded his lean books with the fat of others’ works.
Maybe that’s the reason why he gives his readers mental dyspepsia;
to inwardly digest ‘Hamlet’ would disagree with the stomach of an
ostrich. After all, the world knows that Shakespeare was not a man but
a syndicate, to which I was the largest contributor. I’ll call the man
a plagiarist who says I’m a liar.”
No one cared to knock off the verbal chip which Anon had put upon his
shoulders, so Paul Jones resumed:
“Have I equalled Homer’s record?”
“Of course,” I answered; “you, as an American, couldn’t stand being
beaten by a foreigner like Homer, even though you are both dead ones.
You are claimed by New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Arlington,
Richmond, Fredericksburg, Annapolis, and Ocean Grove. I believe there
are a few other cities whose names have escaped my memory. Have you any
preference in the matter?”
“It’s odd no one has thought about consulting me before. I could have
settled the controversy at once. France did not treat me or my bones
very well, yet I can’t say I am glad to leave there. It isn’t very
pleasant to be dead, but it’s worse to have people squabble over your
body. I wonder if Porter ever heard the adage ‘Let the dead rest in
peace,’ and that other one ‘Cursed be he who moves my bones!’ You’ve
seen two dogs fight over a bone, but you never saw the bone fight. I am
nothing but bones.”
“New York’s claim—”
“I hope they won’t bury me in New York. I’ve heard it said that the
metropolis is noisy enough to wake the dead and it is certain that my
presence would make Captain Landais turn over in his grave. I always
did bore Landais and so if I invaded the territory of the tired, St.
Patrick’s cemetery would yawn and give up its dead.”
“Had you been a politician,” observed Matt Quay, “some faction of our
party would long since have unearthed one of your letters in which you
had selected your burial place.”
“You have not yet told me your choice,” I reiterated, remembering the
city editor’s parting words.
“I would rather be embalmed in the throbbing heart of the sea, with
which my own heart beat so long in unison. My grave has been unmarked
for a century, so why not forever? I would prefer to be commander of
that greatest army of all, the unknown dead, whose resting place is
marked only by monuments of billows and flowers of feathery spray. A
bridal veil of silver surge is as elaborate a shroud as I desire.”
“How about cremation?”
“We’ll get enough of that down here some day, so it is useless to
undergo the ‘roasting’ process twice. Yet it has its advantages.
Soldiers and sailors don’t get much time for godliness, you know, and
as cleanliness is next to it, cremation might—”
“John Brown’s body lies a smouldering in—”
That was as far as Mr. Anon could proceed, for he had fired John
Brown’s anger. That worthy said he was hanged if he were going to allow
anybody to “roast” him by any such incendiary remark.
“Choke him off,” came the chorus from all sides. “Here’s a rope. String
him up.”
This brought up such unpleasant recollections of the past that John
Brown subsided. I hastened to pacify him by observing:
“You have no cause for disquiet, for your bones lie peacefully in the
Adirondacks at North Elba.”
“Hush!” warned Holmes. “That word always invokes Napoleon.”
The Corsican had indeed materialized. He glared at me as he said:
“Peace at Elba? If you found peace there, you accomplished more than
did the great Napoleon, and that were impossible.”
“Ah, but you see I hadn’t met my Waterloo,” I retorted. Wellington
laughed tauntingly.
“Neither had I when I went to Elba,” supplemented Bonaparte, and then
and there I met my Waterloo at the hands of Napoleon. It is poor policy
for a writer of history to dispute the maker of it, though I am aware
the historical novelists hold other views. For a moment it seemed as if
Wellington’s tantalizing mirth would precipitate another battle between
the illustrious warriors. Then the two men shook hands, looking like
two prize fighters about to enter the ring. Nothing happened, however,
and with a trace of disappointment in his tone,—for immortals are very
like mortals and he dearly loved a fight,—Paul Jones went on:
“It is a good thing I’m dead, for living heroes always get restless and
tumble from the clay pedestal on which an admiring public places them.
Heroes should be handled with care, for they are perishable goods. Both
Dewey and Dowie have had their day. Dewey turned his house over to
his wife so the sheriff couldn’t get it, as many another man has done
before and since. Evidently the dear public didn’t believe the two
were one, for the hero-worshippers swept him to obscurity on a tidal
wave of regretful tears. I wonder if he said it was all Mrs. Dewey’s
fault. You know it is more difficult to manage a wife in America
nowadays than it was in the days of Solomon, when the wives were so
frequent that a man couldn’t remember which one was to blame.”
“The English still claim that you were a pirate,” I observed.
“I feel quite honored at so illustrious an accession to our ranks,”
said Captain Kidd.
The admiral smiled.
“Stop your Kidding,” he said to the pirate. “I believe my conduct was
unsatisfactory to them on several occasions when I bearded the lion in
his channel. The English are queer. They made Captain Pierson a baronet
for getting defeated.”
“If we had had Paul Jones,” said Lord Nelson, “we would have made him
prime minister and buried him in Westminster Abbey. England is the most
grateful of all nations.”
“You need not remind me of the ungratefulness of republics,” rejoined
Jones. “I have experienced it, though I am not a living example. But,
my lord, I wish I had had you pitted against me in the days of ’77; I
would dearly have loved to have exchanged shots with you.”
“You are too kind,” drawled Nelson, lifting his monocle to his blind
eye. “I really can’t see you in that light.”
“You have an eye single to your own interest,” I said to Nelson; then
turning to Jones:
“We have swung around the circle and you haven’t yet told me—”
“We will leave it to Roosevelt,” replied the admiral. “Whether it is
John Brown, John Jones or Johnny Craupaud, he will see that the body
gets a square deal—box!”
“How about your epitaph? I would suggest: First in war, last in peace,
and at present in the hearts of his countrymen, to mark the tomb of the
father of the American navy. That epitomizes your whole career.”
“I do not want to usurp Washington’s paternal honors. Of course all
epitaphs are written by Mephisto, ‘the father of liars,’ as you
know, but if mine were to be truthful, my tomb would bear the simple
inscription:
“Pause, stranger, yet weep not,
For here lies the body of
John Paul Jones—perhaps!”
HENRY VIII. AND HIS HAREM IN
HADES.
CHAPTER IV.
Henry VIII. and His Harem in Hades.
“Quaker worship may be as appropriate as any other kind on Sunday,”
observed William Penn, “but this silence is getting on my nerves. Why
don’t you say something funny, you humorists? What’s the use of having
famous funny men in this society if they cannot enliven Hades on a dull
Sabbath?”
“I’m not in the humor to be humorous to-night,” said Bret Harte, who
was busily engaged in making “Condensed Novels” by tearing to shreds
without reading, their contents from the title page to the finis; book
reviewing they designate it up on earth.
“Do you call that wit?” sneered Eugene Field.
“If you can define the difference between wit and humor, I’ll promise
to laugh the next time you see things at night,” retorted Harte.
“Eternity is too short for definitions, except to a philologist,”
evaded Field. “Ask Dick Whately; the archbishop of Dublin is the only
man who discriminates English synonyms.”
“I know when you don’t ask me,” replied the doctor. “Consult Webster.”
“Mortal cannot live by wit alone,” commented that philologist.
“Being immortal, I can,” said Johnson.
“Mark that down, Boswell, even if Shakespeare does object to the
doctor’s company on the Mount of Parnassus. A man of perpetual
inspiration ought to use a fountain pen, but in the absence of a point
to Johnson’s wit, Demosthenes will lend you a pebble.”
“As I live in a glass hot-house, I never throw stones,” gurgled the
orator, after a vain effort to clear his throat of a pill from the
laboratory of Nature.
“On earth I always kept a box of bon mots on my chimney piece,” put in
Sydney Smith.
“If they had been chocolate bon bons, you would have been a sustaining
favorite among the ladies,” chuckled King Henry the Eighth.
“Where knowledge of women is concerned, I bow to your marital
Majesty,” acquiesced Smith. “Mere man never becomes a post-graduate on
femininology, but he can manage to get up a bowing acquaintance with
women after he is married to six of them. It seems to me that Utah
would be a good place to study her ‘of infinite variety.’ I have often
thought that much of Solomon’s wisdom came from his three hundred
wives.”
“With such a match-making father,” I put in, my newspaper instinct
scenting “copy,” “I have often wondered why good Queen Bess never
married.”
“I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t keep up the family reputation,” answered
the king, “but I guess she thought I did marrying enough for the whole
family. Besides, Bess had her hands full ruling the kingdom and her
temper without attempting to rule a husband. However, I never could
understand why she turned a deaf ear to Sir Walter’s pleading. He wooed
her so long with his eyes that she asked him one day why he was such a
mute, inglorious Raleigh. He replied that a beggar who is dumb should
challenge double pity. As many another man has done since then, the
silent lover lost his head over a woman.”
“That’s the King James version,” retorted Sir Walter. “It seems to me
that your Majesty should confine yourself to rattling the skeletons in
your own Bluebeard’s closet.”
“I see you have a sharp tongue to match the edge of the axe which
brought you to your knees. You had a reason for what you did on earth,
but you lost your reason along with your head when you left the upper
world. By the shade of Anne Boleyn,” went on the king, becoming more
and more enraged as he proceeded, “were we on earth, your insolence
should cause you to swing from Tyburn’s tree.”
“You can’t string me up,” sneered Raleigh. “No man ever made a monkey
of me.”
“No, but a woman did. You can’t cloak what you did for Elizabeth. Now
Anne—”
“You forget yourself,” angrily interrupted Anne Boleyn, who had just
come upon the scene.
“But you won’t allow me to forget you!” ruefully retorted the king.
“It’s time you came home, Henry. You’ve been keeping altogether too
late hours at the club recently and I’ve come to take you home.”
“But I had promised to take tea with Catharine Parr,” rebelled Henry.
“You know she is rightfully my wife.”
“Really? You forget that decrees of divorce are not binding in Hades,
whether they have been executed by the hangsman or by the justice.”
“I appeal to Judge Blackstone.”
“This is altogether without precedent, but I must support the lady,”
responded the jurist, gallantly.
“Then take her. Bless you, my children. I’ve no hard feelings, Anne.
May no decrees of court or fate terminate your second union. I’ve
sampled the wine of her womanhood, Judge, and as wine improves with
age, it ought to be even better now than it was some hundreds of years
ago.”
“It isn’t every man who would give his wife a recommendation,”
diplomatically remarked Blackstone, alarmed at the construction Henry
had placed on his gallantry, and noting that Anne Boleyn seemed pleased
thereby. “I fear, however, that Satan would object to any but Lucifer
matches in Hades, so until you strike brimstone, Anne here is still
your wife.”
“How about the others?” groaned Henry.
“You must settle that with them,” evaded the jurist. “I think one wife
would be enough for me, but as you have made your harem, you can’t lie
out of it.”
“Henry!” The tone was threatening. The king meekly arose and cast an
appealing glance at me.
“I would be delighted to have your company,” he said. “In the olden
days I should have commanded, but Anne has taken the command from me.
You know I want you to denounce those hysterical novelists who have
taken liberties with my wives.”
“I’d like to see them take liberties with me,” aggressively brindled
madam.
“They couldn’t do that,” soothingly replied his Majesty. “No, they
painted you in your true colors: a study in black and white.”
“Where do you live?” I inquired.
“On Eighth Avenue, of course,” returned the king, as if that were a
foregone conclusion. “Lucifer named and numbered the streets after
a recent visit to New York. Ward McAllister wanted me to live in
apartments at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, but the ‘skidoo
set’ was not exclusive enough for me and I said I would live on Eighth
Avenue or go back to England. Charon wouldn’t listen to that, as he
said I had given him only a single trip ticket. So I am domiciled on
Eighth Avenue, which we have now reached. Here I live with my six
wives.”
“Six?” I exclaimed, as we entered the royal palace. “I thought it was
eight wives. Why did they call you Henry the Eighth if it were not
because of the number of your consorts? The only thing we Americans
know about you is that you had more wives than the law allows, and
instituted a church to enable you to get another.”
“America?” muttered the king. “I don’t remember where that is. Down
here, however, we refer all questions of geography to Atlas. My dear,
won’t you ask him to come here if he isn’t too weary from carrying on
his shoulder the chip of a world which no one will knock off.”
But Her Grace did not move.
“Your church was instituted too late to be binding on me,” she said,
her nose becoming an acute retrousse. “The word obey didn’t cut any
figure in our matrimonial contract.”
“If I once chopped off your head, as the historians say, you’ve snapped
mine off since,” grumbled his hen-pecked Majesty.
“My head was divorced from my shoulders. I should have preferred the
courts of law to courting the axe.”
“There! don’t cry or you will cause the carpet to mildew. My dear,
never try to salt down a man’s affections with briny tears.”
A queenly woman entered the room. I arose to greet her. The king’s fat
interfered with his gallantry; besides, the woman was his wife, which
explains while it does not justify.
“My sister and my wife,” said Henry, presenting me to Catharine of
Arragon. “It’s the only case on record where a woman, after promising
to be a man’s sister, became his wife. Do you wonder that I began
to feel quite rich in family relations? Although I murdered my
sister-in-law, I left it to the punsters to murder the mothers-in-law
who came after me.”
“The historians say that my fall from kingly favor was a matter of
conscience,” mused Her Grace. “Didn’t the still small voice make itself
heard when you severed the bonds of matrimony with your little hatchet?”
“Not at all, Catharine. I left my conscience on the executioner’s block
to flirt with yours!”
“And married again!”
“Of course. Matrimony always had much attraction for me, although I
realize that a man had better fall into the sea than fall in love
and marry. A corpse devoured by crabs is no less harrowing than the
spectacle of a man devoured by love, and it is better to multiply
crabs than to multiply sinners and fools. Matrimony is a foretaste of
purgatory to which no man should be called upon to submit before death.”
“No wonder you got dyspepsia and gout from indulging your taste.”
“There you are again, Anne, throwing ancient history in my teeth. Did
you ever hear how I got rid of the gout?”
I shook my head.
“Ah, thank goodness, one incident of my life has escaped the novelists.
Lucifer is compiling a mammoth work ‘Every Man His Own Historian’ to
which we are all contributing. It promises to to be one of the ‘six
best sellers.’ Permit me to read a chapter from my autobiography:
“I must have fallen asleep upon my throne. I dreamed that a great
iron safe had fallen upon my feet and awoke to find a hideous-looking
creature seated complacently upon my bandaged foot. I groaned and tried
to shake him off, but he still clung there and the weight of his body
seemed to be pushing red-hot needles into the swollen flesh.
“He took off his cap with a courtly bow.
“‘Allow me to introduce myself as Mr. Gout, M. D.,’ he said.
“‘What! you are Mr. Gout, who is responsible for my sufferings and you
actually have the impudence to come here! Why, oh my foot!’
“‘Do you know why I am so attentive to you?’
“‘From pure cussedness, confound you! Ow-oh, I wish you would keep your
attentions to yourself.’
“‘That’s the way of the world. A man is indiscreet, and when he has to
pay the penalty, lays the blame on some one else. My duty is to remind
you that you cannot abuse this body with impunity.’
“The hideous creature began to jump up and down on my foot. Maddened by
the pain, I picked up a heavy dictionary lying near and hurled seventy
thousand words bound in calf at him. The aim was too low and Webster
fell over my foot. Then I fainted. The Gout had gone!”
“Now that you have disposed of Dr. Gout, let us go back to our original
subject—women,” I said, smiling. “A man who has had six wives ought to
have some knowledge of the feminine character.”
Just then John Heyward entered. The king turned to him.
“Just in time, fool,” he said. “Answer our American friend: What is a
woman?”
“‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.’ That sounds like a
before-treatment advertisement, but is really original with Kipling.
As for myself, although a fool, I don’t attempt to designate a woman
by a descriptive tag, as if she were a special brand of chocolates. To
man, woman is a sphinx endowed with a voice. He never gets more than
a telephonic acquaintance with her, and the woman always hangs up the
receiver and monopolizes the transmitter.”
“Listen to the words of a wise fool who wears a dunce cap for a crown,”
approved Henry. “Right you are, Heyward, and one woman is very much
like another.”
“I beg to differ,” said the poet. “Women are different, not only in
their baptismal labels, but in that some women have a husband and
others have a cat. Women have often been compared to cats, but did
you ever contrast cats and men? Thomas never throws his mother in the
face of his wife. He keeps his own whiskers trimmed and stays home
nights. He does not come back to the partner of his bosom at three A.
M. with a diagonal gait and an asinine gayety, chewing the butt of a
cigar and talking in a tongue that is as unsteady as his legs. Nor does
Tommy slam the door in fourteen languages when Kitty asks how that
blonde hair came on his coat. But we’re all human. If you’re hunting
for a perfect woman, stop—she’s dead; if for a perfect man, you’re a
fool. Elijahs are no longer translated without being prepared for the
undertaker. Yet methinks that if one could forget other folks’ mistakes
as easily as one’s own, there would be less scandal.”
He turned to Catharine Parr.
“One thing has always puzzled me. Why is it that women prefer to be old
men’s darlings, that you enjoy being clouds in the sunset’s glow rather
than in the noontide glory?”
“The setting sun always gives a golden lining to the clouds it
embraces, but to drop the figurative—we are soaring rather high—and
come down to earth, women marry old men so that they may soon become
widows.”
Henry nervously tried to adjust an imaginary crown that weighed heavily
on his head.
“Seymour plucked the weeds from the garden of your widowed life before
the first blade of grass had pushed up from a newly-made grave. O
Inconstancy! O Woman! Of two things, one. Orpheus went to Hell to find
his wife. He failed to win her from her refuge in the shades because
he looked back to discern her features. Had Euridice retraced the path
from Hell without bringing with her surcease from domestic woe, Orpheus
would have wished her back down that familiar track. I wish he would
pay us another visit. I’d loan him five of mine.”
“Which wife would you retain?” asked Catharine Howard.
“Catharine,” answered Henry, diplomatically.
All three who bore that name beamed with gratification.
“Catharine is always at Parr,” continued the king. His fondness for
punning nearly proved his undoing.
“I’m not below Parr,” angrily exclaimed Catharine of Arragon. “I come
before her.”
“No, you came,” corrected the king. “It’s merely a question of tense.
Many a woman promises to be a sister to the devil who has never
received a proposal.”
“That’s a good one on you!” laughed the fool. “Her Grace of Arragon
promised to be a sister to you! What do you say to that?”
“My answer is written in history. ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath
taken away,’ for which ‘blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I replaced
my wives, so that the supply would always equal the demand. I believed
that as long as the Lord took, it was my duty to take.”
The king paused long enough to drink a cup of pink tea and to eat some
breaded calves’ brains for inspiration.
“When trouble comes,” continued Henry, “some people fly to matrimony,
thinking drink too vulgar.”
“Your troubles have been many, judging by your marital intemperance.”
“They were, but my troubles always came singly,” chuckled the king. “As
fast as I executed one, another came, but I made sure I was off with
the old head before I coveted the new.”
“The only bright thing an American can remember to have heard Punch
say is ‘don’t’ when matrimony is on the horizon, but then Punch is
English and England has no Ali Ben Theodore—peace to his Strenuosity—to
turn the throne into a pulpit for dissertations on vital statistics
in the hope that he may make census taking an unnecessary burden
of government. Modern philologists were seriously considering the
advisability of eliminating the word ‘papa’ from the dictionary, when
the leading exponent of the life effective raised the question as to
why mamma’s lap wasn’t filled. When the president becomes advance agent
for the stork hope is born, but if the stork continues to be derelict
in its duties, we might give the eagle a trial in an endeavor to have
this statistical indictment set aside.”
“What does Mr. Roosevelt know about the rights of unattached
bachelors?” asked Catharine the Third. “He isn’t a bachelor and never
was one; he was born domestic and to the domestic man nothing ever
happens—except the buying of more cradles.”
“A woman’s tongue is as full of sharp points as a porcupine,” observed
Henry, who was inordinately fond of epigrammes. “But never mind,
Kittens, I am the last man in the world who would deprive you of
woman’s inalienable rights—love, license, and the pursuit of man.”
“Their Majesties are looking well and youthful,” I said, with a gesture
that included all the wives of the much-married king.
“One never grows any older in Hades,” answered Henry. “That explains
its attraction for women, and why the devil has so many votaries among
the fair sex!”
“An exclamation point often hides a pointless period. When a man talks
epigrammatically about woman, it is a sign that he doesn’t understand
her.”
And being a woman, Catharine Parr had the last word.
WHAT METHUSELAH THINKS OF
DR. OSLER.
CHAPTER V.
What Methuselah Thinks of Dr. Osler.
“O that mine adversary had written a book!”
“The most miserable man in Hades is no longer Job but Methuselah,”
whispered Anon. “Ever since Dr. Osler celebrated his departure for
England by proposing a wholesale slaughter of the innocent aged,
Methuselah has had to take a seat on the sinners’ bench. It was
formerly considered an honor to be an old man, even in Hades, but now
it is a disgrace not to have died young. The other day, Cain, who is
the bad boy of the underworld, gave Methuselah as a birthday present
a collection of thirty-six bottles of chloroform, one for each sixty
years of his earthly age. Then the lad, who is Satan’s chief imp, put a
placard on Methuselah’s back reading ‘Oslerized.’”
“There comes a time in every man’s life when he wishes for Herod’s
power, that he might order all children killed—except his own!”
muttered the old man. “But I had my revenge: I was Abel to raise Cain
over a foot.”
“Under a spreading chestnut tree,
The ancient jokesmith lies,”
hummed Longfellow.
“That is a prehistoric relic which leaked from the Ark when we grounded
on Mt. Ararat,” volunteered Noah. “I sprung that ‘raising Cain’ joke on
Mrs. Noah, but you know a woman has no sense of humor and she said she
had her hands full without working the adoption degree.”
“‘O, that mine adversary had written a book!’” reiterated Methuselah.
“He has; your wish is fulfilled.”
It was a newcomer who spoke. All eyes were turned upon him as
Methuselah asked:
“Who are you?”
“A. Hasbeen, M.D., late secretary of the Os-slurs Chloroforming
Institute of Baltimore. To-day I became a back number—60—which entitled
me to a painless passing, the anæsthetic being administered by Dr.
Senile. But there was no need of the old men getting angry at what Dr.
Osler said about them. He intended it only for advertising purposes.
Having got himself talked into notoriety, his publishers have announced
that a book by the doctor is in press.”
“Then am I revenged indeed! Æsthetic as he is, Dr. Osler will wish that
he had taken an anæsthetic before the book reviewers get through with
him. Oh, for the fatally facile pen of the bright and bitter Corelli!”
“Anthony Trollope says he said it first.”
“Oh, the idea is itself old enough to be chloroformed,” explained Dr.
Hasbeen. “Osler has been trying to explain that it was all a jest, but
the public refuses to take him in earnest: a comedian never can become
a tragedian. It only goes to show that, although Barnum may be right
in his opinion that the American people like to be fooled, they won’t
swallow a joke that is thrust down their throats and smile over it, and
they do not want their sense of the ludicrous drugged by an overdose of
chloroform.”
“I may be a member of the silent majority,” went on Methuselah, “but
this insult to age would put speech in the most chapfallen mummy,
however it might be pressed for time. Notified to quit thinking at
forty and to stop living at sixty! Why, in my day, a man hadn’t cut
his wisdom tooth then! I’m inclined to think that Dr. Osler still has
some teeth to cut. Man, like wine, improves with age. Before making
that speech the doctor should have put on his old slippers; then nobody
would have known where the shoe pinched him.”
“I wonder how long it took Osler to sober up after that intemperate
speech? Nobody ever heard of him until he approached the danger line of
encroaching years. What has he been doing in the past? Doubtless he is
no different from the ordinary man, who remains a dormant factor until
he comes to years of discretion, which is more likely to be sixty than
sixteen. Before that time, he courts women and wine more assiduously
than wisdom and common sense.”
“A man’s early life is too much taken up with breach-of-promise cases,
divorces and the stock exchange to care whether or not the world owes
him a living or to take the trouble to collect it. Though the financial
acumen of Humpty Dumpty does not make Wall Street tremble, it tumbles
to a good thing long before he takes a fall to himself. The bears come
out of their pits and the bulls leave their greenbacks to seek other
and greener goods to devour.”
“You know ‘there is no fool like an old fool,’” I ventured to quote.
“‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are
fools’; they’ve been there themselves,” retorted Methuselah.
“It is easy to mould even stubborn facts by applying the sparks from
the thought anvils of dead men’s minds, which the world accepts because
the men are dead and not because the sparks burn with living truth.
“Proverbs, not men, should be sacrificed on the altar of antiquity.
“‘At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty and reforms his plan.’”
“Thank you, Young,” said Methuselah, gratefully. “Your ‘Night Thoughts’
have shed light on a dark subject. Young is older in wisdom than his
name implies, for a man does not get his mental equilibrium until the
pendulum is swinging to the west, and he becomes too old to wallow in
champagne or to eat lobster suppers with a peroxide blonde. A man’s
legs may be in a forced retreat to the grave, but his brain remains
more active in the world’s service than that of the youngster under
forty, who develops the muscle in his arms at the expense of the gray
matter in his brain. It is only the callow youth who suffers from
softening of the brain. The man at sixty has more dollars in his cellar
and more sense in his garret than the fool of thirty has cents in his
pocket. Yet youth and age are not antagonistic; they are like the two
parts of a pair of scissors in the work of the world: ‘useless each
without the other.’”
“Don’t you think that Dr. Osler promulgated his theory of earthly
eradication at the suggestion of a feminine relative?”
“That would not be surprising. Women are apt to see the defects of an
aged man of talent and the merits of a young fool. It is possible that
some woman in the Osler family is weary of being an old man’s darling
and wants to squeeze him out, unless he can produce the elixir of
Faust.”
“That’s the solution. The women are determined to have something to
squeeze, even if they have to stifle their embraces in chloroform and
let their affections go to ‘weeds.’ Woman is a poppy that exhales
her perfume only in the shade. It may be that somebody else has said
that after me, for Osler implies that the oldest inhabitant is only a
reminiscence of what isn’t so. Who was the author, Bartlett?”
“That is not a ‘Familiar Quotation,’” answered Bartlett, after a
hurried consultation with Dr. Johnson and Roget. “Therefore, it must
belong to Anon; he claims everything to which other people cannot prove
their title. It seems to me that you are getting so independent that
you even rebel against your metaphors. You call woman a fragrant poppy
in the shade, in apparent ignorance of the fact that in Hades, where
all women have shady characters, there is no perfume. You poets can
scent everything but the bloom of truth.”
“Oh, well, you’re not so fragrant,” said Anon, slangily. “You only
gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, while I furnished the thread
which bound them. But we have lost the thread of this discourse. It
seems to me that if the lethal chamber were to become popular, a man
would have to begin putting his affairs in order almost as soon as he
had ceased to ask his mother-in-law if he might kiss his wife.”
“That’s one thing which has struck me as odd,” I said. “What particular
place of torment has been reserved for the mothers-in-law? I haven’t
seen one since I came to Hades.”
“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to
Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law,
you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s
else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these
marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law
to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No
man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.”
I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon
I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his
“Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke
slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested,
and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech
lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by
saying that he never could speak without notes.
“If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than
a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the
plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by
the Oslerized process. Charon would have to charter all the world’s
warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a
jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd
of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban
cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.”
“We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than
any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about
time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell
upon it.’”
“You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained
Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on
that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have
deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.”
“Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the
Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by
reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around
until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on
and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”
“Like an emetic, one thing brings up another,” put in Methuselah,
anxious to throw up his grievance. “Having told us it is one’s duty to
dismiss himself from the world, this authority very kindly suggested
that a particular anæsthetic would be the best means for one’s
transfer out of time. The edict has gone forth: All out at sixty. When
the census-taker makes his rounds, he will say: ‘Age, if you please?
Sixty? Kindly step into the asphyxiation chamber or into the ambulance
where you will find a bottle awaiting you. Good-night’. Night, when
deep sleep falleth upon man, has come too early. When a babe, he
smelleth the bottle afar off and lo! children cry for the soothing
syrup which the man would fain put away. Before his eye is dimmed by
the sunset glow, the light of his life is quenched in four ounces of
chloroform.
“According to this medical expert,” continued Methuselah, “when a man
proposes to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by emigrating beyond the
Styx, he is to buy a ticket and pay for it with poison or pistol. He is
then fit only for the doctor and the refuse heap. Has it come to this?
No twentieth century painless surgery for me, thank you. Long life is
no longer a thing to long for. I would prefer to be kissed not by the
dews of night but by the salutation of the glorious morning.”
“‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,’” exclaimed Solomon, who still
the wisest of men, had hitherto kept silent. He was addressing
Methuselah. “One may no longer tarry until his beard is grown and his
hair is dyed. No longer may he come to his grave in a full age like as
a shock of corn cometh in his season, and though it may go against the
grain, the Grim Reaper stalks through the field, stopping up the ears
with Osler’s Death Drugs.”
“The doctor is an homeopathist,” observed Sherlock Holmes, in a tone so
decided that it left no question for argument.
“I’m not Watson,” I responded, “but of course I know you want some one
to ask you how you know. Just to be accommodating, allow me to inquire
how you can tell that Dr. Osler is an homeopathist when you haven’t
even the ashes of his cigar to analyze? Do you mean because of small
doses?”
“No; like cures like. Old men being a drug on the market, it takes
a drug to remove them. Had he consulted me I would have recommended
cocaine instead of chloroform.”
“Do you think that Dr. Osler will take his own medicine when the frost
is on the temples and the anæsthetic’s handy?”
“Doctors never do. That may be because of professional etiquette, but
it is more likely that the physicians recognize the truth of the saying
about self-preservation being the first law of nature. Some doctors
are so conscientious that they would rather be murdered by another
physician than commit suicide themselves. You may depend upon it that
there is no chloroform in Dr. Osler’s family medicine chest; he keeps
it only for his patients!”
[Illustration: _The Virgin Throned in the West. Chapter VI_]
THE VIRGIN THRONED IN THE
WEST: A TABLOID TANGLE OF
LOVE AND HISTORY.
CHAPTER VI.
The Virgin Throned in the West: A Tabloid Tangle of Love and History.
It was with no little trepidation that I mounted the steps of the
summer palace of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and knocked timidly at
the door. Had I not been somewhat dazed by the nature of my mission,
I might have noticed an electric bell somewhere around, but who ever
heard of a bell on a palace door? That would be in violation of all
ethics of the made-to-order novel. I had determined to see nothing
but what I wished to see and to brush the dust from my knowledge of
royalty—gleaned from the historical novels which tell of everything
under the sun except history—so I bridled my patience and gave my
imagination a free rein. That’s a hobby of mine.
As I closed my eyes and waited with an unuttered prayer that there
might be no dungeon beneath this castle wall, I felt a queer sensation
in my left side. Twice before I had undergone a similar experience.
Once I had called an imperious maiden “my queen” and the lover who is
in the background of every girl butted into the foreground and knocked
me out of the centre of the stage. The other occasion is too painful to
recall and not at all humorous, so I will lose the thread of memory and
resume the thread of my discourse.
I believe I left myself on the palace portico, with my hands clasped
over the hollow place caused by a missing rib, which is the only legacy
left by an ancestor who was too fond of stolen pippins. Since then I
have become convinced that the ache was owing to an uneasy conscience;
but then I thought it was only my heart. Outside the palace I had one
kind of heart disease; would I contract the other kind within the
walls I had forgotten that it takes two to make a contract and had
reckoned without my queen and with an utter disregard of the rules of
mathematics. But there are exceptions to rules; why not to rulers?
I continued to stand outside the palace. Perhaps you wonder at that,
but the reason is simple: the door was closed and, moreover, it was
locked. I am no Sherlock Holmes, nor do I smoke, so I couldn’t deduce
from the ashes of a cigar how I could get that door between me and the
street. There was nothing to do but wait.
And wait I did. Somehow, I didn’t mind it, for you see I was waiting
on a queen. I had waited on other girls with more impatience and more
candied sweetness. Every woman’s idea of a sensible man is one who
will make a fool of himself over her and if it pleases her, he doesn’t
object to playing court jester. That’s what we men are here for—to
prevent women from being bored by the society of their own sex.
Finally I was admitted. Just how I seem to have forgotten. Let me
recall my lessons in memory-training-by-the-aid-of association:
Rule one is to begin at the beginning. Eve began it; she added Adam;
united they stood: over an apple paring they fell; that’s it—I took a
tumble to myself, which is neither slang nor a figure of speech. I had
been leaning against the door, and as my spirits grew more heavy, it
was more than the door hinged on. We parted company and as I lay upon
the floor I felt quite prostrated over it. I lost my dignity and my
watch; then I lost my time but not my temper, although I had fallen
into a compost of lime and sand left as a trap by one of the palace
workmen.
“Are you hurt?” inquired a man-of-arms, as I picked myself out of the
mortar.
“Oh, no,” I answered, the ready tears starting sympathetically. “I’m
not hurt but I feel rather mortified!”
When I told the man in waiting that I had come to see the queen, he
looked doubtful and made a half audible remark about somebody rushing
in and about downtrodden angels. It was an unfamiliar quotation and as
I had no copy of Bartlett’s handy, I did not take his “posie of other
men’s flowers” to myself. Had there been any stairs on which to fight I
might have emulated the “gentleman of France,” but I come from another
country where elevators have killed romance as well as other things.
Another wait. I still smarted from contact with the lime, and feeling a
humiliating sense of my own unworthiness, I meekly made myself small.
When She entered I began to shrivel until I felt like unleaded agate
after being thrown into the “hell box.”
Good Queen Bess is every inch a queen, even to her feet. “Sweet and
twenty” she was—at one time; I can vouch for the qualifying adjective,
if not for the noun, and to be sweet is better than to be queen, for to
be queen it is only necessary to be born beneath a canopy embroidered
with the regal R. Although I thought of Shakespeare’s phrase, I did not
give utterance to the invitation which preceded it; you recollect the
line: “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.”
It isn’t given to every man to be as bold as Shakespeare, even though
he may be more alive to present opportunities.
Now, according to court etiquette, a subject dare not address his
sovereign until he is spoken to, so I simply stood and looked
unutterable things. Her gaze fell. The pause was becoming embarrassing.
“Well,” she said finally.
That wasn’t what I had expected at all. All the books I had ever read
about queens had quoted the ruler thusly: “Her Majesty is graciously
pleased to incline her ear that she may hear the prayer of her
servant.” I noticed that her ears kept their normal position, but I was
not inclined to be fastidious: the queen had spoken!
My lips being now unlocked, I told who I was.
“Oh, to be sure,” Her Grace said, with ready recollection. “You are
the novelist who said so many nice things about me in ‘The Virgin
Throned in the West.’ You possess the first requisite of a courtier: a
knowledge of the gentle art of flattery. Your compliments—”
“Spare me, good Queen,” I interrupted. “I must confess that I wrote
that eulogy before I had seen your Majesty.”
The queen frowned just a little.
“Why need you have said that?” she asked. “Even an immortal queen is
enough like her mortal sisters not to relish a stab at vanity. You men
praise us women and then ruffle our hair by saying you didn’t mean it.
Of course, we forgive you, but to forget is not so easy. Under the
scar, the wound still aches.”
Ever since then I have believed that a man should be arrested for
exposing the naked truth.
“In that book you also paid tender tribute to the babies, though I fail
to see what they have to do with an old maid queen who achieved fame
but not matrimony. Let us hope that tribute, at least, is sincere.”
“No, only sentimental. I wrote that eulogy far from the maddening
child, with naught but memory to lend wings to the imagination. I love
to play with other people’s toddling darlings until there is a cry of
distress from the interior department, in which case distance lends
enchantment to the point of view. I have not always said nice things
about babies, for, as I heard Methuselah say, there comes a time in the
life of every man when he sighs for the power of Herod that he might
order all children killed. Methuselah excepted his own; I don’t.”
“That is cruel,” Her Serenity observed.
“I crave Your Grace’s pardon,” I disagreed; “it is true: that is all.”
“Truth never masquerades in the domino of drollity.”
“Thy reproof, O Queen, is deserved. Would that I were Boswell to
preserve in the amber of biography the gems which fall from the lips of
a Doctress Johnson.”
“Scribe, know you not that a woman would rather you praised her face
than her mind, and her bonnet rather than her ‘blue stockings’? Why
write what you don’t believe?”
“Had my eyes been gladdened by the sight of your charms, fair Queen,”
I boldly asserted, “I should have thrown off the fetters of prose and
soared to the Mount of Parnassus, there to coronate you in verse with
feet iambic.”
“Perhaps the feet might limp—I mean they would, of course, be limpidly
lyrical. But my poet laureate, don’t metrically measure My Majesty.
Cork the rhythmic bottle and all shall be forgiven. And now you may
tell me your mission.”
“I’ve come to interview you,” I blurted out, instinctively putting my
hand on my vest pocket, in which was a bottle of aromatic spirits of
ammonia. But Her Grace has a spirit of her own and needed none of mine.
There was no evidence of vertigo.
“Don’t be alarmed,” I hastened to say. It was a needless assurance, but
according to all precedent, I was expected to make the observation. “I
wrote the interview before I came down here to see you, and it is now
in type with a turn rule at the end for fear it should not measure up
to expectations. This call is a mere matter of form.”
“But how”—
“That’s a secret. Instead of answering your question, allow me to ask
you another. Suppose you were again an earthly ruler with unlimited
power, what would you do?”
“I hardly know,” she confessed naively and added: “But I think my first
move would be to curb the freedom of the press by pensioning off all
the newspaper men, so that we celebrities might have our fanciful fads
without being interviewed. Not that I object to the interview or to the
interviewer. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’—to most men.”
“And fiction is more interesting than truth and much more believable—to
most women,” I retorted. “You know Heine says that woman is at once
apple and serpent. I have never dissented from that view, for apple
sass and serpents’ tongues have always been the desserts woman serves
up to man. Eve plucked the first fruit from the forbidden tree, but
many another fair hand has since robbed the genealogical orchard. Thus
do we ape our ancestors.”
“Poor Eve!” sympathized the queen. “Her daughters have often taken a
bite of the enticing apple, but unlike their mother, it does not open
their eyes to man’s true nature.”
“I have often wondered,” I went on, not heeding the amused smile of
her Majesty, “why God didn’t make a dozen women instead of one out of
Adam’s rib, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Eden would no longer
have been Paradise to Eve if she had had a rival.”
“Where is man’s boasted chivalry?” suddenly asked Elizabeth. “Sir
Walter never struck a woman with the whip of sarcasm.”
“With his cloak wrapped about her, she couldn’t feel the sting of
satire,” I retorted.
“Did you ever hear how I repaid Sir Walter for his gallantry? We had
gone to London to attend the coronation of King Edward the Seventh. One
of the streets we had to cross was so muddy that we paused in dismay. A
newsboy brushed up against me. Taking the papers from under his arm I
tossed them into the street.”
“‘Tut! tut! keep on your coat, Sir Walter,’ I said. ‘Allow me to pilot
you to yonder pavement dryshod.’”
“‘Who says that chivalry is dead?’ quoth Sir Walter.
“‘Am I not dead?’” I asked.
“‘Good Queen Bess will never die,’ responded the baronet, with ready
wit. Then he laughed as the newsboy picked up his papers from the muddy
street, loudly bewailing the prank of the wind which had spoiled his
stock in trade.”
Elizabeth again did violence to my conceptions of royalty by laughing
at her own wit; then she said:
“Sir Scribe, it seems to me that you haven’t progressed well with your
interview. You haven’t once indulged in those misfit personalities
which bring your American papers so many libel suits. When I received
your card I anticipated that I should be discussed by myself and
dissected by you. I expected you would be concerned as to whether my
ancestors belonged to that little company of gentlemen who jumped from
tree to tree in Africa and was prepared to tell you, as I have told
Darwin, that even a baboon can have a respectable daughter!”
Being a blue point is not conducive to successful interviewing, so I
shook off my lethargy and asked as to her favorite flower.
“That is better,” approved her Grace. “I have two favorites—bachelors’
buttons and mock orange blossoms.”
“If not yourself, who would you rather be?”
“The author of one of the six ‘best sellers.’”
“Who is your favorite character in history?”
“I really must decline to answer.”
I did not press the point, for one naturally looks for modesty in a
Virgin Queen.
“Do you mind telling me in what epoch you would have chosen to live?”
“The reign of Terrible Teddy, by all means. Hesiod says there are five
ages of the world; how is yours designated: golden, brazen, or—?”
“This is the age of folly—the folly of flesh,” I answered. “Higher
critics deny the decalogue and bone Jonah’s fish until it resembles
an eel. Even our modern writers play ping pong with hearts and the
seventh commandment, for to them love is nothing unless it brings
in ten per cent royalty. Society has become sensuous; we are having
rather too much of the body. The corsage serves no purpose but to
hide the heart; bosom and back are bared before the footlights while
gartered grace trips tantalizingly in the limelight. Soul has sunk
beneath the seductions of the senses. The demon of desire so entices
men that for the amorous allurement of Kipling’s Vampire—the woman who
did not care—they would go to Hell and consider the trip an enjoyable
excursion. Has virtue fled to hide its blushes in a nunnery and is
there no longer a shrine of sex? Is ‘Don Juan’ to be deified and
‘Camille’ to be glorified? Will—but in deference to Colonel Comstock, I
really must desist.”
“Wherefore so pessimistic—jaundiced or jilted?”
“More likely I’m dyspeptic.”
“Don’t deny it; a lost love is the only justification of a man’s being
a misanthropist and a misogynist.”
“Won’t you kindly translate or at least tell me the language? Emerson
always was a voiceless sphinx to me and foreign tongues are not
articulate to ears deafened by the slang of the streets.”
“Don’t be silly! Your idiomatic Americanisms make muddy the well of
English undefiled, but methinks the water is the clearer and the more
sparkling after each stirring up.
“If you will promise no more interruptions, I will continue my lecture:
Your eyes are too far gazing into the bygone to know to-day’s bliss
or to foresee a confident tomorrow. You are forgetting that while
life roots in the past, it flowers in the present. To never exchange
loving glances with the maiden of the moment, but to dishonor the day
by looking off into the eyes of some dream darling who cannot come to
your bosom is like another Enoch Arden’s hopeless gaze for a sail that
never brings him again to the kisses of Annie Lee. If I mistake not,
your name is a patent of your English ancestry, but without that leaf
from your family tree, I should recognize you as a countryman; to be
loyal to a sweetheart clasped and lost is possible only to the man
whose cradle rocked between the English Channel and the Irish Sea. The
Anglo-Saxon alone of all peoples can become a martyr to a memory.”
Whatever will power I possessed was necessary to keep my eyes away from
the “maiden of the moment.” English blood may be phlegmatic enough to
turn into ice water, but a twenty-years’ acquaintance with American
girls will thaw the most frozen cardiac organ and render it susceptible
to the wiles of any witch of a woman who in other days might have
hanged at Salem. Elizabeth’s very voice was a caress and sometimes a
man forgets to pray, “Lead me not into temptation!”
“The sweeter memories are in themselves,” I murmured, “the more loth
one is to share them with another. If it please Your Grace, we won’t
discuss the—the ‘other girl.’ When a man proposes and the woman
disposes of him by a verbal spanking, sending him away, it may be to
the embraces of another girl, it may be to cherish a memory, he is
seldom in a frame of mind inculcated by gospel precepts. Gratitude
comes later. Yet whether a man marries or whether he remains true to
his ideal, he never loves any other woman quite so much as she who was
pitiless to his pleading. Man’s heart is not like a Manhattan hall room
with space for only one pair of shoes under the bed, but it is a St.
Regis, in which there are no vacant guest chambers. The cosiest corner
of a man’s heart is always reserved for the woman who has refused his
hand.”
Her Majesty threw up her hands in a pretty gesture of mock dismay.
“A misogamist also! I am just dying with curiosity to know what
terrible things my sex have done to you to make you a hater of men,
of women and of marriage. Because some sunflower of a girl has turned
her face to another son is no excuse for you to sulk behind a cloud.
This may be the age of folly, as you claim, but don’t you think that
the greatest fool is he who allows a slip of a girl to rob him of his
_couleur de rose_ spectacles? Come now, ’fess up! Aren’t you making a
hobby of being a hypochondriac? If you linger among the graves of the
gloaming with a heart so full of shadows and eyes so abrim with tears
that you cannot see beauty as it is born, you corrupt the present. If
you fellowship with to-day, it will bestow upon you its purple. If you
bid away the hour that is here to make you happy, all the grief of
Niobe will not win it back again. To-day is a nomad who tarries awhile,
then folds his tent and whistles away on his happy gypsy journey, never
to return.”
“Aren’t we getting rather too philosophical for actors in an _opera
bouffe_ and too solemn for characters in an hysterical novel; nobody
takes history seriously nowadays. This is the hour of hyperbole as
well as the age of folly and my indictment of fleshly fools should be
taken _cum grano salis_. I am not so wrapped about by the despairs of
night that I can get no glimpse of the dawn. I despise not the outward
beauty, nor do I put contempt upon flesh nor call it unclean. I wield
no surgeon’s scalpel to dissect desires which passion into degeneracy.
Yet I deplore that man, who may stature divinely great, should stoop
to crucify the mystery of the flesh in permitting the sanctities of
the soul to be overshadowed by sensuality, in making vulgar that which
should be hallowed. Yet humanity is no windfall apple; despite the
blemishes on the rind, the core continues sound. However pessimistic a
man may be, he must acknowledge that the influence of virtue is more
far reaching than the contagion of vice. Jean Valjean in the Paris
sewer was the optimist who originated the New Thought movement; like
him, I feel instinctively that somewhere beyond the present darkness is
the sunshine of life and safety.”
“It seems to me, sirrah, that you are rather inconsistent.”
“You women have enjoyed a monopoly of that comfortable privilege
altogether too long, and the time has come when man can dispute your
prerogative.”
The asbestos tablets I had brought with me were rapidly being filled
with hieroglyphics which looked like the original Greek and to
understand them needed an acquaintance with Pitman; I must economize on
my questions.
“The one indispensable interrogation in an interview is how you spend
each waking moment of the day,” I hinted. “No post-mortem recollections
would be complete without that.”
“To be a queen is to lead the life effective as well as the life
strenuous. This is one day’s doings in the role of Regina, as ticked
off by the hours—figuratively, of course, for you are aware that there
are no clocks in Hades:
“10 A. M.—‘Good morning.’
“11 A. M.—Sampling new breakfast foods.
“12 M.—Reading the Cimmerian Chatterbox and the Stygian Smart Set.
“1 P. M.—Writing autographs to be auctioned off at New York sales rooms.
“2 P. M.—Dinner.
“3 P. M.—Yachting on the Styx.
“4 P. M.—Sixty minutes with Her Majesty’s diary.
“5 P. M.—Dictating an historical novel to Sir Isaac Pitman.
“By-the-bye,” she broke off suddenly, “Sir Isaac has become afflicted
with writers’ cramp and I need someone to take his place. You are that
someone.”
I knelt, expecting to feel the flat end of a sword laid upon me, but
her Grace simply twined a lock of my blonde hair around her finger.
“Arise, Sir Scribe,” she said, glancing around apprehensively. “Your
attitude is that of a lover proposing to his mistress, and as a penalty
for posing in the upper world, Mephisto has decreed that whatever
attitude a man assumes in Hades, he must set it to words or to music. I
am going to be merciful and you may make of your proposal a frayed-out
phonograph record which will repeat ‘I love you’ without variation. The
warmth of your protestations may melt the wax? You need have no fear of
that. You would be more likely to break the record; we do not use wax
cylinders, but rubber. As for making you my official scribe, the touch
of royalty is sufficient to confer knighthood. Since poor Walter took
that ‘sharp remedy’ for all diseases, I have shunned the sword.”
Curiosity is my besetting sin—it is by no means a woman’s
prerogative—and as it has been one of my fads to read a person’s
character by a glance at his or her hands, I bowed in humble gratitude
at the honor conferred upon me, but not without an upward look at the
fair hand poised gracefully above me. That fleeting glance told me
much. Certain chroniclers of the period Before Darwin tell us that
marks were made on the hands of men—and women?—that the sons of men
might know them. As the passage occurs in Job, some higher critics
interpret the marks to mean boils, but we palmists know better.
Palmistry is Cupid masquerading in a scientific costume; it gives a man
a valid excuse for holding a girl’s hand. Of course even a scribe can’t
take such liberties with a queen, although the cunning of chiromancy
prompted me to attempt a revelation of Her Majesty’s character. Just
what I found in the hand that swayed the destinies of the world She
made me promise not to tell. “God save the Queen—” and the Gentle
Reader!
After detailing her destiny, I arose with a muttered apology for
consuming so much of her time.
“It isn’t only time that is consumed in Hades, but if you wish to go,
you may,” assented Her Grace. “I never argue with a bored sign post
about the distance to the street.”
I bowed and left. Outside was a sign which read: “To New York—twenty
miles.” I stood a moment and pondered. Twenty miles expressed a
nearness which made Hades a suburb of the metropolis! The call of the
city was insistent, the lure of Broadway beckoned to the white lights
and the clang of trolleys, but all about me were unfolding the wonders
of the unknown Stygian country. I did not dispute the distance, nor did
I heed the mute command. I simply turned my back on the sign post and
walked away from the imperative pointing finger.
“BOSS” TWEED ON TAINTED
MONEY, WITH SOME NONSENSE
DEFINITIONS OF FADS
AND FINANCE.
CHAPTER VII.
“Boss” Tweed on Tainted Money, with Some Nonsense Definitions of Fads
and Finance.
The Asbestos Society of Sinners was in session. The subject of debate
was, “Resolved that gold may be yellow, but it is not tainted.”
“‘An Englishman’s hell is want of money,’” mused Carlyle, repeating
what he had said while a denizen of earth.
“It’s too bad he gets Hades in both the upper and lower worlds,”
observed “Boss” Tweed, who as the reincarnated Dives handled the gavel.
“Unfortunately, that condition is not confined to any one country.
Wendell Phillips once said that if an American saw a silver dollar on
the other side of Hell he would jump for it.”
“Is that why you came here?” asked he whose only claim to fame was that
an ass had spoken to him.
“Baalam’s itchy palm spoiled him for a prophet,” observed Tweed,
addressing the chairman, and ignoring that individual. “No, gentlemen,
it wasn’t one dollar that brought me here. It was $10,000,000 or
$100,000,000; I forget which.”
“A cypher more or less makes no difference,” put in Carlyle, cynically.
He evidently thought this a side-splitting English joke, for he laughed
at his own wit.
“That depends whether there is a point back of it,” asserted Dr.
Johnson.
“Truly these be tainted times, if we can place any dependence in the
New York correspondence of the Cimmerian Chatterbox,” volunteered
Tweed. “Poor Diagones has had to give up his quest for an honest man:
not being in the trust, he cannot buy any oil for his lantern. But even
a searchlight wouldn’t help him in these days. An honest man never gets
within the rays of the calcium; he is too busy picking the pockets of
the people.”
“Oil and money will come uppermost at last in the caldron of watered
stocks underneath which are the fires of Hell, for both are Standard.”
“I don’t see how tainted money can be made from refined oil.” It was
Solomon the wise who spoke.
“Tainted money, like crude oil, may be refined,” asserted Tweed. “Yet
even crude oil is not to be despised, for it accrues interest and some
of the taint can be carbolized by sending bad rum to the heathen.
It matters not what denomination tainted money is in, although the
Baptists ought to be able to wash some of the taint away. In to-day’s
issue of the Stygian Siftings, I read that a certain sect who won’t
trust any other denomination to read their Bible for them, say that
the pilfered pelf of frenzied financiers is all right if it be used
for good purposes. It isn’t even necessary to keep the dirty dough in
a separate flour barrel from the certified wheat; they are willing to
convert tares and all into breakfast food. It resolves itself into a
case of homeopathic treatment—the use of tainted money to remove a
greater taint.”
“Bribery, which in evening dress is called graft, has become such
a popular pastime that the refusal of a man to touch money offered
him leads one to the conclusion that it is not tainted but merely
counterfeit,” said Shylock, as he tried to hide some degraded ducats in
his blouse. “They wouldn’t let me shed one drop of blood, yet to-day
the American capitalist gets his pound of flesh by bleeding the people.”
“It’s a wonder Atlas wasn’t exposed for holding up the earth,” mused
Anon. “Since the days of the gods, many a man has had his shoulder put
out of joint trying to do the same stunt, but the weight of the world
is still cause for worry.”
“So deep-rooted in the universe is graft,” asserted Tweed, “that the
chairman of an investigating committee, in making his report, went to
the Jersey shore and looking out to sea, wrote: ‘I can see no graft.’
Even then he forgot the ship-building trust and also overlooked the
unimportant fact that his very words were grafted from Lord Nelson.”
“Who was the first grafter?”
“Adam would have been had he been tempted with a plum instead of with
an apple.”
“Graft,” explained Noah, surnamed Webster, “is a botanical term for
‘splitting straws’ in the garden politic. Its principal fruits are
plums, leafing out in ‘long green.’ A grafter is a captain of industry
who has been found out.”
“All men bow to the despotism of the dollar,” said a well-known
anarchist with an unforgivable name. “It is no longer the divine right
of kingship, but the divine right of dollarship, to rule the earth.
The rulers of old had their armies and forced obedience; the rulers of
to-day have their money bags and buy it.”
“The dollar,” declared Alexander Hamilton, “is the corner-stone of our
egotistic civilization, and the dollar is terribly hard. Its hardness
may make it better as a corner-stone but does not especially fit it for
use as a pillow for tired humanity.”
“Growing socialistic, eh? My dear Alexander, you have been exclusive
owner of six feet of land long enough to be cured of that fanciful fad.”
“Fads,” interposed Worcester, noting that Webster was ready with a
definition and anxious to forestall him, “is a diversion of the wealthy
and the only game on which Parker Brothers have no copyright. It is
played similar to ‘Pit’ and ‘Bluff,’ although it is not confined to
Wall Street.”
“Fancies,” declaimed Johnson, “is a vivid imagination diluted with
printers’ ink for the purpose of converting the skeleton in the family
flat into $1,500 cash. Usually the man who has ancestors doesn’t court
investigation.”
“Investigation,” defined Roget, “is a popular kind of bookkeeping begun
after the race is lost and the money is spent; a locking of the safe
deposit doors after the deposits are safe in the cashier’s pocket. As
the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, Adam, being
fatherless, is the only man in Hades whom the Stygian Insurance Company
would guarantee immune from the epidemic of investigation which has
been transplanted from the upper to the lower world. But even Adam
suffered exposure before he plucked the ‘long green’ from the fig tree.”
“In England insurance is called assurance, but the name better applies
to American directors, whom it assures a life of luxury. The policy
holder believes insurance is a legacy, but his widow discovers it is a
law suit. Life insurance is a bogie at which everybody not in a glass
coffin throws a stone. It is old, tried and true: too old to notice you
after you’re dead; true—to its officers; and tried—in the courts. It
makes sick loans which have the effect of paralyzing the tongues of its
officials or sending them to Europe in search of health.”
“Knowledge is no longer power,” denied Webster; “wealth has taken its
place. Even both ends of Wall Street can be made to meet. At one end is
the aspiring finger of Trinity Church, pointing to the sky, and at its
foot is a cemetery. At the other end is the first station on the road
to Brooklyn and—another cemetery!”
“Gold itself is pure,” observed Portia, LL.D.; “it becomes defiled only
in passing through dirty fingers. Tainted money may be exchanged for
gold that isn’t greasy at the mint and no questions asked. The filth
from the bad man’s fingers doesn’t take away the value of the larcenous
long green, or of the sullied silver.”
“In my time,” said Tweed, “we didn’t ask whether money was tainted
before we took it. There’s time enough for an investigation after
the trust treasure is spent, and suspicious specie never becomes
penitential pesos until after money has ceased to talk. Riches are
promised to the righteous man—which we all are until the newspapers
find us out. Every millionaire secured his wealth honestly with two
exceptions, neither of which are noted in the newspapers.”
“You know it is said,” observed Cæsar, “that it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.”
“If that includes Cleopatra’s needle, there is still hope for the rich
man,” put in Marc Antony.
“A note of protest won’t pay your debts, so what’s the use of all this
outcry about opprobrious opulence?” asked Tweed. “Who can scent from
afar the possibilities of graft quicker than the man who is counting
up his censurable coin? Among the crowd in full cry after a fleeing
burglar with his pockets full of soiled silver, none shouts ‘stop
thief’ more lustily than the pal who did not get his share of the
plunder. In the rustle of the competitor’s greenbacks which are tainted
with the tears of women and the blood of men, no capitalist hears the
cry of the widow and orphan more quickly than he who is seeking to
shear the fleece of an innocent and confiding lot of lambs swallowed in
the vortex of frenzied finance.”
“How about the tainted tricks of politics?” I asked. “I might have
been a politician myself if I hadn’t been converted and so became a
newspaper man instead.”
“Your position is now more hopeless than ever, for you not only know
all the tricks of the politician, but those of the newspaper man as
well,” retaliated Tweed.
“Money, the devil’s pass key, has securely locked more than one
skeleton safely away in the family closet,” I continued. “After all,
we can’t get along without the disreputable dough. If a rotting log
nurture a bank of violets, it would be folly to despise the flowers
because they sprang from a tainted source.”
“It would be well if the twentieth century had a Lycurgus,” commented
Plutarch. “For the purpose of sapping the foundation of avarice, he
called in all the nefarious nuggets and decreed that iron should be
used as current coin. If modern millionaires had to drive a yoke of
oxen to carry home each $88 in dividends, the iron would enter their
souls far more readily than into their pocketbooks.”
“The profits of plunder ought to be checked.”
“So they are. A check is drawn for each man who has his price, to
stop him from branding his neighbor a thief. Never analyze the gold
given as a gift. Does it matter which cow gave the skimmed milk if we
get the cream? If our pocketbook is made corpulent enough to choke
our scruples, shall we inquire if our benefactor has cobwebs on his
conscience? A man’s criminality ought not to be based on the size of
his bank account.”
“Greed and graft have always been blood money relations,” I said. “In
the dawn of history Adam owned the whole world except one little tree
and he wouldn’t be happy till he got that.”
“But I never became a millionaire,” muttered the first man,
disconsolately.
“You would have been a multi-billionaire if you had held onto all your
real estate. But perhaps, like Ann Drew Karnagee, you thought it a sin
to die rich after living in the tainted atmosphere of affluence.”
“Then there was Cæsar. He ran up a supper bill of twenty-five million
in four months. My authority? Never mind; it’s all down somewhere.”
“You are right,” agreed Plutarch. “The turning of tarnished tin into
trust treasure isn’t confined to any one decade. Even Prometheus was
guilty of petty larceny, for he stole fire from heaven and—”
“If you grasp the burning ploughshare of ill-gotten gains, do not
complain if it sears your palms and scorches your brain and petrifies
your heart.” Thus spoke Judas and departed.
“Mortals say that money cannot be carried beyond the grave,” explained
Tweed; “but there is spirit money as well as spirit men. Grafter Judas
hanged himself to get rid of thirty pieces of silver—foolish man! How
little fitted he would have been for life in New York; on the board
of aldermen, for instance, or as a district boss. We New Yorkers are
frequently afflicted with itching palms, but money never burns our
fingers as it does that of Judas in Hades. He throws it away, but it
always returns to his grasp. If I had been empowered with the same
necromancy on earth, I could have been president of the United States.
Possessing Judas’ faculty, I could have paid each man his price and yet
the money would always have returned!”
“In the scales of God,” declaimed Portia, “charity will outweigh gold,
unless Dives and Lazarus have changed places since the last tidings we
had of them.”
“For all that,” concluded Tweed, “the only objection I ever found to
tainted money was that ‘taint enough! A little thieving is a dangerous
thing; graft much or you’ll taste the penitentiary spring. Though
Justice is blind, she isn’t deaf, and he who can jingle the most gold
usually wins his case. The man who sent me to the island said, ‘I hope
to see you in hell some day,’ and I’ve wondered ever since which of us
he was doubtful about getting here.”
HOW THE CREATION CENTERED
ABOUT A PETTICOAT: A REVISED
VERSION OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
OF DARWIN AND THE
ASCENT OF MAN.
CHAPTER VIII.
How the Creation Centered about a Petticoat: A Revised Version of the
First Chapter of Darwin and the Ascent of Man.
All was quiet along the Styx. The river banks were deserted. Cæsar had
been called to court to testify against a counterfeiter who had been
punching his head, and Charon took advantage of the Roman’s absence to
call upon his wife Calpurnia, famed as being the only woman of whom it
was said she was above suspicion. Charon’s craft, which to-day happened
to be no more than an ordinary rowboat, was pulled up on the bank. In
his haste to depart, the ferryman had even left his oars lying loose
in the locks. I was considering the advisability of attempting to row
back to Harlem when my attention was diverted by three dogs swimming in
the placid waters of the Styx. Sitting astride them with all the ease
of a circus clown was a boy whose forehead was branded thus: $——. It
was the mark of Cain; therefore this must be the bad boy himself.
As they drew nearer, I discovered that there was only one dog instead
of three; it was the many-headed Cerberus. All went well until Cain
pulled the dog’s tail. Then the nearest head snapped at the lad so
quickly that he disappeared down its throat. Jonah had now arrived on
the scene, and enraged at this infringement on his copyright, he caught
the canine by its hind legs and holding it aloft, shook it vigorously.
Cain dropped out of the centre cavity in the dog’s delta with a lighted
stogie between his teeth. He tossed the nicotine nugget to Jonah and
bade him take the canine to the pound of Pluto.
“Charge it up to Pa,” the bad boy said airily. Jonah continued to hold
out his hand.
“No credit is given in Hell,” he sneered. “You’ve got to cash in all
your checks.”
Cain put his hand in the outstretched palm, but instead of the expected
gold, he dropped therein the burning Stygian stogie.
Who polluteth his lips with blasphemy? Who imperilleth his
parliamentary standing? Who yelleth in Sanskrit and Yiddish? Ask of the
boy; he is of age and can speak for himself.
And speak for himself he did.
“Despite the doubts cast upon my parentage by Darwin, I am Adam’s son,”
he said, in response to my question. “But, say, I’m an angel with wings
full grown compared with what Pa was when he was a boy.”
“Do tell me about the time Adam was a boy,” I implored. In imagination
I saw a spilling of red ink over the first page of the New York
Universe: “Adam’s Own Story of the Rise and Fall of Man.”
“Dad and Darwin do beat creation,” Cain commented. “The delineator
of the ‘Descent of Man’ says that the earth grew as naturally as a
mushroom on a dung heap. Since hearing of it, Topsy has been giving
herself airs under the impression that as she ‘just growed,’ she was
the first woman. Adam says he doesn’t mind being called a myth by the
higher critics, but when an Afro-American minister proves by logic as
indisputable as a proposition in Euclid that the oldest inhabitant was
a black man, and when Topsy lays claim to being his wife, he thinks
it’s about time to draw the color line. Job tried to comfort Pa by
telling him that it is better to be a myth than a martyr, for martyrs
are burned that myths may live.”
“And Mother Eve?”
“Oh, she is an allegory, too. The legend of the lady of the pippins
was generated into the genius of Genesis for the sole purpose of
stimulating the cerebral cells of the clergymen whose imaginations have
become stunted by much raking for Greek roots. Despite the ancient
scandal when she listened to the solo of the serpent—and the result
proved so disastrous woman has never been inclined to listen to any
voice but her own since that distant day—Eve actually asked Adam to
buy her one of those serpentine dresses the next time he went to
Vanity Valley-on-the-Hudson. Pa replied that because other women were
reverting to the original clinging fig-leaf garb, was no reason why she
should advertise her shame to the world.
“‘To be fashionable is better than to be a Puritan mother,’ Eve
retorted. A woman can find comfort in a new garter or a picture hat
even when a scandal is hanging over her backbone.”
“Then the episode of Eden—”
“Eve’s appetite for apples, which gave the world dyspepsia and all the
ills to which flesh is heir, has been thrown up in her face ever since
the world began. Come to think of it, though, Darwin says there never
was any beginning.”
“Darwin has had his day,” I observed. “His teaching is now obsolete.
Some day I’m going to write a book—everybody does these days—and I have
already copyrighted the title, so literary pirates may beware. It is to
be called ‘The Ascent of Man.’ No more is man the old Adam, the Eden
of his perfect behind him forbidding its gardens of delight. In his
present imperfect is the creative hauntings of the perfect he is yet
to be. As in the old days the man said, ‘The woman’—so it is the woman
who has given man the new birth. Creation always did centre about a
petticoat, fables and creeds to the contrary notwithstanding.”
“I asked Mother Eve about her childhood the other day, and she seemed
lamentably ignorant of her younger days.”
“If Adam hadn’t gone to sleep there would have been no women in the
world,” I put in. Having a reputation as a confirmed misogynist, I felt
that I must live up to it whenever occasion offered.
“The queer part of it,” mused Cain, “is that he never woke up when the
surgical operation was being performed and that, too, in the days when
anæsthetics kept themselves hid in unpressed poppy pods. Catch a woman
letting anybody take a rib from her without her knowing it!”
“If woman is so wide-awake, how was it that Eve lost her certificate of
character by getting drunk on apple cider?”
“With the permission of Darwin and the rest, I will give you a revised
version of the creation by the first higher critic—Cain, son of Adam
and Eve:
“In the beginning chaos created Cosmos.
“And Cosmos continued to apply cosmetics to the face of the Globe
and—Darwin was too busy to take notice.
“And it came to pass that without Darwin to hold the universe in check,
revolution arose; from revolution came evolution and evolution evolved
into molecules which came into contact with protoplasm and by natural
selection the latter survived and became a plastic cell which in turn
threw a fit and degenerated into the primordial germ, which is the
germ of truth. This selection was so unnatural that it did not survive
protogene and to swallow this up there came an ocean of eocene.
“And it came to pass that in the aeon of eocene there was enwombed in
the chaotic chasm, later called Siam, a Simiad who was to show his
relationship to the octopus by embracing the earth. And this Simiad
grew according to his own fancy and—Darwin still slumbered.
“And the merry morn tagged the shadows of night and became ‘it’. The
number of the evening hours was eleven and of the day was twelve.
Eleven and twelve make twenty-three—that’s the sum that spells
‘skidoo’. And the night departed in haste.
“And in the time when it seemed good to him, Darwin awoke and made
two great lights, the greater arc to rule the day and the lesser
incandescent to rule the night. And Darwin was the greater and
Professor Huxley was the lesser; he made Herbert Spencer also.
“And behold! the man, because he had within him all other men, spoke
Henry James English in all its simplicity from his birth up. Mother
Earth sang lullabies to him, but the man was sore vexed at his
_mater’s_ nonsense verses and comic opera lyrics; he swore a Saxon
oath. That being the first word he had uttered, the man was called
Adam. And all in the world there was none other like him.
“Now when the evening and the morning were the fifth day, Darwin began
to sit up and take notice. He took a leaf from Adam’s birth record
and by soaking it in alcohol over night, words became visible and he
read that in the primordial epoch when in the transition period Adam
was a kangaroo, a woman started to sprout from the seed of truth, but
the coming man thought she had better lie a little longer, and so
he stunted her truth-telling for all time by thrusting her into the
tobacco pouch of his kangaroo hide, knowing that there is no stunt like
tobacco.
“Eve was content to come after man for three reasons; first, she knew
it was fashionable to arrive late; second, she was timid and wanted
Mr. Adam to see how the land lay now that the waters had been divided;
third, she was having some clothes made for her debut and even with the
assistance of Prof. Huxley, Tailor Darwin had not been able to get them
ready on time.
“Though eternal despairs deepened their nights about him, Adam was in
a jolly mood and he said: ‘Let us make light of it’—and there was light!
“And when Eden was effulgent Darwin could see the man he had made and
he saw that it was good. He was positive of that but was comparatively
sure he could do better, so he hypnotized Adam by telling him he
had appendicitis and that an operation was necessary for his future
well-being as a man, now that he had ceased to be a monkey. Dad had
never studied physiology—though he made up for it later by dissecting
Eve every chance he got,—and so he did not wonder how it came about
that the only portion of his anatomy for which he no longer had a use,
having given up climbing trees as being too undignified a diversion,
had gotten so far up as to tickle him in the ribs. He remembered that
saying about man being fearfully and wonderfully made, and being
assured by Dr. Darwin that the operation for the removal of ‘a rag and
a bone and a hank of hair’ was as safe as an Hom pill, he quietly fell
asleep.
“That is how man came to lose his tail, for contrary to report,
Darwin did not give man a tail but took one away; contrary also to
the authorized version, woman was made out of man’s tail and not from
his rib. Kipling little knew how apt was his descriptive tag, for the
tail consisted of a bone covered with a hank of hair and the dinosaur
supplied the rag by tying a tin can to Adam’s tail. Thus man evolved
like the tadpole, which does not have to hire George Washington to do
the woodsman stunt, as Nature arranges for the chopping off of its tail
at the accepted time. What Nature does for the tadpole, Dr. Darwin did
for man. But he bungled the job and cut the tail off too short. That’s
the reason appendicitis is prevalent to-day.
“And when Darwin looked on the woman he forgot his grammar and broke
out into superlatives without the justification of the rule of three:
‘This is the most barbarous cut of all.’
“For this unkind reflection on her Marcel Wave and also for the reason
that Mr. Darwin spared her costume but not her modesty, Eve condemned
man to wear clothes for all time.
“And as the evening and the morning were the sixth day, Darwin called
to the woman: ‘This man thou shalt call Adam, surnamed Smith.’ Likewise
to the man he said: ‘Whilst thou lovest this woman, her name shall be
called Evelyn and her children shall be called the daughters of Evelyn,
but when thy love groweth cold like the night, she shall be thy Eve. As
the first parents, so shall be all posterity.’
“And as he spoke so was it. Man’s love was as brief as the life of last
year’s calendar, and ever since the year one, women have been called
the daughters of Eve.
“Thus is fulfilled the prophecy of Darwin, as interpreted by the
firstborn of the earth, Cain Smythe of Eden.”
WHEN ADAM WAS A BOY: RANDOM
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE
OLDEST INHABITANT.
CHAPTER IX.
When Adam was a Boy: Random Recollections of the Oldest Inhabitant.
By the time Cain had completed his recital, we had reached an extensive
estate in the suburbs of Cimmeria.
“This is my birthplace,” said Cain, proudly.
“What! the Garden of—”
“Haven’t you heard that E. P. Roe has driven us back to Eden? At first
Mother didn’t want to come, for contrary to legendary lore, Eden is
situated at the North Pole. It is pretty cold when one’s only covering
is a shiver and the shadow of the Arctic circle. The only way Eve could
keep warm was by reading Jonathan Edwards’ sermons. She was especially
interested in the one wherein he said that sinners are held over the
pit of hell as one holds a spider or some other—the ‘other’ is mine:
I have to correct his grammar as well as his theology—loathsome insect
over the fire.
“After reading that, nothing would do for Mother Eve but that she must
cease shivering and become a sinner in order to have a hot time. Of
course being a woman, the snake could not resist her fascination, and
so she had no more reason to complain of the cold. Roe tried to open a
chestnut burr, pricked his fingers and got so mad that he drove the old
folks back to Eden. Mother Eve flirted with a Stygian plumber until she
got him to put hot air pipes from Jonathan Edwards’ crematory to the
Aiden roof garden. Weatherwise, the _mater_ is again comfortable.”
Adam and Eve were eating apples under the trees as we entered the
Garden. So glad was Eve to see a man who wasn’t a shade that she put a
pair of cherry lips to mine with a resounding smack.
“Forbidden fruit,” scowled Adam.
“There was a time,” I observed, “when I thought it better to welcome
the sting of a wasp rather than the kiss of a woman, but that was
before I had come in contact with a wasp and before I had been kissed
by a woman. Both have taught me that I knew neither wasps nor women and
that all things alliterative are not synonymous.”
Adam seemed anxious to change the subject from osculation to the origin
of things kissable, and to a man, of course, the only things kissable
are sweet little bits of laughing gurgling femininity.
“Doubtless you would be interested in my first impressions of my
helpmeet,” he said, “so I will give you the Genesis of Revelation. When
I was a boy—”
“He always gets childish after dinner,” whispered Eve in an aside
to me. Adam filled in the interruption by whittling on a toothpick.
“I’m glad he has a plentiful stock of lumber, for if you can keep him
whittling, you can get everything out of him except the truth. He
thinks he cuts a chunk out of history every time he flourishes his
jack-knife. The shavings he sells to the breakfast-food trust.”
“When I was a boy,” continued Adam, “I invariably spoke in the first
person, because I was the first person, but as Eve is my better half
I am now only a third, so in future I will not even use the editorial
‘we,’ but simply ‘the man’.”
“And the man said, ‘The woman’—” mocked Cain.
“You’re not in America, where the children bring up the parents,”
reproved Eve. “Besides, your information is but second-hand, for you
were ‘among those absent’.”
“Eve was bone of my bone,” continued Adam, “but not flesh of my flesh.
When I first set eyes on the woman she had not enough adipose tissue to
impair in an infinitesimal degree the rapid penetration of an X-ray; in
fact, from Cosmos to Cleopatra, woman has evaded the searching inquiry
of the X and is still an unknown quantity.”
“And the apple episode?” I questioned.
“That came about very naturally, as did everything in those days.
When the man and the woman were put in Eden, they were told that
everything should be kept decently and in order. Now in those days,
the English tongue had not reached the perfection it has to-day under
the clarifying influences of the spelling reform. There was no Trench
to tell us the use of the words and no popular novelists to bone the
dictionary as a chef does a bird. Eve’s education had been sadly
neglected. She didn’t know just what kind of order was meant and there
was no ‘Complete Housekeeper’ which could be consulted and no ‘Answers
to Correspondents’ column in a newspaper to aid her. So she sat down
and folded her hands.
“There is an aphorism that Satan finds ‘mischief still for idle hands
to do,’ and so when he saw that Eve left the dishes unwashed and her
hair uncombed, he said, ‘Presto, change!’ and was turned into a snake.
“Now it came to pass that the woman listened to the voice of the
charmer. Satan told of her grace and beauty, which Adam took as a
matter of course after the first day and ceased to comment thereon,
whereat the woman’s heart grew troubled.
“If you wish to know wherein you have failed to provide for the wife of
your bosom, you will find your neighbors well informed on the subject.
Adam might have learned much from the snake, for Eve poured her woe
into sympathetic ears—if snakes have ears. She wanted to know what was
the best kind of order.
“‘Apple-pie order,’ advised Satan promptly. Then being a lawyer, he
peeled off an apple-ate laugh.
“Eve related how her husband had tired of her and had taken to sleeping
night and day in the hope that Darwin might take the hint and find use
for another of his ribs—Adam had not yet been put wise to the fact
that he was minus a tail and thought that he could populate a harem by
dispensing with his ribs.
“The next day the serpent made another social call on Mistress Eve, who
tearfully besought a recipe for winning back her husband’s alienated
affections. Satan pondered a moment; then he said:
“‘You can’t please Adam, your husband, unless you give him apple
pie—the kind his mother used to make.’ Satan chuckled at the joke; he
thought it so good that he vowed it should be retold in every age as a
memorial of the fall.
“‘Give Adam some sass and then you can have everything in apple-pie
order,’ hissed the snake.
“‘You order the apples and I’ll make the pies.’
“But Satan had been cunning in transforming himself into a snake
instead of into a monkey, for he reminded Eve that he had no arms and
she must pick the fruit herself. This she did and then the serpent said
all good cooks tasted the ingredients to test their fitness for use.
Eve took a bite of the pippin; then she called Adam to get the core.
They liked the apple so well neither could wait for the pies to cook,
but ate up all the forbidden fruit.
“Sans bathing suit and sans modesty, Adam was taking a sun bath on
the beach, looking longingly over the gates of Eden at the wide world
outside when Landlord Darwin appeared.
“‘Front!’ came the command.
“Adam tried to put on a bold front, but as his linen was in the wash
and he had never been bell-boy in a hotel, he failed miserably. He
blushed at the exposure and was mercifully covered with confusion.
“‘I may as well tell the naked truth,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been
swimming, and the woman thou gavest me did steal my clothes, saying
that to be in style she must have a tailor-made suit.’
“So Eve became the original new woman and ever since then the Edenless
Adams have called marriage a failure whenever they couldn’t lay the
blame on the woman. And Eve—well, she can make apple pies as good as
she ever did!”
“But that green apple gave Mother Eve a belly ache,” ejaculated Cain,
“and I came to deliver her. She has since said that wasn’t the last
time I gave her a pain, but one can excuse her using slang after
associating with such a fabulistic personage as Æsop.
“You would have lacerated laughter could you have seen Dad when the
Ichthyosaurus—the mother-in-Latin of the stork—brought me to Eden.
The chimney wasn’t large enough for the reptile relic of the Mesozoic
age to crawl down, so it carelessly dropped me onto the stomach of
the astonished Father Adam, breaking what has since been known as the
floating rib. From that accident arose the legend that woman was made
of the crookedest part of man, which was the reason she couldn’t keep
him straight.
“Eve welcomed me all right, for a mother takes to babies and goo goo
talk as naturally as ducks take to water, but Adam felt queer—out of
place; he didn’t quite understand the thing and wondered why I hadn’t
been born full-grown. He didn’t know whether I was a new kind of
breakfast food, a condensed milk advertisement, or an alarm clock sent
to wake him up early in the morning. Most of the time I was cutting my
teeth, Dad was sulking out in the backyard under the apple tree with a
pretty well-developed case of green eye and the blues. Occasionally
he would come in and try to smile as he peeped over in the couch of
fig leaves. Then Eve would take me up and hand me to Papa. He took me
as if he were afraid I would bite and held me out at arm’s length as
if he thought the thing might melt and ruin his full dress suit, which
consisted of a smile minus the fig leaves. I understand that evening
dress has differed little from that day to this.”
“I confess that I am lamentably ignorant on the subject, but I find
Henry James more lucid than the naturalists who wrote ‘Wild Men I Have
Known.’ What was the origin of species?”
“With all deference to Darwin and the rest,” explained Cain, “methinks
it was an apple seed!”
And being the first seed of the woman, Cain certainly ought to know!
ELECTION DAY BEYOND THE STYX.
CHAPTER X.
Election Day Beyond the Styx.
Hades has two newspapers to mirror forth the daily doings of the
Stygian smart set. Owing to the uncounted population of the resort,
these publications have circulations which would make the most yellow
of earthly journals grow pink with envy. Here are some clippings from
recent issues of the rival newspapers:
THE CIMMERIAN CHATTERBOX
PUBLISHED EVERY LITTLE WHILE TO KEEP PACE
WITH THE LARGEST CIRCULATION LIES
OF THE AMERICAN PRESS.
_Edited by Horace Greeley and other defeated politicians, who tell
the truth if the man is not a subscriber, and print all the news that
doesn’t make a lightning coupling with the waste basket._
Domestic News: Registering the Vote—It is no sinecure to be registrar
of voters in Hades. If you think it is, ask “Boss” Tweed, who threw
up his job to Matt Quay, who is sticking it out, though it take all
eternity. Many of those who take up their residence on the banks of
the Styx know little about themselves and less about their ancestors.
Notwithstanding this, there are few people in Hades who haven’t stood
up before the registrar to have their noses counted, and the endeavor
has been to have every Tom, Dick, and Harry, as well as every Jane,
Mary, and Anne on the list. The age of Anne and also the more famous
age of Elizabeth gave the registrar some trouble at first, but after
telling the “eternal feminine” that no affidavit or birth certificate
is required with the age declaration, the statistics became less
alarming to the fair sex.
There are some people, however, who think that to right a lie it is
only necessary to write one and so requested blanks which they later
mailed to Quay, the head nose enumerator. In this way they could tell
what their age has been, without the annoyance of seeing the ungallant
smile of unbelief depicted on the registrar’s face as he marks down
“age 16” in his book and mentally adds fifteen as in the days when he
studied oral arithmetic. Many a woman’s figure belies the statement
that “figures can’t lie.” While the unwritten law of chivalry makes
it rude to ask a lady’s age, the law of Hades gives a man the right
to estimate her age if the lady slams the door in his face. Woman’s
rights are still a subject for debate. You can tell the age of a horse
by his teeth, but no man can tell a woman’s age by her lack of gray
hairs.
STYGIAN SIFTINGS.
PRINTERS’ PI COOKED TO A CRISP FOR THE DELECTATION OF LOVERS OF
REALISM, AND SERVED HOT FROM THE GRIDDLE OF OUR REPORTER’S IMAGINATION.
DEVIL-BAKED by Arthur Big Brain and Willie Randy’s Nurse.
_N. B.—We have the largest circulation and we can prove it. We
always arrange the event to suit the “extra.” Our paper is read; our
contemporary is redder. Imitation is the sincerest proof of color
blindness. We print all the news that no one else will print. It’s all
here and all untrue. If you see it in the Siftings, you may be excused
for having your doubts. We cater to the great reading public, not to
the Sunday School. There is no hyphenated heaviness in this paper. Our
motto: More muck to mix._
_EDITORIAL: AN ELECTION PROPHECY._
Owing to the many claims presented, the Stygian Siftings acknowledges
that it is a difficult matter to decide who has been the greatest
benefactor to Hell, but we think Nero should be accorded the palm. We
say this not because we wish to play favorites, but merely for the sake
of harmony, which we believe would be best secured by the selection of
Nero, the violinist, at the coming election to fill the position of
janitor in the hall of fame.
_NERO RECALLED FROM THE CATACOMBS._
(_From the Cimmerian Chatterbox._)
We do not reprint legends of the bib and rattle, so we treat our
contemporary with the contemptuous silence which it deserves. Its
scissor blades are longer than the nose of its editor. A subsidized
press, which the Stygian Siftings is known to be, is unworthy of
notice. But to the candidate put forth, whose conduct needs careful
editing and much blue pencil, we would apostrophize thusly: Nero, your
only claim to fame is that you murdered your mother, kicked your wife
down stairs and made Rome howl while you painted the town red. Many
another man has done all three and only got his picture in the rogues’
gallery and the newspapers in return for his efforts. Nero, put that
upon your catgut and play it to the shades of the tunes you have
murdered! Nero was born without whiskers and he’s had many a close
shave since then. Who was the first shaver? A coupon for a hair cut and
a cup of red ink given for the best answer!
_THE CANDIDATE SPEAKS._
(_Oration of Nero Stenographically Reported for the Stygian Siftings._)
LADIES AND FELLOW-CITIZENS—If it please the ladies, I come to speak in
my own behalf and crave your attention and your vote. As there appears
to be no other candidate who is so anxious for the office of janitor
of the hall of fame and general benefactor of Hades as I, it seems to
me that no other qualifications are needed. However, there are some
persons who are conceited enough to imagine that they will give me a
hard run for my money. Why, fellow-citizens and voters, these men are
not even natives of this fair country, the finest the sun forgot to
shine upon! ‘Tis true they have been naturalized, but they never can be
civilized. They may have push and cheek, but they lack the pull to get
there.
Some men are so suspicious that they won’t take stock in anything
except the thermometer; under the present climatic conditions in
Hades, that is bound to rise. The time for prejudice is past. It may
be necessary to remind the opposition that we are a populous community.
We have not taken into our limits any farm lands. In all our borders
there are only solid blocks of houses with here and there a football
park, where the players may break each other’s bones on the gridiron.
There are other institutions to which we might refer with pride, but
the metropolitan press is stirring them up with a muck rake. We own up
to all the charges made and herein we differ from summer resorts up on
the earth, where they sit on the lid and say their prayers, and then
lie a little about the real condition of things in their community. The
Stygianite, who lives in the earth and not on it, cannot prevaricate
without being found out. He owns up whenever he has to, and that is
pretty often. Up on earth, however, descendants of Ananias are as
numberless as the hairs on the head of an after-taking advertisement.
I do not desire to answer the idiotorial attack of the editor of the
Cimmerian Chatterbox, for I agree with him that it is better to boil
your candidates in printers’ ink before election than to roast them
afterward.
If I decide to accept the office which the chairman of the Roman
executive committee assures me will be tendered to the only Nero, I
promise you all exemption from taxes, divorce without six months’
probation in the backwoods—anything and everything you ask shall be
yours. You deposit the ballot; Nero will do the rest.
Among the reforms I intend to institute will be a wholesale cleaning
of Hades. I will put fresh paint on the houses daily to keep Alexander
from wearing out the buildings by leaning against them. I will install
couches in the public parks for men who have run for office so much
that they must be tired, and I will not debar any of the candidates
I defeat from six feet of Squatters’ Ground. I will even distribute
campaign mirrors to others who would like to see themselves as I see
them. Of course I believe that the man should seek the office, but the
only reason I ask for your votes is so that I may have another office
to put on my official letter-head. I’m not sure I can find room for it,
but I can increase the size of the paper and perhaps employ another
typewriter. Don’t be like a balance wheel, ready to move in either
direction on the slightest provocation. The man who borrows trouble on
election day must return the goods if he bets on the wrong man. Never
mind if the reformers ask: “Where did he get it?” Every politician
knows where his graft comes from; call on me the day after election and
I’ll see that you all get yours. Don’t sell your vote for a mess of
political pottage without seeing the color of my long green.
And now I must conclude, for my voice is husky with much speaking.
Most of the great orators are dead. Cicero is dead; Demosthenes is
dead, and to tell the truth, gentlemen, I don’t feel very much alive
myself! (Great applause.)
_NERO’S LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE._
TO THE DILETTANTE POLITICAL CLUB: Greeting—It is with pleasure that I
accept the endorsement of your distinguished body. All I ask is that
if the voters don’t feel like giving the position to me, kindly turn
down the other fellows. Alexander and Louis XIV. will serve their
constitutions, but not their country. They offered their services in
the late unpleasantness, but only on condition that they were not to
leave the country unless the enemy entered it. Your endorsement of me
has been hanging over their heads like a dynamite bomb swung from a
socialistic cobweb. Now the silence of political oblivion has fallen
with a dull, sickening thud, and they are shaking in their boots with
muffled ice and bated breath.
The party plank is a see-saw to catch votes. I stand upon this
platform: I am in favor of making Hades the centre of the universe as
it now is of the earth, and building a bridge over the Styx to New
York, so that disappointed politicians and all others weary of life may
here find refuge and a warm welcome.
I am in favor of fortifying the Styx, which would give Captain Kidd
and his pirates a chance to swoop down on the commerce in New York Bay
and get back to Hades unmolested. They could also form a combination
with the chicken thieves of the African colony, and the supply of fowls
brought across the river would establish for all time the pre-eminence
of Hades as an all-the-year-’round resort.
Yours for harmony,
NERO, REX.
Hotel Hereafter,
CIMMERIA, HADES-ON-STYX.
Mephisto, Proprietor and Cook.
_WHEN IS WAGED THE BATTLE OF BALLOTS._
The Siftings is informed, on the best of authority, that an election is
in progress. On his way to the office, the editor was buttonholed by
a ward heeler and handed a pawned ticket. He was then conducted to a
booth, where he retired—except for about three feet of trousers and two
of leather. Having scratched to his heart’s content, he saw his ballot
chewed by a stuffed box, and was permitted to go to his sanctum, there
to forecast the outcome—a more uncertain quantity than the weather
brewed in the department of the interior. Our reporter says it’s all
over but the shouting and he is shouting for Nero one minute and for
Alexander the next. Personally, the editor is in doubt as to whom will
be elected. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he has heard the
speeches of three of the candidates and has read the predictions of
the chairmen of the different parties. One side or the other must be
laboring under a “misapprehension.” Our attorney assures us that this
phrase is perfectly safe. Having already two suits for libel on hand,
we don’t feel like starting a clothing store to get rid of surplus
suits. Misfit personalities always give the editor a libel suit. He
needs a font of nonpareil with many daggers in it to keep off a minion
of misunderstanding. Our attorney is Col. Robert G. Ingersoll. (See
advertising columns.)
Alexander needs a few votes and Nero needs a lot and by the time they
get through needing, there will be no votes left for anybody else.
Louis XIV. has bolted his party and is running on an independent
ticket. It is said that his name appears on the voting lists of all the
wards; if so, he ought to be challenged. However, “Boss” Tweed, who is
chairman of Nero’s campaign committee, may be confidentially expected
to look out for his candidate’s interests—and his own.
Some say the dark horse will win, having the support of the tea party
gang and of the Prince of Darkness. In this spirit-moving campaign
no one knows where the population is going to focus. The residence
of a repeater is a mystery deeper than the fixed locale of a New
York poolroom. After all, Hades is a good deal like the earth, where
graveyards, forgetting the ethics of etiquette, yawn on election day to
permit dead men to vote. Just as the paper goes to press, it is stated
that pasters are being freely used and that 5,876,433 candidates have
sprung up. The voting is still going on. If the polls close at the
usual time, it is believed there would be about twenty small boys who
had been overlooked in the voting, and these would kick as soon as they
discovered they were not in the running.
We understand that in Hades woman has her rights, that she can exercise
her franchise, yet not a single woman has voted to-day. It all goes to
show that a woman desires only what she can’t get. She would rather use
the ballots for curling papers or to trim her bonnet than to put into a
stuffed box. But there’s another reason. According to the registration,
not one woman in Hades is of votable age. None would acknowledge being
more than “sweet and twenty!”
_ELECTION EXTRA! LAST EDITION!_
The battle of ballots is over. The last scratched ticket has been
counted and the victor is—“Boss” Tweed! The New York politician, as
Nero’s manager, had charge of the distribution of tickets and pasted
his own name over that of the Roman emperor. All’s fair in war and
politics. Tweed deserves a tablet in the corridors of the hall of fame
as well as the key to its front door!
NOAH’S PERSONALLY CONDUCTED
EXCURSION TO EARTH.
CHAPTER XI.
Noah’s Personally Conducted Excursion to Earth.
All the Stygian colony was thrown into a state of unusual excitement
one hot December morning by the following posters replacing the
campaign lithographs of Nero and Alexander:
LAST CHANCE TO COOL OFF!
UNSURPASSED FUNSEEKING
EXCURSION
TO THE MIRTH-PROVOKING REGION OF
EARTH
ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18.
(Next day Sunday, giving ample time to get back—also
to recover and look sober)
BASEBALL AT THE BATTERY.
The committee guarantees the game, not the quality of the playing.
Umpire Shylock promises to make the score as close as his nature will
permit. This is the line-up:
Count Ercolo Antonio Matthioli—Mask Wearers—Louis Duc de Vermandois.
Ananias—Fancy Twirlers—Munchausen.
Napoleon—First Sack—Louis XIV.
Boswell—Middleman—Sancho Panza.
Herr Bismark—Where the Keg Is—Rip Van Winkle.
Tweed—Hole in the Wall—Quay.
Nero—All Out—Alexander.
Beau Brummel—Centre of Attraction—Ward McAllister.
Bobbie Burns—Where the Daisies Droop Their Heads—Longfellow.
N. B.—Only dead-head tickets accepted. Get pasteboards from the
committee. Reception. R. s. v. p.
NOAH, _Chairman_,
P. T. BARNUM,
CAPTAIN KANE.
All that week Noah’s personally-conducted excursion to earth was
the one topic of conversation. The Stygianites ceased to watch the
thermometer and even forgot to stone the clerk of the weather bureau.
It was the burning question of the hour in Hades and smouldered for
several days.
Two days after it had been posted, I joined the group reading the
circular for the ’steenth time.
“Is Noah capable of being at the helm?” asked Napoleon. “His record
indicates that all he knows could be printed on a postage stamp without
cancelling the stamp.”
“He may be behind the times,” volunteered Methuselah, “but at least you
must give Noah credit for knowing enough to come in out of the rain,
which is more than could be said of most of the people of his day and
generation.”
“To my knowledge,” quoth Alexander, “there are but two instances
recorded of our good friend _Populi_ going wrong; first, when he
refused to follow Noah into the Ark before I was born; second, when he
failed to elect yours truly as custodian of the keys to the hall of
fame.”
“What mean the mystic letters ‘R. s. v. p.’?” asked Columbus,
re-reading the circular.
“Being an Italian, you Ought to know Greek,” I rejoined, becoming first
Ade to the injured Dooleyism, who didn’t Seem to get My Dust. Some
Pagan Spaniards can’t see an American joke without Housetop Comment in
Capital Letters. But I had gone Too Far to Ring Off, so I spoke in a
Tone like an English check: “It’s a Foreign Phrase used by Americans in
inviting People They Don’t Want. Translated into United States R. s. v.
p. reads: Rush in; shake hands; Victual up; Pull Out. Moral: Don’t be
Inquisitive, for if I read History and the Zodiac aright, it’s a Cinch
that you’ll have to hide your Elongated Flappers by Retreating to the
Shadows of the Tall Cedars.”
“_Revenons a nos moutons, redacteur_,” protested Napoleon, who abhorred
slang and preferred his followers and his fables without any morals.
To be called an editor made me quite willing to come back to the
subject—even reporters are susceptible to flattery.
“Anything that will distract one’s attention from the thermometer is
welcome,” said young Lochinvar. “Can you wonder that a lover sighs like
a furnace in this heated season when one sizzles by degrees? Alas!
there are no summer girls in Hades, for they exist only in the shadow
of an ice cream parlor. But I object to the company of Jonah on the
excursion. He would hoodoo the whole trip and some of us wouldn’t get
back to the Styx alive!”
Just then Izaak Walton joined the group.
“I wonder,” he said, “what Jonah’s mother-in-law said when he returned
home and told that story of the whale as his excuse for remaining out
three nights. Other men tell variations of the same story, but they
make them less fishy.”
“By the bye,” I put in, “it seems to me the Morman has the biggest kick
coming against his wives’ mothers, yet I’ve never heard a word of
complaint from any of them. How do you account for that, prophet?”
“Speaking from experience, I would say that one mother-in-law is
quite enough to have in a family unless a man is fond of excitement,”
answered Joe Smith.
“Boswell, what have I said on that subject,” asked Dr. Johnson. “I hate
to repeat myself, but having said everything that’s worth saying, it’s
up to Boswell.”
“If every Johnson had his Boswell, Washington might come into his own,”
said that general. “But I suppose I ought to be satisfied, for am I not
the father of my country?”
“You seem to think you are the father of the whole world,” snapped
Adam, who was jealous of the American. “That distinction belonged to
me when your country was still shrouded in the mists of the unknown.
I have talked with all the historians and as far as I can learn, you
are the father of no one and certainly not of your country. You aren’t
even a Pilgrim Father and if all Americans followed in the footsteps of
their first president, vital statistics would be less satisfactory to
Roosevelt than they are. Now, when I was a boy—”
“Listen to the oldest inhabitant,” jeered Washington. “Adam recalls his
boyhood days with extraordinary vividness for a man who never had any.”
“You may have been first at banquets and first in the hearts of your
countrymen,” continued Adam, “but you weren’t first in the heart of
your wife. As you married a widow, some man must have been ahead of you
there.”
“Then there’s that old cherry tree fable which ought to have been
uprooted from the school-books long ago,” said Ananias, who also had an
axe to grind. “It’s unfortunate for the perpetuation of truthfulness
that the only offspring of the father of his country is a chestnutty
cherry tree, with a few chips lying on the ground.”
Baron Munchausen gave George Washington a resounding slap on the back.
“You ought to give up being a pattern of veracity and take to writing
fiction,” he said. “An historical novel by General Washington would
be the Great American Novel which publishers have announced for the
last hundred years and which many authors have thought themselves
bald-headed trying to produce.”
“I understand that after the ball game, Tennyson will write ‘The Charge
of the Eleven.’”
“Isn’t he wrong in his numeral? Baseball is a nine, which is somewhat
of a discrepancy.”
“Oh, that’s poetic license!”
“May I be Shakespearean a moment?” asked Lord Bacon.
“You cannot, even for a moment,” declared the Bard of Avon. “I allow no
infringements on my copyright.”
“Don’t get excited,” returned milord. “All shades look alike to me
and it would be a poor expert who couldn’t prove you were somebody
else by your signature. Besides, who is Shakespeare anyway? The
sweets of notoriety are not for you. You have never been interviewed,
your picture does not figure in any patent-medicine advertisement,
and no phonograph record repeats your blankety-blank verse without
variation. Why, Bill, in these days you couldn’t pass an examination
in Shakespeare without the assistance of half a dozen books of notes,
a glossary, and five professors to tell you what you meant. To be the
writer of a coon song is to be famous; to pen ‘Hamlet’ is simply to
provide food for bookworms.”
“Let’s arbitrate,” suggested Æsop.
“None of your fables for mine,” said Shakespeare, slangily. “You would
designate two dogs; I would select two cats; they would call in a fox
for the odd. The arbitrators would come to talk it over. I would smile
and rub the cats’ fur the right way. You would fill the dogs with
porterhouse steak rare, broiled till the air for miles around would be
rich with the odor, and served with butter gravy. I would cram the cats
with liver and cream. You would turn the fox loose in the chicken yard
and give him the run of the goose pasture. Oh, I know how arbitrations
are run, whether they be conducted by cats or by capital!”
“This is no occasion for petty jealousies,” remonstrated Izaak Walton.
“I would rather cull flowers just now from the banks of a trout stream
than train for a prize fight. Hip! hip! hip! for the Hippodrome! Have
you forgotten that you are going to exchange Hades for New York, where
you can pull the sky over you for cover, use the moon in place of an
incandescent light, the four points of the compass for bed posts and a
morning shower for an alarm clock? We are going to find rest near the
heart of Nature, where bookmakers are unknown and politicians have no
higher ambition than to sit on a rail fence and dream of whittling down
the salaries of the school teachers when they get a place on the board
of education.”
“Boss” Tweed smiled for the first time since his election as janitor of
the hall of fame.
“Noah may have a map of the road to the millennium,” he said, “but he
has gotten side-tracked if he thinks New York is one of the stations
along that route!”
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE.
CHAPTER XII.
The Man with the Megaphone.
“We’re off,” sang out Noah, using a huge megaphone which could be heard
throughout the length of the train. “Perhaps it was not necessary to
tell you that we had started, but the megaphone man on all ‘Seeing New
York’ trips is expected to begin his lecture with that observation, and
as we’re going to the earth, we must do as mortals do.
“Due notice of our return will be published in the newspapers, but as
our stay in the metropolis is indefinite, our address has been left
with the constable, and the maid has been instructed to accept service.
“Speaking of maids reminds me that the dear women are rather hotter
under their lace collars just now than usual and are saying things
quite horrid. You see King Henry the Eighth insisted upon leaving the
women at home. To this Cæsar was opposed.
“‘Your wife may be above suspicion,’ said Henry, ‘but I’m not so sure
about mine. Six women tagging after a man are just about half a dozen
too many.’
“Sir Walter Raleigh joined forces with Cæsar and they brought the
matter to the attention of His Satanic Majesty. The metropolitan stores
have just announced a bargain sale of dress goods, so Lucifer knew he
would have an insurrection on his hands if he didn’t let the woman go
shopping. You will notice that the ladies are with us.”
“If Lucifer had not been a fallen angel,” whispered King Henry in my
ear, “he would not have known women so well!”
“Have you noticed the charming costume of Mother Eve, who is
chaperoning the party?” asked Ward McAllister. “Her hat is made up of
a little basket turned upside down, with trailing plants hanging from
the top, kept from falling by a tangled mass of ribbon, tickled by a
feather that like the ostrich from which it was taken, hides its head
in a mound of lace and—but how can a mere man describe a woman’s bonnet
adequately unless he has paid the bill for it? Adam says he would get a
divorce if he could name anybody but a snake as co-respondent.”
The megaphone continued to assault our ear drums.
“We are still in the region regarded as mythical by Robert Ingersoll,”
went on Noah, “and I am pleased to say that that gentleman is returning
to haunt the famous city which is assessed for one of our largest
avenues paved with good intentions. This resolution business begins
January first with a bracing against booze and a curtailing of the
smoke luxury, but it’s bones to nickels that it ends on the third day
of grace with a general retreat all along the line and the devil in
full pursuit. Most men proceed to lay a whole sidewalk before the grade
is fixed.”
The train started up hill with a jolt, but disdaining to notice the
inconvenience of his passengers—it was a personally-conducted tour,—the
Grand Sir Knight of the Hand Car continued:
“This road is inclined to take you to your destination, and I trust the
gravity of the situation appeals to you. Passengers are permitted to do
one of three things: They may remain seated on the up grade provided
they ply their fans vigorously enough to keep the engine from getting
a hot box; or they may get out and walk up hill, or if they need
exercise, they may get out and push. This is a free country where pull
doesn’t count.
“We always look out for the comfort of our patrons. No passenger ever
got a cinder in his eye from a locomotive on this road. Electricity is
the motive power and it may interest the scientists present to learn
that I have discovered the composition of electricity and with it the
secret of life. Its power is derived from the action of its principal
element, oxygen, in the process of uniting with the other element,
hydrogen, with which it compounds in varying proportions up to seven
parts by weight of oxygen to one of hydrogen, beyond which point the
product becomes water. Up on earth, they need coal or its equivalent
to furnish power to produce electricity. Down here we make it from the
decomposition of water and permitting the oxygen and the hydrogen to
re-unite. As a result of this friction we get a fire many times hotter
than that produced by coal, emitting oxygen instead of carbonic acid
gas. That explains the exhilaration of the air of Hades and is one
reason for its popularity as a health resort.
“No charge is ever made on this line for excessive baggage. You may
carry as much as you please, provided you carry it yourself. The only
live stock taken in the baggage cars are camels. These ‘water wagons’
might be useful if the assembled company gets dry before New York is
reached, and if the train should break down, the camel can always be
depended upon to get a hump on itself.
“The Stygian subway, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest scenic route
in the world—on a clear day. From the observation cars one gets a view
of all that is to be seen—earth and darkness. This road is a great feat
of engineering from the fact that it has no tunnels, no bridges and no
curves. It is the only double tracked line in Hades and each rail is so
widely separated from its fellow that they are not on speaking terms.
“A third rail was added for safety and rapid progress, movement having
been the order of things since the earth began to revolve upon its
axis. It was found that a single track would not fit the rolling stock
and an attempt to propel a two-wheel car over a single-rail road by
Ananias provoked much cussing. The road-bed did not lie so well as the
engineer who laid it!
“This is the only line in the world where the time-tables are made
solely to suit the public and where a man never loses his train nor his
temper. If the schedule as formulated by the general manager, Myself,
does not suit you, application to the division superintendent, Myself,
will be all that is necessary. Complaints to the general passenger,
agent, Myself, are at once referred to Me in My capacity of president
and thus no time is lost in red tape. I hold every office within the
gift of the road, the only practical solution to labor difficulties.
“We are now nearing Hellgate, which is at the entrance to New York.
Never having been to America, I asked Benedict Arnold to write
the remainder of the lecture. You may therefore depend upon this
description of the Great Republic as being strictly impartial and
without prejudice. As an aside, I may as well tell you that before
starting for New York, Arnold took the precaution to put an iron band
around his pocketbook.
“America, according to the man who sold it, is the land where preachers
are paid from $500 to $20,000 according to their ability to dodge
Satan and tickle the ears of the wealthy; where no clergyman writes a
sermon without a concordance in one hand and a popular novel in the
other; where the deacons conduct an auction for the best pews, and
where there is a daily round of theatricals by the Sunday School and
chicken suppers by the Ladies’ Aid, with collections and religion
thrown in for a change on Sunday.
“This is the land where the politician shakes poverty by the hand
before election and later altogether; where they have a congress of
four hundred men to make laws for a supreme court of nine to set aside;
where they have prayers on the floor of the national capitol and
whiskey in the basement; where men vote for what they do not want for
fear they will get what they want by voting for it; where other men
stay away from the polls one day and swear about the result the other
three-hundred and sixty-four days in the year.
“American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear
November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can
deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing
it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody
but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up
his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could
gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start an agitation
to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in.
“The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward
were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New
Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before
he knew it himself!
“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis,
Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of
Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences
that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy
one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis
of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every
second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly
peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in
his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking
up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware
to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep
and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be
demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated
to the twentieth story.
“This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets
so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not
large enough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a
god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers
and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be
a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit
on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of
energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach.
“The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who
tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the
reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention
between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning
the day with an orange phosphate at ten A.M., and finishing it and
the pocketbook of her steady company at twelve P.M. with a menu of
soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of
conscience or a disordered stomach!
“America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is
statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy;
where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests
of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept
in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after
election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make
clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets the aphorism
that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds
a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and
wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual
challenge to the world.
“America is a nation whose goddess of Liberty was foreign born,
baptized in blood, then sent into exile, where, serene and indifferent,
she turns her back on the land of her adoption and looks out to sea, a
heartless statue! This is a country without a language of its own, with
a national hymn that sings only of New England and is set to stolen
music, whose only national dance is the cakewalk and most popular tune
a rag-time coon song; a land whose people never allow the voice of
conscience to speak louder than the bell of the cash register.”
“Despite his century of banishment, Benedict Arnold is still a traitor
to his country,” I observed.
“Not at all,” answered Washington. “Why, he doesn’t know the meaning
of the word ‘traitor’ when separated from its Websterian environment.
His so-called betrayal of his country was but an incident to his
winning a woman, and where there’s a woman, man will make a way. Before
the organization of the Asbestos Society of Sinners, the historians
conspired with Pluto to fry us in our own fat, but now, immune in our
asbestos attire, it’s Siberia for Satan, and there’s always something
doing in the Douma of the Dead. As for me, I’m tired of being called
‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s
feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth
when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”
Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New
York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had
ceased. It was not until the car shot out of the darkness that the
letter dropped from my hand. I gasped in astonishment.
“The Battery! All change!” sang out the voice in the megaphone. But the
car did not stop. As if shot from a catapult it leaped over the trees
and vaulted the aquarium. It fluttered in the air and then settled down
in the waters of the bay like a bird with a broken wing.
When I opened my eyes I was being rolled over a barrel, and an
ambulance surgeon was forcing some very bad whiskey down my throat.
Whether it was the liquor or the water I had swallowed I know not, but
my surroundings seemed those of the Twenty-third Street water front,
west, rather than of the Battery. Was I being rescued from the sinking
of a ferry boat or from Noah’s Ark? Had my trip to Hades consumed only
the flash of the grain of sand in Time’s hour-glass which had seen me
sink to the bottom of the river and rise again, or had I been the
guest of the shades of the Styx for a day, a month, a year? A man who
had taken a whiskey straight might have solved the problem, but to a
man whose brain was befuddled by mixed drinks, coherent thought was
impossible. I fell asleep, content to drift and drift and dream—of
devils.
THE END.
THE LAND OF FULFILLED DESIRE.
EPILOGUE.
The Land of Fulfilled Desire.
MY DEAR MR. BANGS:
I have been to Hades in search of a sensation, but even the devil
couldn’t keep a newspaper man down and so once more I am in the
territory of the tired—New York. It may interest you to know that I am
holding down the city desk of the Universe, the former incumbent having
disappeared shortly before my return from the domain of the departed.
He left a letter addressed to his successor and I feel that I am
violating no confidence in divulging its contents:
“What impels me to record the experiences of this, my last night on
earth, I do not know. Perhaps it is to counterfeit courage, for when a
man receives a ‘ticket to the hereafter’ he feels the need of something
to brace his backbone, just as a boy will whistle in make-believe
bravery on rounding a dark corner.
“I felt more than ordinarily weary, for I seemed to be losing my grip
on my work and on—life! For several minutes I had been idly toying
with a pearl-handled revolver which I used as a paper weight, when a
rustling of paper made me turn. On the floor was a letter.
“‘That’s odd,’ I muttered. ‘The shades who deliver letters from
our Stygian correspondent usually lay them upon my desk like any
well-regulated ghost would do.’
“As I stooped to pick up the epistle, I noticed that my blue pencil lay
upon my pen, the two forming a cross. Then I knew what had exorcised
the shade and frightened it away. To an imaginative man, the episode
was uncanny. And it was night!
“Using the penholder as a paper cutter, I tore open the envelope and
took out the letter. It began without formalities:
“‘I suppose my interviews with Cimmerian citizens were pronounced
the most sensational fakes of the year. Did you state whether the
manuscript from the domain of the departed had a sulphurous tinge or
was redolent with spices and perfumes? The wireless correspondence from
Hades-on-Styx must have created much excitement on earth. People may
doubt the genuineness of my description of Hades, but they will have
a hot time proving me wrong, although nowadays not even the parson
believes in a scorch for every sin. Don’t you want to come and take my
place as scribe to Satan? I have been fighting down a desire to have
you visit this subterranean resort, for did one but express the wish,
it would be gratified in this, the Land of Fulfilled Desire. If Pluto
says “Come”—’
“Obeying a sudden impulse, I struck a match and held the letter in
the flame. Instantly it was snatched from my hand, though I could see
no one. At the same moment every electric light in the building went
out, leaving the place in darkness. On the air was a pungent odor of
brimstone.
“‘The devil!’ I ejaculated. That invocation sealed my fate: it was the
Styx and the Simple Life for mine, via the Jersey ferry. And it was
night!”
In the lore of Longfellow, “All the rest is mystery.”
LAWRENCE DANIEL FOGG.
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