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[1]

BEHIND THE BEYOND

STEPHEN LEACOCK

[2]

[3]
[4]
[5]

THE PROLOGUE

BEHIND THE

: : : BEYOND : : :

AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

TO HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

ILLUSTRATED BY A. H. FISH

[6]

[7]

CONTENTS

[8]
[9]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[10]

BEHIND THE BEYOND

A Modern Problem Play

[11]

Act I.—Behind the Beyond

THE curtain rises, disclosing the ushers
of the theater still moving up and
down the aisles. Cries of "Program!"
"Program!" are heard.
There is a buzz of brilliant conversation, illuminated
with flashes of opera glasses and the
rattle of expensive jewelry.

Then suddenly, almost unexpectedly, in fact
just as if done, so to speak, by machinery, the
lights all over the theater, except on the stage,
are extinguished. Absolute silence falls.
Here and there is heard the crackle of a shirt
front. But there is no other sound.

In this expectant hush, a man in a check
tweed suit walks on the stage: only one man,
one single man. Because if he had been accompanied
by a chorus, that would have been
a burlesque; if four citizens in togas had been
with him, that would have been Shakespeare;[12]
if two Russian soldiers had walked after him,
that would have been melodrama. But this is
none of these. This is a problem play. So he
steps in alone, all alone, and with that absolute
finish of step, that ability to walk as if,—how
can one express it?—as if he were walking,
that betrays the finished actor.

He has, in fact, barely had time to lay down
his silk hat, when he is completely betrayed.
You can see that he is a finished actor—finished
about fifteen years ago. He lays the
hat, hollow side up, on the silk hat table on
the stage right center—bearing north, northeast,
half a point west from the red mica fire
on the stage which warms the theater.

All this is done very, very quietly, very impressively.
No one in the theater has ever seen
a man lay a silk hat on a table before, and so
there is a breathless hush. Then he takes off
his gloves, one by one, not two or three at a
time, and lays them in his hat. The expectancy
is almost painful. If he had thrown his gloves
into the mica fire it would have been a relief.
But he doesn't.

The Curtain rises.

[Illus]
[13]

The man on the stage picks up a pile of letters
from the letter department of the hat
table. There are a great many of these letters,
because all his business correspondence, as
well as his private letters, are sent here by the
General Post Office. Getting his letters in this
way at night, he is able to read them like lightning.
Some of them he merely holds upside
down for a fraction of a second.

Then at last he speaks. It has become absolutely
necessary or he wouldn't do it. "So—Sao
Paolo risen two—hum—Rio Tinto down
again—Moreby anxious, 'better sell for half a
million sterling'—hum . . ."

(Did you hear that? Half a million sterling
and he takes it just as quietly as that. And it
isn't really in the play either. Sao Paolo and
Rio Tinto just come in to let you know the sort
of man you're dealing with.)

"Lady Gathorne—dinner—Thursday the
ninth—lunch with the Ambassador—Friday the
tenth."

(And mind you even this is just patter. The[14]
Ambassador doesn't come into the play either.
He and Lady Gathorne are just put in to let
the people in the cheaper seats know the kind
of thing they're up against.)

Then the man steps across the stage and
presses a button. A bell rings. Even before
it has finished ringing, nay, just before it begins
to ring, a cardboard door swings aside and a
valet enters. You can tell he is a valet because
he is dressed in the usual home dress of a stage
valet.

He says, "Did you ring, Sir John?"

There is a rustle of programs all over the
house. You can hear a buzz of voices say,
"He's Sir John Trevor." They're all on to
him.

When the valet says, "Did you ring, Sir
John," he ought to answer, "No, I merely
knocked the bell over to see how it would
sound," but he misses it and doesn't say it.

"Has her ladyship come home?"

"Yes, Sir John."

"Has any one been here?"

"Mr. Harding, Sir John."[15]

"Any one else?"

"No, Sir John."

"Very good."

The valet bows and goes out of the cardboard
door, and everybody in the theater, or at
least everybody in the seats worth over a dollar,
knows that there's something strange in the
relations of Lady Cicely Trevor and Mr.
Harding. You notice—Mr. Harding was there
and no one else was there. That's enough in
a problem play.

The double door at the back of the stage,
used only by the principal characters, is opened
and Lady Cicely Trevor enters. She is young
and very beautiful, and wears a droopy hat and
long slinky clothes which she drags across the
stage. She throws down her feather hat and
her crêpe de what-you-call-it boa on the boa
stand. Later on the valet comes in and gathers
them up. He is always gathering up things like
this on the stage—hats and boas and walking
sticks thrown away by the actors,—but nobody
notices him. They are his perquisites.[16]

Sir John says to Lady Cicely, "Shall I ring
for tea?"

And Lady Cicely says, "Thanks. No," in a
weary tone.

This shows that they are the kind of people
who can have tea at any time. All through a
problem play it is understood that any of the
characters may ring for tea and get it. Tea in
a problem play is the same as whisky in a melodrama.

Then there ensues a dialogue to this effect:
Sir John asks Lady Cicely if she has been out.
He might almost have guessed it from her coming
in in a hat and cloak, but Sir John is an
English baronet.

Lady Cicely says, "Yes, the usual round,"
and distributes a few details about Duchesses
and Princesses, for the general good of the audience.

Then Lady Cicely says to Sir John, "You
are going out?"

"Yes, immediately."

"To the House, I suppose."

This is very impressive. It doesn't mean, as[17]
you might think, the Workhouse, or the White
House, or the Station House, or the Bon
Marché. It is the name given by people of
Lady Cicely's class to the House of Commons.

"Yes. I am extremely sorry. I had hoped I
might ask to go with you to the opera. I fear
it is impossible—an important sitting—the
Ministers will bring down the papers—the Kafoonistan
business. The House will probably
divide in committee. Gatherson will ask a
question. We must stop it at all costs. The
fate of the party hangs on it."

Sir John has risen. His manner has
changed. His look is altered. You can see
him alter it. It is now that of a statesman.
The technical details given above have gone to
his head. He can't stop.

He goes on: "They will force a closure on
the second reading, go into committee, come out
of it again, redivide, subdivide and force us to
bring down the estimates."

While Sir John speaks, Lady Cicely's manner
has been that of utter weariness. She has
picked up the London Times and thrown it[18]
aside; taken up a copy of Punch and let it fall
with a thud to the floor, looked idly at a piece
of music and decided, evidently, not to sing it.
Sir John runs out of technical terms and stops.

The dialogue has clearly brought out the following
points: Sir John is in the House of
Commons. Lady Cicely is not. Sir John is
twenty-five years older than Lady Cicely. He
doesn't see—isn't he a fool, when everybody
in the gallery can see it?—that his parliamentary
work is meaningless to her, that her life
is insufficient. That's it. Lady Cicely is being
"starved." All that she has is money, position,
clothes, and jewelry. These things starve any
woman. They cramp her. That's what makes
problem plays.

Lady Cicely speaks, very quietly, "Are you
taking Mr. Harding with you?"

"Why?"

"Nothing. I thought perhaps I might ask
him to take me to the opera. Puffi is to sing."

"Do, pray do. Take Harding with you by
all means. Poor boy, do take him with you."

Sir John pauses. He looks at Lady Cicely[19]
very quietly for a moment. He goes on with a
slight change in his voice.

"Do you know, Cicely, I've been rather
troubled about Harding lately. There's something
the matter with the boy, something
wrong."

"Yes?"

"He seems abstracted, moody—I think, in
fact I'm sure that the boy is in love."

"Yes?"

Lady Cicely has turned slightly pale. The
weariness is out of her manner.

"Trust the instinct of an old man, my dear.
There's a woman in it. We old parliamentary
hands are very shrewd, you know, even in these
things. Some one is playing the devil with
Jack—with Harding."

Sir John is now putting on his gloves again
and gathering up his parliamentary papers
from the parliamentary paper stand on the left.

He cannot see the change in Lady Cicely's
face. He is not meant to see it. But even the
little girls in the tenth row of the gallery are
wise.[20]

He goes on. "Talk to Harding. Get it out
of him. You women can do these things. Find
out what the trouble is and let me know. I
must help him." (A pause. Sir John is speaking
almost to himself—and the gallery.) "I
promised his mother when she sent him home,
sent him to England, that I would."

Lady Cicely speaks. "You knew Mr. Harding's
mother very well?"

Sir John: "Very well."

"That was long ago, wasn't it?"

"Long ago."

"Was she married then?"

"No, not then."

"Here in London?"

"Yes, in London. I was only a barrister
then with my way to make and she a famous
beauty." (Sir John is speaking with a forced
levity that doesn't deceive even the ushers.)
"She married Harding of the Guards. They
went to India. And there he spent her fortune—and
broke her heart." Sir John sighs.

"You have seen her since?"

"Never."[21]

"She has never written you?"

"Only once. She sent her boy home and
wrote to me for help. That was how I took
him as my secretary."

"And that was why he came to us in Italy
two years ago, just after our marriage."

"Yes, that was why."

"Does Mr. Harding know?"

"Know what?"

"That you—knew his mother?"

Sir John shakes his head. "I have never
talked with him about his mother's early life."

The stage clock on the mantelpiece begins
to strike. Sir John lets it strike up to four or
five, and then says, "There, eight o'clock. I
must go. I shall be late at the House. Good-by."

He moves over to Lady Cicely and kisses
her. There is softness in his manner—such
softness that he forgets the bundle of parliamentary
papers that he had laid down. Everybody
can see that he has forgotten them. They
were right there under his very eye.

Sir John goes out.[22]

Lady Cicely stands looking fixedly at the
fire. She speaks out loud to herself. "How
his voice changed—twenty-five years ago—so
long as that—I wonder if Jack knows."

There is heard the ring of a bell off the stage.
The valet enters.

"Mr. Harding is downstairs, my lady."

"Show him up, Ransome."

A moment later Mr. Harding enters. He is
a narrow young man in a frock coat. His face
is weak. It has to be. Mr. Harding is meant
to typify weakness. Lady Cicely walks
straight to him. She puts her two hands on his
shoulders and looks right into his face.

"MY DARLING," she says. Just like that.
In capital letters. You can feel the thrill of it
run through the orchestra chairs. All the audience
look at Mr. Harding, some with opera
glasses, others with eyeglasses on sticks. They
can see that he is just the sort of ineffectual
young man that a starved woman in a problem
play goes mad over.

Lady Cicely repeats "My darling" several
times. Mr. Harding says "Hush," and tries[23]
to disengage himself. She won't let him. He
offers to ring for tea. She won't have any.
"Oh, Jack," she says. "I can't go on any
longer. I can't. When first you loved me, I
thought I could. But I can't. It throttles me
here—this house, this life, everything——"
She has drawn him to a sofa and has sunk down
in a wave at his feet. "Do you remember,
Jack, when first you came, in Italy, that night,
at Amalfi, when we sat on the piazza of the
palazzo?" She is looking rapturously into his
face.

Mr. Harding says that he does.

"And that day at Fiesole among the orange
trees, and Pisa and the Capello de Terisa and
the Mona Lisa—Oh, Jack, take me away from
all this, take me to the Riviera, among the contadini,
where we can stand together with my
head on your shoulder just as we did in the
Duomo at Milano, or on the piaggia at Verona.
Take me to Corfu, to the Campo Santo, to
Civita Vecchia, to Para Noia—anywhere——"

Mr. Harding, smothered with her kisses,
says, "My dearest, I will, I will." Any man[24]
in the audience would do as much. They'd
take her to Honolulu.

While she is speaking, Sir John's voice had
been heard off the stage. "No, thank you, Ransome,
I'll get them myself, I know just where
I left them." Sir John enters hurriedly, advances
and picks up his papers on the table—turns—and
stands——

He sees his wife's attitude and hears her say
"Riviera, Amalfi, Orangieri, Contadini and
Capello Santo." It is enough. He drops his
parliamentary papers. They fall against the
fire irons with a crash. These in falling upset
a small table with one leg. The ball of wool
that is on it falls to the floor. The noise of this
disturbs the lovers.

They turn. All three look at one another.
For a moment they make a motion as if to ring
for tea. Then they stand petrified.

"You!" gasps Lady Cicely. She does this
awfully well. Everybody says afterward that
it was just splendid when she said "You."

Sir John stands gazing in horror. "Him![25]
My God! He!" Mr. Harding says nothing.
He looks very weak.

Lady Cicely unpetrifies first.

She breaks out, speaking through her nostrils.
"Yes, I love him, I love him. I'm not
ashamed of it. What right have you to deny
it me? You gave me nothing. You made me
a chattel, a thing——"

You can feel the rustle of indignation
through the house at this. To make a woman a
thing is the crowning horror of a problem play.

"You starved me here. You throttled me."
Lady Cicely takes herself by the neck and throttles
herself a little to show how.

"You smothered me. I couldn't breathe—and
now I'm going, do you hear, going away,
to life, to love, behind the beyond!" She gathers
up Mr. Harding (practically) and carries
him passionately away. He looks back weakly
as he goes.

Sir John has sunk down upon a chair. His
face is set.

"Jack," he mutters, "my God, Jack!"[26]

As he sits there, the valet enters with a telegram
on a tray.

"A telegram, Sir John."

Sir John (dazed and trying to collect himself),
"What?"

"A telegram, sir,—a cablegram."

Sir John takes it, opens it and reads aloud:

"He is dead. My duty is ended. I am coming
home—Margaret Harding."

"Margaret coming home. It only needed
that—my God."

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       

As he says it, the curtain falls.

The lights flick up. There is a great burst
of applause. The curtain rises and falls. Lady
Cicely and Mr. Harding and Sir John all come
out and bow charmingly. There is no trace of
worry on their faces, and they hold one another's
hands. Then the curtain falls and the
orchestra breaks out into a Winter Garden
waltz. The boxes buzz with discussion. Some
of the people think that Lady Cicely is right in
claiming the right to realize herself: others
think that before realizing herself she should[27]
have developed herself. Others ask indignantly
how she could know herself if her husband
refused to let her be herself. But everybody
feels that the subject is a delicious one.

Those of the people who have seen the play
before very kindly explain how it ends, so as
to help the rest to enjoy it. But the more serious-minded
of the men have risen, very gently,
and are sneaking up the aisles. Their expression
is stamped with deep thought as if pondering
over the play. But their step is as that of
leopards on the march, and no one is deceived
as to their purpose.

The music continues. The discussion goes
on.

The leopards come stealing back. The orchestra
boils over in a cadence and stops. The
theater is darkened again. The footlights
come on with a flash. The curtain silently lifts,
and it is[28]—

Act II.—Six Months Later

THE programs rustle. The people
look to see where it is. And they
find that it is "An Apartment in
Paris." Notice that this place
which is used in every problem play is just
called An Apartment. It is not called Mr.
Harding's Apartment, or an Apartment for
which Mr. Harding pays the Rent. Not a bit.
It is just an Apartment. Even if it were "A
Apartment" it would feel easier. But "An
Apartment"!! The very words give the audience
a delicious shiver of uncomfortableness.

When the curtain rises it discloses a French
maid moving about the stage in four-dollar silk
stockings. She is setting things on a little table,
evidently for supper. She explains this in
French as she does it, so as to make it clear.[Illus]

Their expression is stamped with deep thought.

"Bon! la serviette de monsieur! bon! la serviette
de madame, bien—du champagne, bon!
langouste aux champignons, bien, bon.—" This
is all the French she knows, poor little thing,[29]
but langouste aux champignons beats the audience,
so she is all right.

Anyway, this supper scene has to come in.
It is symbolical. You can't really show Amalfi
and Fiesole and the orange trees, so this kind
of supper takes their place.

As the maid moves about there is a loud
knock at the cardboard door of the apartment.
A man in official clothes sticks his head in. He
is evidently a postal special messenger because
he is all in postal attire with a postal glazed
hat.

"Monsieur Arrding?" he says.

"Oui."

"Bon! Une lettre."

"Merci, monsieur." He goes out. The audience
feel a thrill of pride at having learned
French and being able to follow the intense
realism of this dialogue. The maid lays the
letter on the supper table.

Just as she does it the door opens and there
enter Mr. Harding and Lady Cicely. Yes,
them. Both of them. The audience catches
it like a flash. They live here.[30]

Lady Cicely throws aside her cloak. There
is great gaiety in her manner. Her face is
paler. There is a bright spot in each cheek.
Her eyes are very bright.

There follows the well-known supper scene.
Lady Cicely is very gay. She pours champagne
into Mr. Harding's glass. They both drink
from it. She asks him if he is a happy boy
now. He says he is. She runs her fingers
through his hair. He kisses her on the bare
shoulder. This is also symbolic.

Lady Cicely rattles on about Amalfi and
Fiesole. She asks Mr. Harding if he remembers
that night in the olive trees at Santa Clara,
with just one thrush singing in the night sky.
He says he does. He remembers the very
thrush. You can see from the talk that they
have been all over Baedeker's guide to the Adriatic.

At times Lady Cicely's animation breaks.
She falls into a fit of coughing and presses her
hand to her side. Mr. Harding looks at her
apprehensively. She says, "It is nothing, silly[31]
boy, it will be gone in a moment." It is only
because she is so happy.

He kisses her on the bare shoulder.

[Illus]Then, quite suddenly, she breaks down and
falls at Mr. Harding's knees.

"Oh, Jack, Jack, I can't stand it! I can't
stand it any longer. It is choking me!"

"My darling, what is it?"

"This, all this, it is choking me—this apartment,
these pictures, the French maid, all of it.
I can't stand it. I'm being suffocated. Oh,
Jack, take me away—take me somewhere
where it is quiet, take me to Norway to the
great solemn hills and the fjords——"

Then suddenly Mr. Harding sees the letter
in its light blue envelope lying on the supper
table. It has been lying right beside him for
ten minutes. Everybody in the theater could
see it and was getting uncomfortable about it.
He clutches it and tears it open. There is a
hunted look in his face as he reads.

"What is it?"

"My mother—good God, she is coming. She[32]
is at the Bristol and is coming here. What can
I do?"

Lady Cicely is quiet now.

"Does she know?"

"Nothing, nothing."

"How did she find you?"

"I don't know. I can't imagine. I knew
when I saw in the papers that my father was
dead that she would come home. But I kept
back the address. I told the solicitors, curse
them, to keep it secret."

Mr. Harding paces the stage giving an imitation
of a weak man trapped. He keeps muttering,
"What can I do?"

Lady Cicely speaks very firmly and proudly.
"Jack."

"What?"

"There is only one thing to do. Tell her."

Mr. Harding, aghast, "Tell her?"

"Yes, tell her about our love, about everything.
I am not ashamed. Let her judge me."

Mr. Harding sinks into a chair. He keeps
shivering and saying, "I tell you, I can't; I
can't. She wouldn't understand." The letter[33]
is fluttering in his hand. His face is contemptible.
He does it splendidly. Lady Cicely
picks the letter from his hand. She reads it
aloud, her eyes widening as she reads:

Lady Cicely reads, her eyes widen and her
voice chokes with horror.

She advances to him and grips his hand.
"What does it mean, Jack, tell me what does
it mean?"

"Good God, Cicely, don't speak like that."

"This—these lines—about your father."

"I don't know what it means—I don't care—I
hated him, the brute. I'm glad he's dead. I
don't care for that. But she's coming here, any
minute, and I can't face it."

Lady Cicely, more quietly, "Jack, tell me,[34]
did my—did Sir John Trevor ever talk to you
about your father?"

"No. He never spoke of him."

"Did he know him?"

"Yes—I think so—long ago. But they were
enemies—Trevor challenged him to a duel—over
some woman—and he wouldn't fight—the
cur."

Lady Cicely (dazed and aghast)—"I—understand—it—now."
She recovers herself and
speaks quickly.

"Listen. There is time yet. Go to the hotel.
Go at once. Tell your mother nothing. Nothing,
you understand. Keep her from coming
here. Anything, but not that. Ernestine,"—She
calls to the maid who reappears for a second—"a
taxi—at once."

She hurriedly gets Harding's hat and coat.
The stage is full of bustle. There is a great
sense of hurry. The audience are in an agony
for fear Ernestine is too slow, or calls a four-wheel
cab by mistake. If the play is really
well put on, you can presently hear the taxi
buzzing outside. Mr. Harding goes to kiss[35]
Lady Cicely. She puts him from her in horror
and hastens him out.

She calls the maid. "Ernestine, quick, put
my things, anything, into a valise."

"Madame is going away!"

"Yes, yes, at once."

"Madame will not eat?"

"No, no."

"Madame will not first rest?" (The slow
comprehension of these French maids is something
exasperating.) "Madame will not await
monsieur?

"Madame will not first eat, nor drink—no?
Madame will not sleep?"

"No, no—quick, Ernestine. Bring me what
I want. Summon a fiacre. I shall be ready in
a moment." Lady Cicely passes through a side
door into an inner room.

She is scarcely gone when Mrs. Harding enters.
She is a woman about forty-five, still very
beautiful. She is dressed in deep black.

(The play is now moving very fast. You
have to sit tight to follow it all.)[36]

She speaks to Ernestine. "Is this Mr.
Harding's apartment?"

"Yes, madame."

"Is he here?" She looks about her.

"No, madame, he is gone this moment in a
taxi—to the Hotel Bristol, I heard him say."

Mrs. Harding, faltering. "Is—any one—here?"

"No, madame, no one—milady was here a
moment ago. She, too, has gone out." (This
is a lie but of course the maid is a French
maid.)

"Then it is true—there is some one——"
She is just saying this when the bell rings, the
door opens and there enters—Sir John Trevor.

"You!" says Mrs. Harding.

"I am too late!" gasps Sir John.

She goes to him tremblingly—"After all
these years," she says.

"It is a long time."

"You have not changed."

She has taken his hands and is looking into
his face, and she goes on speaking. "I have
thought of you so often in all these bitter years[37]—it
sustained me even at the worst—and I
knew, John, that it was for my sake that you
had never married——"

Then, as she goes on talking, the audience
realize with a thrill that Mrs. Harding does
not know that Sir John married two years ago,
that she has come home, as she thought, to the
man who loved her, and, more than that, they
get another thrill when they realize that Lady
Cicely is learning it too. She has pushed the
door half open and is standing there unseen,
listening. She wears a hat and cloak; there is
a folded letter in her hand—her eyes are wide.
Mrs. Harding continues:

"And now, John, I want your help, only you
can help me, you are so strong—my Jack, I
must save him." She looks about the room.
Something seems to overcome her. "Oh, John,
this place—his being here like this—it seems a
judgment on us."

The audience are getting it fast now. And
when Mrs. Harding speaks of "our awful moment
of folly," "the retribution of our own[38]
sins," they grasp it and shiver with the luxury
of it.

After that when Mrs. Harding says: "Our
wretched boy, we must save him,"—they all
know why she says "our."

She goes on more calmly. "I realized. I
knew—he is not alone here."

Sir John's voice is quiet, almost hollow. "He
is not alone."

"But this woman—can you not deal with her—persuade
her—beg her for my sake—bribe
her to leave my boy?"

Lady Cicely steps out. "There is no bribe
needed. I am going. If I have wronged him,
and you, it shall be atoned."

Sir John has given no sign. He is standing
stunned. She turns to him. "I have heard and
know now. I cannot ask for pity. But when
I am gone—when it is over—I want you to give
him this letter—and I want you, you two, to—to
be as if I had never lived."

She lays the letter in his hand. Then without
a sign, Lady Cicely passes out. There is a
great stillness in the house. Mrs. Harding has[39]
watched Lady Cicely and Sir John in amazement.
Sir John has sunk into a chair. She
breaks out, "John, for God's sake what does it
mean—this woman—speak—there is something
awful, I must know."

"Yes, you must know. It is fate. Margaret,
you do not know all. Two years ago I married——"

"But this woman, this woman——"

"She is—she was—my wife."

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       

And at this moment Harding breaks into the
room. "Cicely, Cicely, I was too late——"
He sees the others. "Mother," he says in
agony, "and you——" He looks about.
"Where is she? What is happening? I must
know——"

Sir John, as if following a mechanical impulse,
has handed Harding the letter. He
tears it open and reads:

"Dearest, I am going away, to die. It cannot
be long now. The doctor told me to-day.
That was why I couldn't speak or explain it to[40]
you and was so strange at supper. But I am
glad now. Good-by."

Harding turns upon Sir John with the snarl
of a wolf. "What have you done? Why have
you driven her away? What right had you
to her, you devil? I loved her—She was
mine——"

He had seized a pointed knife from the supper
table. His shoulders are crouched—he is
about to spring on Sir John. Mrs. Harding
has thrown herself between them.

"Jack, Jack, you mustn't strike."

"Out of the way, I say, I'll——"

"Jack, Jack, you mustn't strike. Can't you
understand? Don't you see—what it is. . . ."

"What do you mean—stand back from me."

"Jack he—is—your—father."

The knife clatters to the floor. "My God!"

And then the curtain falls—and there's a
burst of applause and, in accordance with all
the best traditions of the stage, one moment
later, Lady Cicely and Mr. Harding and Sir
John and Mrs. Harding are all bowing and[41]
smiling like anything, and even the little
French maid sneaks on in a corner of the stage
and simpers.

Then the orchestra plays and the leopards
sneak out and the people in the boxes are all
talking gayly to show that they're not the least
affected. And everybody is wondering how it
will come out, or rather how it can possibly
come out at all, because some of them explain
that it's all wrong, and just as they are making
it clear that there shouldn't be any third act,
the curtain goes up and it's—[42]—

Act III. Three Months Later

THE curtain rises on a drawing-room
in Mrs. Harding's house in London.
Mrs. Harding is sitting at a table.
She is sorting out parcels. There
is a great air of quiet about the scene. The
third act of a problem play always has to be
very quiet. It is like a punctured football with
the wind going out of it. The play has to just
poof itself out noiselessly.

For instance, this is the way it is done.

Does Mrs. Harding start to talk about Lady
Cicely and Jack, and Paris? Not a bit. She is
simply looking over the parcels and writing
names and talking to herself so that the audience
can get the names.

"For the Orphans' Home—poor little
things. For the Foundlings' Protection Society.
For the Lost Infants' Preservation
League" (a deep sigh)—"poor, poor children."

Now what is all this about? What has this[43]
to do with the play? Why, don't you see that
it is the symbol of philanthropy, of gentleness,
of melancholy sadness? The storm is over and
there is nothing in Mrs. Harding's heart but
pity. Don't you see that she is dressed in
deeper black than ever, and do you notice that
look on her face—that third-act air—that resignation?

Don't you see that the play is really all
over? They're just letting the wind out of it.

A man announces "Sir John Trevor."

Sir John steps in. Mrs. Harding goes to
meet him with both hands out.

"My dear, dear friend," she says in rich,
sad tones.

Sir John is all in black. He is much aged,
but very firm and very quiet. You can feel
that he's been spending the morning with the
committee of the Homeless Newsboys' League
or among the Directorate of the Lost Waifs'
Encouragement Association. In fact he begins
to talk of these things at once. The people
who are not used to third acts are wonder[44]ing
what it is all about. The real playgoers
know that this is atmosphere.

Then presently——

"Tea?" says Mrs. Harding, "shall I ring?"

"Pray do," says Sir John. He seats himself
with great weariness. The full melancholy
of the third act is on him. The tea which
has been made for three acts is brought in.
They drink it and it begins to go to their
heads. The "atmosphere" clears off just a
little.

"You have news, I know," says Mrs. Harding,
"you have seen him?"

"I have seen him."

"And he is gone?"

"Yes, he has sailed," says Sir John. "He
went on board last night, only a few hours
after my return to London. I saw him off.
Poor Jack. Gatherson has been most kind.
They will take him into the embassy at Lima.
There, please God, he can begin life again.
The Peruvian Ambassador has promised to
do all in his power."

Sir John sighs deeply and is silent. This to[45]
let the fact soak into the audience that Jack
has gone to Peru. Any reasonable person
would have known it. Where else could he
go to?

"He will do well in Peru," says Mrs. Harding.
She is imitating a woman being very
brave.

"Yes, I trust so," says Sir John. There is
silence again. In fact the whole third act is
diluted with thirty per cent. of silence. Presently
Mrs. Harding speaks again in a low
tone.

"You have other news, I know."

"I have other news."

"Of her?"

"Yes. I have been to Switzerland. I have
seen the curé—a good man. He has told me
all there is to tell. I found him at the hospice,
busy with his œuvre de bienfaisance. He led
me to her grave."

Sir John is bowed in deep silence.

Lady Cicely dead! Everybody in the theater
gasps. Dead! But what an unfair way
to kill her! To face an open death on the stage[46]
in fair hand to hand acting is one thing, but
this new system of dragging off the characters
to Switzerland between the acts, and then returning
and saying that they are dead is quite
another.

Presently Mrs. Harding speaks, very softly.
"And you? You will take up your work here
again?"

"No; I am going away."

"Going?"

"Yes, far away. I am going to Kafoonistan."

Mrs. Harding looks at him in pain. "To
Kafoonistan?"

"Yes. To Kafoonistan. There's work there
for me to do."

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       

There is silence again. Then Sir John
speaks. "And you? You will settle down
here in London?"

"No. I am going away."

"Going away?"

"Yes, back to Balla Walla. I want to be[47]
alone. I want to forget. I want to think.
I want to try to realize."

"You are going alone?"

"Yes, quite alone. But I shall not feel
alone when I get there. The Maharanee will
receive me with open arms. And my life will
be useful there. The women need me; I will
teach them to read, to sew, to sing."

"Mrs. Harding—Margaret—you must not
do this. You have sacrificed your life enough—you
have the right to live——"

There is emotion in Sir John's tone. It is
very rough on him to find his plan of going
to Kafoonistan has been outdone by Mrs.
Harding's going to Balla Walla. She shakes
her head.

"No, no; my life is of no account now. But
you, John, you are needed here, the country
needs you. Men look to you to lead them."

Mrs. Harding would particularize if she
could, but she can't just for the minute remember
what it is Sir John can lead them to. Sir
John shakes his head.

"No, no; my work lies there in Kafoonistan.[48]
There is a man's work to be done there. The
tribes are ignorant, uncivilized."

This dialogue goes on for some time. Mrs.
Harding keeps shaking her head and saying
that Sir John must not go to Kafoonistan, and
Sir John says she must not go to Balla Walla.
He protests that he wants to work and she
claims that she wants to try to think clearly.
But it is all a bluff. They are not going.
Neither of them. And everybody knows it.
Presently Mrs. Harding says:

"You will think of me sometimes?"

"I shall never forget you."

"I'm glad of that."

"Wherever I am, I shall think of you—out
there in the deserts, or at night, alone there
among the great silent hills with only the stars
overhead, I shall think of you. Your face will
guide me wherever I am."

He has taken her hand.

"And you," he says, "you will think of me
sometimes in Balla Walla?"

He takes her in his arms.

[Illus]"Yes, always. All day while I am with the
Maharanee and her women, and at night, the[49]
great silent Indian night when all the palace
is asleep and there is heard nothing but the
sounds of the jungle, the cry of the hyena
and the bray of the laughing jackass, I shall
seem to hear your voice."

She is much moved. She rises, clenches her
hands and then adds, "I have heard it so for
five and twenty years."

He has moved to her.

"Margaret!"

"John!"

"I cannot let you go, your life lies here—with
me—next my heart—I want your help, your
love, here inside the beyond."

And as he speaks and takes her in his arms,
the curtain sinks upon them, rises, falls, rises,
and then sinks again asbestos and all, and the
play is over. The lights are on, the audience
rises in a body and puts on its wraps. All over
the theater you can hear the words "perfectly
rotten," "utterly untrue," and so on. The general
judgment seems to be that it is a perfectly
rotten play, but very strong.

They are saying this as they surge out in[50]
great waves of furs and silks, with black crush
hats floating on billows of white wraps among
the foam of gossamer scarfs. Through it all
is the squawk of the motor horn, the call of
the taxi numbers and the inrush of the fresh
night air.

But just inside the theater, in the office, is
a man in a circus waistcoat adding up dollars
with a blue pencil, and he knows that the play
is all right.

[51]

[52]

FAMILIAR INCIDENTS

[53]

I.—With the Photographer

"I  WANT my photograph taken," I said.
The photographer looked at me without
enthusiasm. He was a drooping
man in a gray suit, with the dim eye of
a natural scientist. But there is no need to describe
him. Everybody knows what a photographer
is like.

"Sit there," he said, "and wait."

I waited an hour. I read the Ladies Companion
for 1912, the Girls Magazine for 1902
and the Infants Journal for 1888. I began
to see that I had done an unwarrantable thing
in breaking in on the privacy of this man's
scientific pursuits with a face like mine.

After an hour the photographer opened the
inner door.

"Come in," he said severely.

I went into the studio.

"Sit down," said the photographer.

I sat down in a beam of sunlight filtered[54]
through a sheet of factory cotton hung against
a frosted skylight.

The photographer rolled a machine into the
middle of the room and crawled into it from
behind.

He was only in it a second,—just time
enough for one look at me,—and then he was
out again, tearing at the cotton sheet and the
window panes with a hooked stick, apparently
frantic for light and air.

Then he crawled back into the machine again
and drew a little black cloth over himself. This
time he was very quiet in there. I knew that
he was praying and I kept still.

When the photographer came out at last,
he looked very grave and shook his head.

"The face is quite wrong," he said.

"I know," I answered quietly; "I have always
known it."

He sighed.

"I think," he said, "the face would be better
three-quarters full."

"I'm sure it would," I said enthusiastically,
for I was glad to find that the man had such[55]
a human side to him. "So would yours. In
fact," I continued, "how many faces one sees
that are apparently hard, narrow, limited, but
the minute you get them three-quarters full
they get wide, large, almost boundless in——"

But the photographer had ceased to listen.
He came over and took my head in his hands
and twisted it sideways. I thought he meant
to kiss me, and I closed my eyes.

But I was wrong.

He twisted my face as far as it would go
and then stood looking at it.

He sighed again.

"I don't like the head," he said.

Then he went back to the machine and took
another look.

"Open the mouth a little," he said.

I started to do so.

"Close it," he added quickly.

Then he looked again.

"The ears are bad," he said; "droop them a
little more. Thank you. Now the eyes. Roll
them in under the lids. Put the hands on the
knees, please, and turn the face just a little[56]
upward. Yes, that's better. Now just expand
the lungs! So! And hump the neck—that's
it—and just contract the waist—ha!—and twist
the hip up toward the elbow—now! I still
don't quite like the face, it's just a trifle too
full, but——"

I swung myself round on the stool.

"Stop," I said with emotion but, I think,
with dignity. "This face is my face. It is not
yours, it is mine. I've lived with it for forty
years and I know its faults. I know it's out
of drawing. I know it wasn't made for me,
but it's my face, the only one I have—" I
was conscious of a break in my voice but I
went on—"such as it is, I've learned to love it.
And this is my mouth, not yours. These ears
are mine, and if your machine is too narrow—"
Here I started to rise from the seat.

Snick!

The photographer had pulled a string. The
photograph taken. I could see the machine
still staggering from the shock.

"I think," said the photographer, pursing[57]
his lips in a pleased smile, "that I caught the
features just in a moment of animation."

"So!" I said bitingly,—"features, eh? You
didn't think I could animate them, I suppose?
But let me see the picture."

"Oh, there's nothing to see yet," he said,
"I have to develop the negative first. Come
back on Saturday and I'll let you see a proof
of it."

On Saturday I went back.

The photographer beckoned me in. I
thought he seemed quieter and graver than before.
I think, too, there was a certain pride
in his manner.

He unfolded the proof of a large photograph,
and we both looked at it in silence.

"Is it me?" I asked.

"Yes," he said quietly, "it is you," and we
went on looking at it.

"The eyes," I said hesitatingly, "don't look
very much like mine."

"Oh, no," he answered, "I've retouched
them. They come out splendidly, don't they?"[58]

"Fine," I said, "but surely my eyebrows are
not like that?"

"No," said the photographer, with a momentary
glance at my face, "the eyebrows are
removed. We have a process now—the Delphide—for
putting in new ones. You'll notice
here where we've applied it to carry the hair
away from the brow. I don't like the hair
low on the skull."

"Oh, you don't, don't you?" I said.

"No," he went on, "I don't care for it. I
like to get the hair clear back to the superficies
and make out a new brow line."

"What about the mouth?" I said with a bitterness
that was lost on the photographer; "is
that mine?"

"It's adjusted a little," he said, "yours is
too low. I found I couldn't use it."

"The ears, though," I said, "strike me as
a good likeness; they're just like mine."

"Is it me?"

[Illus]"Yes," said the photographer thoughtfully,
"that's so; but I can fix that all right in the
print. We have a process now—the Sulphide[59]—for
removing the ears entirely. I'll see
if——"

"Listen!" I interrupted, drawing myself up
and animating my features to their full extent
and speaking with a withering scorn that should
have blasted the man on the spot. "Listen! I
came here for a photograph—a picture—something
which (mad though it seems) would have
looked like me. I wanted something that would
depict my face as Heaven gave it to me, humble
though the gift may have been. I wanted
something that my friends might keep after
my death, to reconcile them to my loss. It
seems that I was mistaken. What I wanted
is no longer done. Go on, then, with your
brutal work. Take your negative, or whatever
it is you call it,—dip it in sulphide, bromide,
oxide, cowhide,—anything you like,—remove
the eyes, correct the mouth, adjust the
face, restore the lips, reanimate the necktie
and reconstruct the waistcoat. Coat it with
an inch of gloss, shade it, emboss it, gild it,
till even you acknowledge that it is finished.[60]
Then when you have done all that—keep it
for yourself and your friends. They may
value it. To me it is but a worthless bauble."

I broke into tears and left.

[61]

II.—The Dentist and the Gas

"I  THINK," said the dentist, stepping outside
again, "I'd better give you gas."

Then he moved aside and hummed an
air from a light opera while he mixed
up cement.

I sat up in my shroud.

"Gas!" I said.

"Yes," he repeated, "gas, or else ether or
a sulphuric anesthetic, or else beat you into
insensibility with a club, or give you three
thousand bolts of electricity."

These may not have been his exact words.
But they convey the feeling of them very
nicely.

I could see the light of primitive criminality
shining behind the man's spectacles.

And to think that this was my fault—the result
of my own reckless neglect. I had grown
so used to sitting back dozing in my shroud
in the dentist's chair, listening to the twittering[62]
of the birds outside, my eyes closed in the
sweet half sleep of perfect security, that the
old apprehensiveness and mental agony had
practically all gone.

He didn't hurt me, and I knew it.

I had grown—I know it sounds mad—almost
to like him.

For a time I had kept up the appearance
of being hurt every few minutes, just as a precaution.
Then even that had ceased and I had
dropped into vainglorious apathy.

It was this, of course, which had infuriated
the dentist. He meant to reassert his power.
He knew that nothing but gas could rouse me
out of my lethargy and he meant to apply it—either
gas or some other powerful pain stimulant.

So, as soon as he said "gas," my senses were
alert in a moment.

"When are you going to do it?" I said in
horror.

"Right now, if you like," he answered.

His eyes were glittering with what the Germans
call Blutlust. All dentists have it.[63]

I could see that if I took my eye off him
for a moment he might spring at me, gas in
hand, and throttle me.

"No, not now, I can't stay now," I said,
"I have an appointment, a whole lot of appointments,
urgent ones, the most urgent I ever
had." I was unfastening my shroud as I spoke.

"Well, then, to-morrow," said the dentist.

"No," I said, "to-morrow is Saturday. And
Saturday is a day when I simply can't take gas.
If I take gas, even the least bit of gas on a
Saturday, I find it's misunderstood——"

"Monday then."

"Monday, I'm afraid, won't do. It's a bad
day for me—worse than I can explain."

"Tuesday?" said the dentist.

"Not Tuesday," I answered. "Tuesday is
the worst day of all. On Tuesday my church
society meets, and I must go to it."

I hadn't been near it, in reality, for three
years, but suddenly I felt a longing to attend
it.

"On Wednesday," I went on, speaking hurriedly
and wildly, "I have another appointment,[64]
a swimming club, and on Thursday two appointments,
a choral society and a funeral. On
Friday I have another funeral. Saturday is
market day. Sunday is washing day. Monday
is drying day——"

"Hold on," said the dentist, speaking very
firmly. "You come to-morrow morning: I'll
write the engagement for ten o'clock."

I think it must have been hypnotism.

Before I knew it, I had said "Yes."

I went out.

On the street I met a man I knew.

"Have you ever taken gas from a dentist?"
I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said; "it's nothing."

Soon after I met another man.

"Have you ever taken gas?" I asked.

"Oh, certainly," he answered, "it's nothing,
nothing at all."

Altogether I asked about fifty people that
day about gas, and they all said that it was
absolutely nothing. When I said that I was
to take it to-morrow, they showed no concern
whatever. I looked in their faces for traces of[65]
anxiety. There weren't any. They all said
that it wouldn't hurt me, that it was nothing.

So then I was glad because I knew that gas
was nothing.

It began to seem hardly worth while to keep
the appointment. Why go all the way downtown
for such a mere nothing?

But I did go.

I kept the appointment.

What followed was such an absolute nothing
that I shouldn't bother to relate it except for
the sake of my friends.

The dentist was there with two assistants.
All three had white coats on, as rigid as naval
uniforms.

I forget whether they carried revolvers.

Nothing could exceed their quiet courage.
Let me pay them that tribute.

I was laid out in my shroud in a long chair
and tied down to it (I think I was tied down;
perhaps I was fastened with nails). This part
of it was a mere nothing. It simply felt like
being tied down by three strong men armed
with pinchers.[66]

After that a gas tank and a pump were placed
beside me and a set of rubber tubes fastened
tight over my mouth and nose. Even those
who have never taken gas can realize how ridiculously
simple this is.[Illus]

I did go . . . I kept the appointment.

Then they began pumping in gas. The sensation
of this part of it I cannot, unfortunately,
recall. It happened that just as they began to
administer the gas, I fell asleep. I don't quite
know why. Perhaps I was overtired. Perhaps
it was the simple home charm of the surroundings,
the soft drowsy hum of the gas pump, the
twittering of the dentists in the trees—did I
say the trees? No; of course they weren't in
the trees—imagine dentists in the trees—ha!
ha! Here, take off this gaspipe from my face
till I laugh—really I just want to laugh—only
to laugh——

Well,—that's what it felt like.

Meanwhile they were operating.

Of course I didn't feel it. All I felt was
that someone dealt me a powerful blow in the
face with a sledgehammer. After that some[67]body
took a pickax and cracked in my jaw
with it. That was all.

It was a mere nothing. I felt at the time
that a man who objects to a few taps on the
face with a pickax is overcritical.

I didn't happen to wake up till they had
practically finished. So I really missed the
whole thing.

The assistants had gone, and the dentist
was mixing up cement and humming airs from
light opera just like old times. It made the
world seem a bright place.

I went home with no teeth. I only meant
them to remove one, but I realized that they
had taken them all out. Still it didn't matter.

Not long after I received my bill. I was
astounded at the nerve of it! For administering
gas, debtor, so much; for removing teeth,
debtor, so much;—and so on.[68]

In return I sent in my bill:

My bill has been contested and is in the
hands of a solicitor. The matter will prove, I
understand, a test case and will go to the final
courts. If the judges have toothache during
the trial, I shall win.[69]

III.—My Lost Opportunities

THE other day I took a walk with a
real estate man. Out in the suburbs
he leaned over the wooden
fence of an empty lot and waved
his hand at it.

"There's a lot," he said, "that we sold last
week for half a million dollars."

"Did you really!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," he said, "and do you know that
twenty-five years ago you could have picked
that up for fifty thousand!"

"What," I said, "do you mean to say that
I could have had all that beautiful grass and
those mullin stalks for fifty thousand dollars?"

"I do."

"You mean that when I was a student at
college, feeding on four dollars a week, this
opportunity was knocking at the door and I
missed it?"

I turned my head away in bitterness as I[70]
thought of my own folly. Why had I never
happened to walk out this way with fifty thousand
dollars in my pocket and buy all this
beautiful mud?

The real estate man smiled complacently at
my grief.

"I can show you more than that," he said.
"Do you see that big stretch of empty ground
out there past that last fence?"

"Yes, yes," I said excitedly, "the land with
the beautiful tar-paper shack and the withered
cedar tree,—the one withered cedar tree,—standing
in its lonely isolation and seeming to
beckon——"

"Say," he said, "was you ever in the real
estate business yourself?"

"No," I answered, "but I have a poetic
mind, and I begin to see the poetry, the majesty,
of real estate."

"Oh, is that it," he answered. "Well, that
land out there,—it's an acre and a half,—was
sold yesterday for three million dollars!!"

"For what!"

"For three million dollars, cold."[71]

"Not COLD!" I said, "don't tell me it was
cold."

"Yes," went on the real estate man, "and
only three years ago you could have come out
here and had it for a song!"

"For a song!" I repeated.

Just think of it! And I had missed it! With
a voice like mine. If I had known what I
know now, I would have come out to that
land and sung to it all night. I never knew
in the days when I was content with fifteen
dollars a week what a hidden gift my voice
was. I should have taken up land-singing and
made a fortune out of it.

The thought of it saddened me all the way
home: and the talk of the real estate man as
he went made me feel still worse.

He showed me a church that I could have
bought for a hundred thousand and sold now
at half a million for a motor garage. If I
had started buying churches instead of working
on a newspaper, I'd have been rich to-day.

There was a skating rink I could have
bought, and a theatre and a fruit store, a[72]
beautiful little one-story wooden fruit store,
right on a corner, with the darlingest Italian
in it that you ever saw. There was the cutest
little pet of a cow-stable that I could have
turned into an apartment store at a profit of a
million,—at the time when I was studying
Greek and forgetting it. Oh! the wasted opportunities
of life!

And that evening when I got back to the
club and talked about it at dinner to my business
friends, I found that I had only heard a
small part of it.

Real estate! That's nothing! Why they
told me that fifteen years ago I could have
had all sorts of things,—trunk line railways,
sugar refineries, silver mines,—any of
them for a song. When I heard it I was half
glad I hadn't sung for the land. They told
me that there was a time when I could have
bought out the Federal Steel Co. for twenty
million dollars! And I let it go.[Illus]

He showed me a church that I could have bought for a hundred thousand.

The whole Canadian Pacific Railway, they
said, was thrown on the market for fifty millions.
I left it there writhing, and didn't pick[73]
it up. Sheer lack of confidence! I see now
why these men get rich. It's their fine, glorious
confidence, that enables them to write out
a cheque for fifty million dollars and think
nothing of it.

If I wrote a cheque like that, I'd be afraid
of going to Sing Sing. But they aren't, and
so they get what they deserve.

Forty-five years ago,—a man at the club
told me this with almost a sob in his voice,—either
Rockefeller or Carnegie could have been
bought clean up for a thousand dollars!

Think of it!

Why didn't my father buy them for me, as
pets, for my birthday and let me keep them
till I grew up?

If I had my life over again, no school or
education for me! Not with all this beautiful
mud and these tar-paper shacks and corner lot
fruit stores lying round! I'd buy out the
whole United States and take a chance, a
sporting chance, on the rise in values.[74]

IV.—My Unknown Friend

HE STEPPED into the smoking
compartment of the Pullman,
where I was sitting alone.

He had on a long fur-lined
coat, and he carried a fifty-dollar suit case that
he put down on the seat.

Then he saw me.

"Well! well!" he said, and recognition
broke out all over his face like morning sunlight.

"Well! well!" I repeated.

"By Jove!" he said, shaking hands vigorously,
"who would have thought of seeing
you?"

"Who, indeed," I thought to myself.

He looked at me more closely.

"You haven't changed a bit," he said.

"Neither have you," said I heartily.

"You may be a little stouter," he went on
critically.[75]

"Yes," I said, "a little; but you're stouter
yourself."

This of course would help to explain away
any undue stoutness on my part.

"No," I continued boldly and firmly, "you
look just about the same as ever."

And all the time I was wondering who he
was. I didn't know him from Adam; I
couldn't recall him a bit. I don't mean that
my memory is weak. On the contrary, it is
singularly tenacious. True, I find it very hard
to remember people's names; very often, too,
it is hard for me to recall a face, and frequently
I fail to recall a person's appearance,
and of course clothes are a thing one doesn't
notice. But apart from these details I never
forget anybody, and I am proud of it. But
when it does happen that a name or face escapes
me I never lose my presence of mind. I
know just how to deal with the situation. It
only needs coolness and intellect, and it all
comes right.

My friend sat down.

"It's a long time since we met," he said.[76]

"A long time," I repeated with something
of a note of sadness. I wanted him to feel
that I, too, had suffered from it.

"But it has gone very quickly."

"Like a flash," I assented cheerfully.

"Strange," he said, "how life goes on and
we lose track of people, and things alter. I
often think about it. I sometimes wonder,"
he continued, "where all the old gang are
gone to."

"So do I," I said. In fact I was wondering
about it at the very moment. I always find
in circumstances like these that a man begins
sooner or later to talk of the "old gang" or
"the boys" or "the crowd." That's where the
opportunity comes in to gather who he is.

"Do you ever go back to the old place?"
he asked.

"Never," I said, firmly and flatly. This
had to be absolute. I felt that once and for
all the "old place" must be ruled out of the
discussion till I could discover where it was.

"No," he went on, "I suppose you'd hardly
care to."[77]

"Not now," I said very gently.

"I understand. I beg your pardon," he
said, and there was silence for a few moments.

So far I had scored the first point. There
was evidently an old place somewhere to which
I would hardly care to go. That was something
to build on.

Presently he began again.

"Yes," he said, "I sometimes meet some
of the old boys and they begin to talk of you
and wonder what you're doing."

"Poor things," I thought, but I didn't say it.

I knew it was time now to make a bold
stroke; so I used the method that I always
employ. I struck in with great animation.

"Say!" I said, "where's Billy? Do you
ever hear anything of Billy now?"

This is really a very safe line. Every old
gang has a Billy in it.

"Yes," said my friend, "sure—Billy is
ranching out in Montana. I saw him in Chicago
last spring,—weighed about two hundred
pounds,—you wouldn't know him."[78]

"No, I certainly wouldn't," I murmured to
myself.

"And where's Pete?" I said. This was
safe ground. There is always a Pete.

"You mean Billy's brother," he said.

"Yes, yes, Billy's brother Pete. I often
think of him."

"Oh," answered the unknown man, "old
Pete's quite changed,—settled down altogether."
Here he began to chuckle, "Why,
Pete's married!"

I started to laugh, too. Under these circumstances
it is always supposed to be very
funny if a man has got married. The notion
of old Peter (whoever he is) being married is
presumed to be simply killing. I kept on
chuckling away quietly at the mere idea of it.
I was hoping that I might manage to keep on
laughing till the train stopped. I had only
fifty miles more to go. It's not hard to laugh
for fifty miles if you know how.

But my friend wouldn't be content with it.

"I often meant to write to you," he said,[79]
his voice falling to a confidential tone,
"especially when I heard of your loss."

I remained quiet. What had I lost? Was
it money? And if so, how much? And why
had I lost it? I wondered if it had ruined me
or only partly ruined me.

"One can never get over a loss like that,"
he continued solemnly.

Evidently I was plumb ruined. But I said
nothing and remained under cover, waiting to
draw his fire.

"Yes," the man went on, "death is always
sad."

Death! Oh, that was it, was it? I almost
hiccoughed with joy. That was easy. Handling
a case of death in these conversations is
simplicity itself. One has only to sit quiet
and wait to find out who is dead.

"Yes," I murmured, "very sad. But it has
its other side, too."

"Very true, especially, of course, at that
age."

"As you say at that age, and after such a
life."[80]

"Strong and bright to the last I suppose,"
he continued, very sympathetically.

"Yes," I said, falling on sure ground, "able
to sit up in bed and smoke within a few days
of the end."

"What," he said, perplexed, "did your
grandmother——"

My grandmother! That was it, was it?

"Pardon me," I said provoked at my own
stupidity; "when I say smoked, I mean able
to sit up and be smoked to, a habit she had,—being
read to, and being smoked to,—only
thing that seemed to compose her——"

As I said this I could hear the rattle and
clatter of the train running past the semaphores
and switch points and slacking to a
stop.

My friend looked quickly out of the window.

His face was agitated.

"Great heavens!" he said, "that's the junction.
I've missed my stop. I should have got
out at the last station. Say, porter," he called[81]
out into the alleyway, "how long do we stop
here?"

"Just two minutes, sah," called a voice back.
"She's late now, she's makin' up tahm!"

My friend had hopped up now and had
pulled out a bunch of keys and was fumbling
at the lock of the suit case.

"I'll have to wire back or something," he
gasped. "Confound this lock—my money's in
the suit case."

My one fear now was that he would fail
to get off.

"Here," I said, pulling some money out of
my pocket, "don't bother with the lock. Here's
money."

"Thanks," he said grabbing the roll of
money out of my hand,—in his excitement he
took all that I had.—"I'll just have time."

He sprang from the train. I saw him
through the window, moving toward the waiting-room.
He didn't seem going very fast.

I waited.[Illus]

I shall not try to be quite so extraordinarily clever.

The porters were calling, "All abawd! All
abawd." There was the clang of a bell, a[82]
hiss of steam, and in a second the train
was off.

"Idiot," I thought, "he's missed it;" and
there was his fifty-dollar suit case lying on
the seat.

I waited, looking out of the window and
wondering who the man was, anyway.

Then presently I heard the porter's voice
again. He evidently was guiding someone
through the car.

"Ah looked all through the kyar for it,
sah," he was saying.

"I left it in the seat in the car there behind
my wife," said the angry voice of a stranger,
a well-dressed man who put his head into the
door of the compartment.

Then his face, too, beamed all at once with
recognition. But it was not for me. It was
for the fifty-dollar valise.

"Ah, there it is," he cried, seizing it and
carrying it off.

I sank back in dismay. The "old gang!"
Pete's marriage! My grandmother's death!
Great heavens! And my money! I saw it all;[83]
the other man was "making talk," too, and
making it with a purpose.

Stung!

And next time that I fall into talk with a
casual stranger in a car, I shall not try to be
quite so extraordinarily clever.[84]

V.—Under the Barber's Knife

"WAS you to the Arena the other
night?" said the barber, leaning
over me and speaking in his confidential
whisper.

"Yes," I said, "I was there."

He saw from this that I could still speak.
So he laid another thick wet towel over my
face before he spoke again.

"What did you think of the game," he
asked.

But he had miscalculated. I could still make
a faint sound through the wet towels. He
laid three or four more very thick ones over
my face and stood with his five finger tips
pressed against my face for support. A thick
steam rose about me. Through it I could hear
the barber's voice and the flick-flack of the
razor as he stropped it.

"Yes, sir," he went on in his quiet professional
tone, punctuated with the noise of the
razor, "I knowed from the start them boys[85]
was sure to win,"—flick-flack-flick-flack,—"as
soon as I seen the ice that night and seen
the get-away them boys made I knowed it,"—flick-flack,—"and
just as soon as Jimmy got
aholt of the puck——"

This was more than the barber at the next
chair could stand.

"Him get de puck," he cried, giving an
angry dash with a full brush of soap into the
face of the man under him,—"him get ut-dat
stiff—why, boys," he said, and he turned appealingly
to the eight barbers, who all rested
their elbows on the customers' faces while they
listened to the rising altercation; even the
manicure girl, thrilled to attention, clasped
tight the lumpy hand of her client in her white
digits and remained motionless,—"why boys,
dat feller can't no more play hockey than——"

"See here," said the barber, suddenly and
angrily, striking his fist emphatically on the
towels that covered my face. "I'll bet you
five dollars to one Jimmy can skate rings
round any two men in the league."

"Him skate," sneered the other squirting a[86]
jet of blinding steam in the face of the client
he was treating, "he ain't got no more go in
him than dat rag,"—and he slapped a wet
towel across his client's face.

All the barbers were excited now. There
was a babel of talk from behind each of the
eight chairs. "He can't skate;" "He can
skate;" "I'll bet you ten."

Already they were losing their tempers,
slapping their customers with wet towels and
jabbing great brushfuls of soap into their
mouths. My barber was leaning over my face
with his whole body. In another minute one
or the other of them would have been sufficiently
provoked to have dealt his customer a
blow behind the ear.

Then suddenly there was a hush.

"The boss," said one.

In another minute I could realize, though I
couldn't see it, that a majestic figure in a white
coat was moving down the line. All was still
again except the quiet hum of the mechanical
shampoo brush and the soft burble of running
water.[87]

The barber began removing the wet towels
from my face one by one. He peeled them
off with the professional neatness of an Egyptologist
unwrapping a mummy. When he reached
my face he looked searchingly at it. There
was suspicion in his eye.

"Been out of town?" he questioned.

"Yes," I admitted.

"Who's been doing your work?" he asked.
This question, from a barber, has no reference
to one's daily occupation. It means "who has
been shaving you."

I knew it was best to own up. I'd been in
the wrong, and I meant to acknowledge it with
perfect frankness.

"I've been shaving myself," I said.

My barber stood back from me in contempt.
There was a distinct sensation all
down the line of barbers. One of them threw
a wet rag in a corner with a thud, and another
sent a sudden squirt from an atomizer into
his customer's eyes as a mark of disgust.

My barber continued to look at me narrowly.[88]

"What razor do you use?" he said.

"A safety razor," I answered.

The barber had begun to dash soap over
my face; but he stopped—aghast at what I had
said.

A safety razor to a barber is like a red
rag to a bull.

"If it was me," he went on, beating lather
into me as he spoke, "I wouldn't let one of
them things near my face: No, sir: There
ain't no safety in them. They tear the hide
clean off you—just rake the hair right out by
the follicles," as he said this he was illustrating
his meaning with jabs of his razor,—"them
things just cut a man's face all to
pieces," he jabbed a stick of alum against an
open cut that he had made,—"And as for
cleanliness, for sanitation, for this here hygiene
and for germs, I wouldn't have them
round me for a fortune."

I said nothing. I knew I had deserved it,
and I kept quiet.[Illus]

When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it.

The barber gradually subsided. Under
other circumstances he would have told me[89]
something of the spring training of the baseball
clubs, or the last items from the Jacksonville
track, or any of those things which a cultivated
man loves to hear discussed between
breakfast and business. But I was not worth
it. As he neared the end of the shaving he
spoke again, this time in a confidential, almost
yearning, tone.

"Massage?" he said.

"No thank you."

"Shampoo the scalp?" he whispered.

"No thanks."

"Singe the hair?" he coaxed.

"No thanks."

The barber made one more effort.

"Say," he said in my ear, as a thing concerning
himself and me alone, "your hair's
pretty well all falling out. You'd better let
me just shampoo up the scalp a bit and stop
up them follicles or pretty soon you won't—"

"No, thank you," I said, "not to-day."

This was all the barber could stand. He
saw that I was just one of those miserable
dead-beats who come to a barber shop merely[90]
for a shave, and who carry away the scalp
and the follicles and all the barber's perquisites
as if they belonged to them.

In a second he had me thrown out of the
chair.

"Next," he shouted.

As I passed down the line of the barbers,
I could see contempt in every eye while they
turned on the full clatter of their revolving
shampoo brushes and drowned the noise of
my miserable exit in the roar of machinery.[91]

[92]
[93]

PARISIAN PASTIMES

I.—The Advantages of a Polite Education

"TAKE it from me," said my friend
from Kansas, leaning back in his
seat at the Taverne Royale and
holding his cigar in his two fingers—"don't
talk no French here in Paris. They
don't expect it, and they don't seem to understand
it."

This man from Kansas, mind you, had a
right to speak. He knew French. He had
learned French—he told me so himself—good
French, at the Fayetteville Classical Academy.
Later on he had had the natural method "off"
a man from New Orleans. It had cost him
"fifty cents a throw." All this I have on his
own word. But in France something seemed to
go wrong with his French.

"No," he said reflectively, "I guess what
most of them speak here is a sort of patois."[94]

When he said it was a patois, I knew just
what he meant. It was equivalent to saying
that he couldn't understand it.

I had seen him strike patois before. There
had been a French steward on the steamer
coming over, and the man from Kansas, after
a couple of attempts, had said it was no use
talking French to that man. He spoke a hopeless
patois. There were half a dozen cabin
passengers, too, returning to their homes in
France. But we soon found from listening to
their conversation on deck that what they
were speaking was not French but some sort
of patois.

It was the same thing coming through Normandy.
Patois, everywhere, not a word of
French—not a single sentence of the real language,
in the way they had it at Fayetteville.
We stopped off a day at Rouen to look at the
cathedral. A sort of abbot showed us round.
Would you believe it, that man spoke patois,
straight patois—the very worst kind, and fast.
The man from Kansas had spotted it at once.[95]
He hadn't listened to more than ten sentences
before he recognized it. "Patois," he said.

Of course, it's fine to be able to detect patois
like this. It's impressive. The mere fact that
you know the word patois shows that you must
be mighty well educated.

Here in Paris it was the same way. Everybody
that the man from Kansas tried—waiters,
hotel clerks, shop people—all spoke
patois. An educated person couldn't follow it.

On the whole, I think the advice of the man
from Kansas is good. When you come to
Paris, leave French behind. You don't need
it, and they don't expect it of you.

In any case, you soon learn from experience
not to use it.

If you try to, this is what happens. You
summon a waiter to you and you say to him
very slowly, syllable by syllable, so as to give
him every chance in case he's not an educated
man:

"Bringez moi de la soupe, de la fish, de la
roast pork et de la fromage."

And he answers:[96]

"Yes, sir, roast pork, sir, and a little bacon
on the side?"

That waiter was raised in Illinois.

Or suppose you stop a man on the street
and you say to him:

"Musshoo, s'il vous plait, which is la direction
pour aller à le Palais Royal?"

And he answers:

"Well, I tell you, I'm something of a
stranger here myself, but I guess it's straight
down there a piece."

Now it's no use speculating whether that
man comes from Dordogne Inférieure or from
Auvergne-sur-les-Puits because he doesn't.

On the other hand, you may strike a real
Frenchman—there are some even in Paris. I
met one the other day in trying to find my way
about, and I asked him:

"Musshoo, s'il vous plait, which is la direction
pour aller à Thomas Cook & Son?"

"B'n'm'ss'ulvla'n'fsse'n'sse'pas!"

I said: "Thank you so much! I had half
suspected it myself." But I didn't really know
what he meant.[97]

So I have come to make it a rule never to
use French unless driven to it. Thus, for example,
I had a tremendous linguistic struggle
in a French tailors shop.

There was a sign in the window to the effect
that "completes" might be had "for a hundred."
It seemed a chance not to be missed.
Moreover, the same sign said that English and
German were spoken.

So I went in. True to my usual principle
of ignoring the French language, I said to the
head man:

"You speak English?"

He shrugged his shoulders, spread out his
hands and looked at the clock on the wall.

"Presently," he said.

"Oh," I said, "you'll speak it presently.
That's splendid. But why not speak it right
away?"

The tailor again looked at the clock with a
despairing shrug.

"At twelve o'clock," he said.

"Come now," I said, "be fair about this.[98]
I don't want to wait an hour and a half for you
to begin to talk. Let's get at it right now."

But he was obdurate. He merely shook his
head and repeated:

"Speak English at twelve o'clock."

Judging that he must be under a vow of
abstinence during the morning, I tried another
idea.

"Allemand?" I asked, "German, Deutsch,
eh! speak that?"

Again the French tailor shook his head, this
time with great decision.

The tailor shrugged his shoulders.

[Illus]"Not till four o'clock," he said.

This was evidently final. He might be lax
enough to talk English at noon, but he refused
point-blank to talk German till he had
his full strength.

I was just wondering whether there wasn't
some common sense in this after all, when the
solution of it struck me.

"Ah!" I said, speaking in French, "très
bong! there is somebody who comes at twelve,
quelqu'un qui vient à midi, who can talk
English."

[99]

"Precisément," said the tailor, wreathed in
smiles and waving his tape coquettishly about
his neck.

"You flirt!" I said, "but let's get to business.
I want a suit, un soot, un complete,
complet, comprenez-vous, veston, gilet, une
pair de panteloon—everything—do you get
it?"

The tailor was now all animation.

"Ah, certainement," he said, "monsieur desires
a fantasy, une fantaisie, is it not?"

A fantasy! Good heavens!

The man had evidently got the idea from
my naming so many things that I wanted a suit
for a fancy dress carnival.

"Fantasy nothing!" I said—"pas de fantaisie!
un soot anglais"—here an idea struck
me and I tapped myself on the chest—"like
this," I said, "comme ceci."

"Bon," said the tailor, now perfectly satisfied,
"une fantaisie comme porte monsieur."

Here I got mad.

"Blast you," I said, "this is not a fantaisie.
Do you take me for a dragon-fly, or what?[100]
Now come, let's get this fantaisie business
cleared up. This is what I want"—and here
I put my hand on a roll of very quiet grey
cloth on the counter.

"Très bien," said the tailor, "une fantaisie."

I stared at him.

"Is that a fantaisie?"

"Certainement, monsieur."

"Now," I said, "let's go into it further,"
and I touched another piece of plain pepper
and salt stuff of the kind that is called in the
simple and refined language of my own country,
gents' panting.

"This?"

"Une fantaisie," said the French tailor.

"Well," I said, "you've got more imagination
than I have."

Then I touched a piece of purple blue that
would have been almost too loud for a Carolina
nigger.

"Is this a fantaisie?"

The tailor shrugged his shoulders.

"Ah, non," he said in deprecating tones.[101]

"Tell me," I said, speaking in French, "just
exactly what it is you call a fantasy."

The tailor burst into a perfect paroxysm of
French, gesticulating and waving his tape as
he put the sentences over the plate one after
another. It was fast pitching, but I took them
every one, and I got him.

What he meant was that any single colour
or combination of single colours—for instance,
a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion
behind—is not regarded by a French tailor as
a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour,
such as the ordinary drab grey of the business
man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To
the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting
is a glittering panorama of fantaisies,
whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow
room with a band in scarlet, is a plain, simple
scene.

I thanked him. Then I said:

"Measure me, mesurez-moi, passez le tape
line autour de moi."

He did it.

I don't know what it is they measure you[102]
in, whether in centimètres or cubic feet or
what it is. But the effect is appalling.

The tailor runs his tape round your neck
and calls "sixty!" Then he puts it round the
lower part of the back—at the major circumference,
you understand,—and shouts, "a hundred
and fifty!"

It sounded a record breaker. I felt that
there should have been a burst of applause.
But, to tell the truth, I have friends—quiet
sedentary men in the professoriate—who
would easily hit up four or five hundred on
the same scale.

Then came the last item.

"Now," I said, "when will this 'complete'
be ready?"

"Ah, monsieur," said the tailor, with winsome
softness, "we are very busy, crushed,
écrasés with commands! Give us time, don't
hurry us!"

"Well," I said, "how long do you want?"

"Ah, monsieur," he pleaded, "give us four
days!"

I never moved an eyelash.[103]

"What!" I said indignantly, "four days!
Monstrous! Let me have this whole complete
fantasy in one day or I won't buy it."

"Ah, monsieur, three days?"

"No," I said, "make it two days."

"Two days and a half, monsieur."

"Two days and a quarter," I said; "give it
me the day after to-morrow at three o'clock
in the morning."

"Ah, monsieur, ten o'clock."

"Make it ten minutes to ten and it's a go,"
I said.

"Bon," said the tailor.

He kept his word. I am wearing the
fantaisie as I write. For a fantaisie, it is fairly
quiet, except that it has three pockets on each
side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable
for the throat of an opera singer, and as many
buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it's a
first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious
fantaisie, such as any retired French ballet
master might be proud to wear.[104]

II.—The Joys of Philanthropy

"GOOD-MORNING," said the valet de
chambre, as I stepped from my
room.

"Good-morning," I answered.
"Pray accept twenty-five centimes."

"Good-morning, sir," said the maître d'hôtel,
as I passed down the corridor, "a lovely morning,
sir."

"So lovely," I replied, "that I must at once
ask you to accept forty-five centimes on the
strength of it."

"A beautiful day, monsieur," said the head
waiter, rubbing his hands, "I trust that monsieur
has slept well."

"So well," I answered, "that monsieur must
absolutely insist on your accepting seventy-five
centimes on the spot. Come, don't deny me.
This is personal matter. Every time I sleep
I simply have to give money away."

"Monsieur is most kind."

Kind? I should think not. If the valet de[105]
chambre and the maître d'hôtel and the chef de
service and the others of the ten men needed
to supply me with fifteen cents worth of coffee,
could read my heart, they would find it an abyss
of the blackest hatred.

Yet they take their handful of coppers—great
grown men dressed up in monkey suits
of black at eight in the morning—and bow
double for it.

If they tell you it is a warm morning, you
must give them two cents. If you ask the time,
it costs you two cents. If you want a real
genuine burst of conversation, it costs anywhere
from a cent to a cent and a half a word.

Such is Paris all day long. Tip, tip, tip,
till the brain is weary, not with the cost of it,
but with the arithmetical strain.

No pleasure is perfect. Every rose has its
thorn. The thorn of the Parisian holiday-maker
is the perpetual necessity of handing
out small gratuities to a set of overgrown
flunkies too lazy to split wood.

Not that the amount of the tips, all added
together, is anything serious. No rational man[106]
would grudge it if it could be presented in a
bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every
morning and done with for the day.

But the incessant necessity of handing out
small tips of graded amounts gets on one's
nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round
with enough money of different denominations
in one's pocket to start a bank—gold and paper
notes for serious purchases, and with them a
huge dead weight of great silver pieces, five
franc bits as large as a Quaker's shoebuckle,
and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket.
These one must distribute as extras to cabmen,
waiters, news-vendors, beggars, anybody
and everybody in fact that one has anything to
do with.

The whole mass of the coppers carried only
amounts perhaps to twenty-five cents in honest
Canadian money. But the silly system of the
French currency makes the case appear worse
than it is, and gives one the impression of being
a walking treasury.

Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually
putting his hand into his side pocket[107]
and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all
day in an unending stream. You enter a
French theatre. You buy a programme, fifty
centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it.
You hand your coat and cane to an aged harpy,
who presides over what is called the vestiaire,
pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten.
You are shown to your seat by another old
fairy in dingy black (she has a French name,
but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes.
Just think of the silly business of it. Your
ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has
cost you about three dollars and a half. One
would almost think the theatre could afford to
throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the
sake of international good will.

Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell
and there appears the valet de chambre,
dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of
black taffeta. You tell him that you want a
bath. "Bien, monsieur!" He will fetch the
maître d'hôtel. Oh, he will, will he, how good
of him, but really one can't witness such kindness
on his part without begging him to accept[108]
a twenty-five centime remembrance. "Merci
bien, monsieur." The maître d'hôtel comes.
He is a noble looking person who wears a
dress suit at eight o'clock in the morning with
patent leather shoes of the kind that I have
always wanted but am still unable to afford.
Yet I know from experience that the man
merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes a
breath. For fifty centimes he'll bow low
enough to crack himself. If you gave him a
franc, he'd lie down on the floor and lick your
boots. I know he would; I've seen them do it.

So when the news comes that you propose
to take a bath, he's right along side of you in
a minute, all civility. Mind you, in a really
French hotel, one with what is called the old
French atmosphere, taking a bath is quite an
event, and the maître d'hôtel sees a dead sure
fifty centimes in it, with perhaps an extra ten
centimes if times are good. That is to say,
he may clear anything from ten to twelve cents
on the transaction. A bath, monsieur? Nothing
more simple, this moment, tout de suite,
right off, he will at once give orders for it. So[109]
you give him eleven cents and he then tells the
hotel harpy, dressed in black, like the theatre
harpies, to get the bath and she goes and gets
it. She was there, of course, all the time, right
in the corridor, and heard all that proceeded,
but she doesn't "enter into her functions" until
the valet de chambre tells the maître d'hôtel
and the maître d'hôtel informs her officially of
the coming event.

She gets the bath. What does she do?
Why, merely opens the door of the bathroom,
which wasn't locked, and turns on the water.
But, of course, no man with any chivalry in
him could allow a harpy to be put to all that
labour without pressing her to accept three
cents as a mark of personal appreciation.

Thus the maître d'hôtel and the valet de
chambre and the harpy go on all day, from
six in the morning when they first "enter into
functions" until heaven knows when at night
when they leave off, and they keep gathering in
two cents and three cents and even five cents
at a time. Then presently, I suppose, they go
off and spend it in their own way. The maître[110]
d'hôtel transformed into a cheap Parisian with
a dragon-fly coat and a sixty cent panama,
dances gaily at the Bal Wagram, and himself
hands out coppers to the musicians, and gives
a one cent tip to a lower order of maître
d'hôtel. The harpy goes forth, and with other
harpies absorbs red wine and indescribable
cheese at eleven at night in a crowded little
café on the crowded sidewalk of a street about
as wide as a wagon. She tips the waiter who
serves her at the rate of one cent per half
hour of attendance, and he, I suppose, later on
tips someone else, and so on endlessly.

In this way about fifty thousand people in
Paris eke out a livelihood by tipping one another.

The worst part of the tipping system is that
very often the knowledge that tips are expected
and the uncertainty of their amount, causes
one to forego a great number of things that
might otherwise be enjoyable.

I brought with me to Paris, for example, a
letter of introduction to the President of the
Republic. I don't say this in any boasting[111]
spirit. A university professor can always get
all the letters of introduction that he wants.
Everyone knows that he is too simple to make
any commercial use of them. But I never presented
this letter to the President. What was
the use? It wouldn't have been worth it. He
would have expected a tip, and of course in
his case it would have had to be a liberal one,
twenty-five cents straight out. Perhaps, too,
some of his ministers would have strolled in,
as soon as they saw a stranger, on the chance
of picking up something. Put it as three ministers
at fifteen cents each, that's forty-five cents
or a total of seventy cents for ten minutes' talk
with the French Government. It's not
worth it.

In all Paris, I only found one place where
tipping is absolutely out of the question. That
was at the British Embassy. There they don't
allow it. Not only the clerks and the secretaries,
but even the Ambassador himself is forbidden
to take so much as the smallest gratuity.

And they live up to it.[112]

That is why I still feel proud of having
made an exception to the rule.

I went there because the present ambassador
is a personal friend of mine. I hadn't known
this till I went to Paris, and I may say in fairness
that we are friends no longer: as soon as
I came away, our friendship seemed to have
ceased.

I will make no secret of the matter. I
wanted permission to read in the National
Library in Paris. All Frenchmen are allowed
to read there and, in addition, all the personal
friends of the foreign ambassadors. By a convenient
fiction, everybody is the friend of this
ambassador, and is given a letter to prove it,
provided he will call at the Embassy and get
it. That is how I came to be a friend of the
British Ambassador. Whether our friendship
will ripen into anything warmer and closer, it
is not for me to say.

But I went to the Embassy.

The young man that I dealt with was, I
think, a secretary. He was—I could see it at
once—that perfect thing called an English[113]
gentleman. I have seldom seen, outside of
baseball circles, so considerate a manner. He
took my card, and from sheer considerateness
left me alone for half an hour. Then he came
back for a moment and said it was a glorious
day. I had heard this phrase so often in Paris
that I reached into my pocket for ten cents.
But something in the quiet dignity of the young
man held me back. So I merely answered
that it was indeed a glorious day, and that the
crops would soon head out nicely if we got
this sunshine, provided there wasn't dew
enough to start the rust, in which case I was
afraid that if an early frost set in we might
be badly fooled. He said "indeed," and asked
me if I had read the last London Weekly
Times. I said that I had not seen the last one;
but that I had read one about a year ago and
that it seemed one of the most sparkling
things I had ever read; I had simply roared
over it from cover to cover.

He looked pleased and went away.

When he came back, he had the letter of
commendation in his hand.[114]

Would you believe it? The civility of it!
They had printed the letter, every word of it—except
my own name—and it explained all
about the ambassador and me being close
friends, and told of his desire to have me read
in the National Library.

I took the letter, and I knew of course that
the moment had come to do something handsome
for the young man. But he looked so
calm that I still hesitated.

I took ten cents out of my pocket and held
it where the light could glitter from every
point of its surface full in his face.

And I said——

"My dear young friend, I hope I don't insult
you. You are, I can see it, an English gentleman.
Your manner betrays it. I, too,
though I may seem only what I am, had I not
been brought up in Toronto, might have been
like you. But enough of this weakness,—will
you take ten cents?"[Illus]

Something in the quiet dignity of the young man held me.

He hesitated. He looked all round. I could
see that he was making a great effort. The[115]
spirit of Paris battled against his better nature.
He was tempted, but he didn't fall.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I'd like to take
it, but I'm afraid I mustn't."

"Young man," I said, "I respect your feelings.
You have done me a service. If you
ever fall into want and need a position in the
Canadian Cabinet, or a seat in our Senate, let
me know at once."

I left him.

Then by an odd chance, as I passed to the
outer door, there was the British Ambassador
himself. He was standing beside the door
waiting to open it. There was no mistaking
him. I could tell by his cocked hat and brass
buttons and the brass chain across his chest
that it was the Ambassador. The way in which
he swung the door back and removed his hat
showed him a trained diplomat.

The moment had come. I still held my ten
cents.

"My lord," I said, "I understand your position
as the only man in Paris who must not
accept a tip, but I insist."[116]

I slipped the money into his hand.

"Thank'ee kindly, sir," said the Ambassador.

Diplomatically speaking, the incident was
closed.[117]

>III.—The Simple Life in Paris

PARIS—at least the Paris of luxury and
fashion—is a childless city. Its
streets are thronged all day with a
crowd that passes in endless succession
but with never a child among them. You may
stand on the boulevards and count a thousand
grown-up persons for one child that goes by.

The case, of course, is not so extreme in the
quieter parts of the city. I have seen children,
sometimes two or three together, in the
Champs Elysées. In the garden of the
Tuileries I once saw six all in a group. They
seemed to be playing. A passer-by succeeded
in getting a snapshot of them without driving
them away. In the poorer districts, there are
any quantity of children, even enough to sell,
but in the Paris of the rich, the child is conspicuous
by its absence. The foreign visitors
come without their children. The true Parisian
lady has pretty well gone out of the business.[118]

Here and there you may see driving past
with its mother in an open barouche, or parading
the Rue de la Paix on the hand of its
nurse, the doll-like substitute for old-time infancy,
the fashionable Parisian child. As far
as the sex can be determined by looking at it,
it is generally a girl. It is dressed in the
height of fashion. A huge picture hat reaches
out in all directions from its head. Long gloves
encase its little arms to prevent it from making
a free use of them. A dainty coat of
powder on its face preserves it from the distorting
effect of a smile. Its little hundred
dollar frock reaches down in a sweet simplicity
of outline. It has a belt that runs round its
thighs to divide it into two harmonious parts.
Below that are bare pink legs ending in little
silk socks at a dollar an inch and wee slippers
clasped with a simple emerald buckle. Therein,
of course, the child only obeys the reigning
fashion. Simplicity,—so I am informed by
the last number of La Mode Parisienne,—is
the dominant note of Parisian dress to-day,—simplicity,
plainness, freedom from all display.[119]
A French lady wears in her hair at the Opera
a single, simple tiara bound with a plain row
of solitaire diamonds. It is so exquisitely simple
in its outline that you can see the single diamonds
sticking out from it and can count up
the price of each. The Parisian gentleman
wears in his button-hole merely a single orchid,—not
half a dozen,—and pins his necktie with
one plain, ordinary ruby, set in a perfectly unostentatious
sunburst of sapphires. There is
no doubt of the superiority of this Parisian simplicity.
To me, when it broke upon me in
reading La Mode Parisienne, it came as a kind
of inspiration. I took away the stuffy black
ribbon with its stupidly elaborate knot from
my Canadian Christie hat and wound a single
black ostrich feather about it fastened with
just the plainest silver aigrette. When I had
put that on and pinned a piece of old lace to
the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I
walked the street with the quiet dignity of a
person whose one idea is not to be conspicuous.

But this is a digression. The child, I was
saying, wears about two hundred worth of vis[120]ible
clothing upon it; and I believe that if you
were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and
hold it upside down, you would see about fifty
dollars more. The French child has been converted
into an elaborately dressed doll. It is
altogether a thing of show, an appendage of
its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and
parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but
a living toy or plaything.

Even on these terms the child is not a success.
It has a rival who is rapidly beating it
off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As
an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the
fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and
ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the
child forty points in a hundred and win out. It
can dress better, look more intelligent, behave
better, bark better,—in fact, the child is simply
not in it.[Illus]

The Parisian dog.

This is why, I suppose, in the world of Parisian
luxury, the dog is ousting the infant altogether.
You will see, as I said, no children on
the boulevards and avenues. You will see dogs
by the hundred. Every motor or open[121]
barouche that passes up the Champs Elysées,
with its little white cloud of fluffy parasols and
garden-hats, has a dainty, beribboned dog sitting
among its occupants: in every avenue and
promenade you will see hundreds of clipped
poodles and toy spaniels; in all the fashionable
churches you will see dogs bowed at their devotions.

It was a fair struggle. The child had its
chance and was beaten. The child couldn't
dress: the dog could. The child couldn't or
wouldn't pray: the dog could,—or at least he
learnt how. No doubt it came awkwardly at
first, but he set himself to it till nowadays a
French dog can enter a cathedral with just as
much reverence as his mistress, and can pray
in the corner of the pew with the same humility
as hers. When you get to know the Parisian
dogs, you can easily tell a Roman Catholic
dog from a Low Church Anglican. I knew a
dog once that was converted,—everybody said
from motives of policy,—from a Presbyterian,—but,
stop, it's not fair to talk about it,—the
dog is dead now, and it's not right to speak[122]
ill of its belief, no matter how mistaken it may
have been.

However, let that pass, what I was saying
was that between the child and the dog, each
had its chance in a fair open contest and the
child is nowhere.

People, who have never seen, even from the
outside, the Parisian world of fashion, have no
idea to what an extent it has been invaded by
the dog craze. Dogs are driven about in
motors and open carriages. They are elaborately
clipped and powdered and beribboned
by special "coiffeurs." They wear little buckled
coats and blankets, and in motors,—I don't
feel quite sure of this,—they wear motor goggles.
There are at least three or four—and
for all I know there may be more—fashionable
shops in Paris for dogs' supplies. There
is one that any curious visitor may easily find
at once in the Rue des Petits Champs close
to the Avenue de l'Opera. There is another
one midway in the galleries of the Palais
Royal. In these shops you will see, in the
first place, the chains, collars, and whips that[123]
are marks of the servitude in which dogs still
live (though, by the way, there are already, I
think, dog suffragettes heading a very strong
movement). You will see also the most delicious,
fashionable dog coats, very, very simple,
fastened in front with one silver clasp, only
one. In the Palais Royal shop they advertise,
"Newest summer models for 1913 in dogs'
tailoring." There are also dogs' beds made
in wickerwork in cradle shape with eider-down
coverlets worked over with silk.

A little while ago, the New York papers
were filled with an account of a dog's lunch
given at the Vanderbilt Hotel by an ultra-fashionable
American lady. It was recorded that
Vi Sin, the Pekin Spaniel of Mrs. H. of
New York, was host to about ten thousand
dollars worth of "smart" dogs. I do not know
whether or not this story is true, for I only
read it in the Parisian papers. But certain it
is that the episode would have made no sensation
in Paris. A dog eating in a restaurant
is a most ordinary spectacle. Only a few days
ago I had lunch with a dog,—a very quiet,[124]
sensible Belgian poodle, very simply dressed in
a plain morning stomach coat of ultramarine
with leather insertions. I took quite a fancy to
him. When I say that I had lunch with him,
I ought to explain that he had a lady, his mistress,
with him,—that also is quite usual in
Paris. But I didn't know her, and she sat on
the further side of him, so that I confined myself
to ordinary table civilities with the dog. I
was having merely a plain omelette, from motives
of economy, and the dog had a little dish
of entrecote d'agneau aux asperges maître
d'hôtel. I took some of it while the lady was
speaking to the waiter and found it excellent.
You may believe it or not, but the entry of a
dog into a French restaurant and his being
seated at a table and having his food ordered
creates not the slightest sensation. To bring
a child into a really good restaurant would, I
imagine, be looked upon as rather a serious
affair.

Not only is the dog the darling of the hour
during his lifetime, but even in death he is
not forgotten. There is in Paris a special dog[125]
cemetery. It lies among the drooping trees of
a little island in the Seine, called the Isle de la
Recette, and you may find it by taking the
suburban tramway for Asnières. It has little
tombstones, monuments, and flowered walks.
One sorrow-stricken master has inscribed over
a dog's grave,—"Plus je vois les hommes, plus
j'aime mon chien." The most notable feature
of the cemetery is the monument of Barry, a
St. Bernard dog. The inscription states that
he saved forty lives in the Alps.

But the dog craze is after all only a sign and
sample of the prevailing growth and extent of
fashionable luxury. Nowhere in the world, I
suppose, is this more conspicuous than in Paris,
the very Vanity Fair of mundane pleasure.
The hostesses of dinners, dances and fêtes vie
with one another in seeking bizarre and extravagant
effects. Here is a good example of
it taken from actual life the other day. It is
an account of an "oriental fête" given at a
private mansion in Paris.

It runs thus:—"The sumptuous Paris mansion
of the Comtesse Aynard de Chabrillan in[126]
the Rue Christophe-Colomb was converted into
a veritable scene from the 'Thousand and One
Nights' on the occasion of a Persian fête given
by her to a large company of friends.

"In the courtyard an immense tent was
erected, hung with superb Persian stuffs and
tapestries, and here the élite of Paris assembled
in gorgeous Oriental costumes.

"The countess herself presided in a magnificent
Persian costume of green and gold, with
an immense white aigrette in her hair."

Notice it. The simplicity of it! Only
green and gold in her costume, no silver, no
tin, no galvanized iron, just gold, plain gold;
and only "one immense white aigrette." The
quiet dignity of it!

The article goes on:—"Each of the sensational
entries was announced by M. André de
Fouquières, the arbiter of Parisian elegance.

"One of the most striking spectacles of the
evening was the appearance of Princesse P.
d'Arenberg, mounted on an elephant, richly
bedecked with Indian trappings. Then came
the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre and the[127]
Comtesse Stanislas de Castellane in gold cages,
followed by the Marquise de Brantes, in a
flower-strewn Egyptian litter, accompanied by
Pharaoh and his slaves.

"The Comtesse de Lubersac danced an
Oriental measure with charming grace, and
Prince Luis Fernando of Spain, in an ethereal
costume, his features stained a greenish hue,
executed a Hindoo dance before the assembly."

Can you beat it? His features stained with
a greenish hue! Now look at that! He
might have put on high grade prepared paint
or clear white lead,—he's rich enough,—but,
no, just a quiet shingle stain is enough for him.

I cannot resist adding from the same source
the list of the chief guests. Anybody desiring
a set of names for a burlesque show to run
three hundred nights on the circuit may have
them free of charge or without infringement
of copyright.

"Nearly everyone prominent in Paris society
was present, including the Maharajah of
Kapurthala, Princess Prem Kaur, Prince Aga
Khan, the Austrian Ambassador and Countess[128]
Szecsen, the Persian and Bulgarian Ministers,
Mme. Stancioff, Duc and Duchesse de Noailles,
Comtesse A. Potocka, Marquis and Marquise
de Mun, Comtesse du Bourg de Bozas, Mrs.
Moore, Comte and Comtesse G. de Segonzec
and Prince and Princess de Croy."

I am sorry that "Mrs. Moore" was there.
She must have slipped in unnoticed.

What is not generally known is that I was
there myself. I appeared,—in rivalry with
Prince Luis Fernando—dressed as a Bombay
soda water bottle, with aerial opalescent streaks
of light flashing from the costume which was
bound with single wire.[129]

IV.—A Visit to Versailles

"WHAT!" said the man from Kansas,
looking up from his asparagus,
"do you mean to say that you
have never seen the Palace of
Versailles?"

"No," I said very firmly, "I have not."

"Nor the fountains in the gardens?"

"No."

"Nor the battle pictures?"

"No."

"And the Hall of Mirrors,"—added the
fat lady from Georgia.

"And Madame du Barry's bed"—said her
husband.

"Her which," I asked, with some interest.

"Her bed."

"All right," I said, "I'll go."

I knew, of course, that I had to. Every
tourist in Paris has got to go and see Versailles.
Otherwise the superiority of the others
becomes insufferable, with foreigners it is[130]
different. If they worry one about palaces
and cathedrals and such—the Château at Versailles,
and the Kaiserhof and the Duomo at
Milan—I answer them in kind. I ask them
if they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at
Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch at St.
Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and
the Toboggo at Montreal. That quiets them
wonderfully.

But, as I say, I had to go.

You get to Versailles—as the best of various
ways of transport—by means of a contrivance
something between a train and a street car.
It has a little puffing steam-engine and two
cars—double deckers—with the top deck open
to the air and covered with a wooden roof on
rods. The lower part inside is called the
first-class and a seat in it costs ten cents extra.
Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it.
The engine is a quaint little thing and wears
a skirt, painted green, all around it, so that you
can just see the tips of its wheels peeping
modestly out below. It was a great relief to
me to see this engine. It showed that there[131]
is such a thing as French delicacy after all.
There are so many sights along the boulevards
that bring the carmine blush to the face of the
tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying
to avoid seeing them), that it is well to know
that the French draw the line somewhere.
The sight of the bare wheels of an engine is
too much for them.

The little train whirls its way out of Paris,
past the great embankment and the fortifications,
and goes rocking along among green
trees whose branches sweep its sides, and trim
villas with stone walls around quaint gardens.
At every moment it passes little inns and
suburban restaurants with cool arbours in front
of them, and waiters in white coats pouring
out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty
just to look at them.

In due time the little train rattles and rocks
itself over the dozen miles or so that separate
Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right
in front of the great stone court-yard of the
palace. There through the long hours of a
summer afternoon you may feast your eyes[132]
upon the wonderland of beauty that rose at
the command of the grand monarch, Louis
XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland
that marked the spot two hundred and fifty
years ago.

All that royal munificence could effect was
lavished on the making of the palace. So vast
is it in size that in the days of its greatest
splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates.
The sheer length of it from side to side is only
about a hundred yards short of half a mile.
To make the grounds the King's chief landscape
artist and his hundreds of workers
laboured for twenty years. They took in, as
it were, the whole landscape. The beauty of
their work lies not only in the wonderful
terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that
extend from the rear of the Château, but in
its blending with the scene beyond. It is so
planned that no distant house or building
breaks into the picture. The vista ends everywhere
with the waving woods of the purple
distance.

Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred[133]
million dollars on the making of the palace.
When made it was filled with treasures of art
not to be measured in price. It was meant to
be, and it remains, the last word of royal
grandeur. The King's court at Versailles
became the sun round which gravitated the
fate and fortune of his twenty million subjects.
Admission within its gates was itself
a mark of royal favour. Now, any person
with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris
on the double-decked street car and wander
about the palace at will. For a five cent tip
to a guide you may look through the private
apartments of Marie Antoinette, and for two
cents you may check your umbrella while you
inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First.
For nothing at all you may stand on the vast
terrace behind the Château and picture to
yourself the throng of gay ladies in paniered
skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in sea-green
inexpressibles, who walked among its groves
and fountains two hundred years ago. The
palace of the Kings has become the playground
of the democracy.[134]

The palace—or the Château, as it is modestly
named—stands crosswise upon an elevation that
dominates the scene for miles around. The
whole building throughout is only of three
stories, for French architecture has a horror
of high buildings. The two great wings of
the Château reach sideways, north and south;
and one, a shorter one, runs westwards towards
the rear. In the front space between
the wings is a vast paved court-yard—the Royal
Court—shut in by a massive iron fence. Into
this court penetrated, one autumn evening in
1789, the raging mob led by the women of
Paris, who had come to drag the descendant
of the Grand Monarch into the captivity that
ended only with the guillotine. Here they
lighted their bonfires and here they sang and
shrieked and shivered throughout the night.
That night of the fifth of October was the real
end of monarchy in France.

No one, I think—not even my friend from
Kansas who boasted that he had "put in"
three hours at Versailles—could see all that is
within the Château. But there are certain[135]
things which no tourist passes by. One of
them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV,
a great series of square apartments all opening
sideways into each other with gilded doors as
large as those of a barn, and with about as
much privacy as a railway station. One room
was the King's council chamber; next to this,
a larger one, was the "wig-room," where the
royal mind selected its wig for the day and
where the royal hair-dresser performed his
stupendous task. Besides this again is the
King's bedroom. Preserved in it, within a
little fence, still stands the bed in which
Louis XIV died in 1715, after a reign of
seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily
hold three hundred people. Outside of it is
a great antechamber, where the courtiers
jealously waited their turn to be present at
the King's "lever," or "getting up," eager to
have the supreme honour of holding the royal
breeches.

But if the King's apartments are sumptuous,
they are as nothing to the Hall of Mirrors,
the showroom of the whole palace, and esti[136]mated
to be the most magnificent single room
in the world. It extends clear across the end
of the rear wing and has a length of 236 feet.
It is lighted by vast windows that reach almost
to the lofty arch that forms its ceiling; the
floor is of polished inlaid wood, on which
there stood in Louis the Great's time, tables,
chairs, and other furniture of solid silver.
The whole inner side of the room is formed
by seventeen enormous mirrors set in spaces
to correspond in shape to the window opposite,
and fitted in between with polished
marble. Above them runs a cornice of glittering
gilt, and over that again the ceiling curves
in a great arch, each panel of it bearing some
picture to recall the victories of the Grand
Monarch. Ungrateful posterity has somewhat
forgotten the tremendous military achievements
of Louis XIV—the hardships of his
campaign in the Netherlands in which the staff
of the royal cuisine was cut down to one
hundred cooks—the passage of the Rhine, in
which the King actually crossed the river from
one side to the other, and so on. But the[137]
student of history can live again the triumphs
of Louis in this Hall of Mirrors. It is an
irony of history that in this room, after the
conquest of 1871, the King of Prussia was
proclaimed German Emperor by his subjects
and his allies.

But if one wants to see battle pictures, one
has but to turn to the north wing of the
Château. There you have them, room after
room—twenty, thirty, fifty roomsful—I don't
know how many—the famous gallery of battles,
depicting the whole military history of France
from the days of King Clovis till the French
Revolution. They run in historical order.
The pictures begin with battles of early barbarians—men
with long hair wielding huge
battle-axes with their eyes blazing, while other
barbarians prod at them with pikes or take a
sweep at them with a two-handed club. After
that there are rooms full of crusade pictures—crusaders
fighting the Arabs, crusaders investing
Jerusalem, crusaders raising the siege of
Malta and others raising the siege of Rhodes;
all very picturesque, with the blue Mediter[138]ranean,
the yellow sand of the desert, prancing
steeds in nickel-plated armour and knights
plumed and caparisoned, or whatever it is, and
wearing as many crosses as an ambulance emergency
staff. All of these battles were apparently
quite harmless, that is the strange thing
about these battle pictures: the whole thing, as
depicted for the royal eye, is wonderfully full
of colour and picturesque, but, as far as one
can see, quite harmless. Nobody seems to be
getting hurt, wild-looking men are swinging
maces round, but you can see that they won't
hit anybody. A battle-axe is being brought
down with terrific force, but somebody is
thrusting up a steel shield just in time to meet
it. There are no signs of blood or injury.
Everybody seems to be getting along finely and
to be having the most invigorating physical exercise.
Here and here, perhaps, the artist depicts
somebody jammed down under a beam or
lying under the feet of a horse; but if you look
close you see that the beam isn't really pressing
on him, and that the horse is not really stepping
on his stomach. In fact the man is per[139]fectly
comfortable, and is, at the moment, taking
aim at somebody else with a two-string
crossbow, which would have deadly effect if he
wasn't ass enough to aim right at the middle of
a cowhide shield.

You notice this quality more and more in
the pictures as the history moves on. After
the invention of gunpowder, when the combatants
didn't have to be locked together, but
could be separated by fields, and little groves
and quaint farm-houses, the battle seems to
get quite lost in the scenery. It spreads out
into the landscape until it becomes one of the
prettiest, quietest scenes that heart could wish.
I know nothing so drowsily comfortable as the
pictures in this gallery that show the battles
of the seventeenth century,—the Grand Monarch's
own particular epoch. This is a wide,
rolling landscape with here and there little
clusters of soldiers to add a touch of colour
to the foliage of the woods; there are woolly
little puffs of smoke rising in places to show
that the artillery is at its dreamy work on a
hill side; near the foreground is a small group[140]
of generals standing about a tree and gazing
through glasses at the dim purple of the background.
There are sheep and cattle grazing
in all the unused parts of the battle, the whole
thing has a touch of quiet, rural feeling that
goes right to the heart. I have seen people
from the ranching district of the Middle West
stand before these pictures in tears.[Illus]

Personally I plead guilty to something of the same spirit.

It is strange to compare this sort of thing
with some of the modern French pictures.
There is realism enough and to spare in them.
In the Salon exhibition a year or two ago, for
instance, there was one that represented lions
turned loose into an arena to eat up Christians.
I can imagine exactly how a Louis
Quatorze artist would have dealt with the
subject,—an arena, prettily sanded, with here
and there gooseberry bushes and wild gilly
flowers (not too wild, of course), lions with
flowing manes, in noble attitudes, about to
roar,—tigers, finely developed, about to spring,—Christians
just going to pray,—and through
it all a genial open-air feeling very soothing
to the royal senses. Not so the artist of to-[141]day.
The picture in the Salon is of blood.
There are torn limbs gnawed by crouching
beasts, as a dog holds and gnaws a bone;
there are faces being torn, still quivering, from
the writhing body,—in fact, perhaps after all
there is something to be said for the way the
Grand Monarch arranged his gallery.

The battle pictures and the Hall of Mirrors,
and the fountains and so on, are, I say, the
things best worth seeing at Versailles. Everybody
says so. I really wish now that I had
seen them. But I am free to confess that
I am a poor sightseer at the best. As soon as
I get actually in reach of a thing it somehow
dwindles in importance. I had a friend once,
now a distinguished judge in the United
States, who suffered much in this way. He
travelled a thousand miles to reach the World's
Fair, but as soon as he had arrived at a comfortable
hotel in Chicago, he was unable to
find the energy to go out to the Fair grounds.
He went once to visit Niagara Falls, but failed
to see the actual water, partly because it no[142]
longer seemed necessary, partly because his
room in the hotel looked the other way.

Personally I plead guilty to something of
the same spirit. Just where you alight from
the steam tramway at Versailles, you will find
close on your right, a little open-air café, with
tables under a trellis of green vines. It is as
cool a retreat of mingled sun and shadow as
I know. There is red wine at two francs and
long imported cigars of as soft a flavour as
even Louis the Fourteenth could have desired.
The idea of leaving a grotto like that to go
trapesing all over a hot stuffy palace with a
lot of fool tourists, seemed ridiculous. But I
bought there a little illustrated book called the
Château de Versailles, which interested me so
extremely that I decided that, on some reasonable
opportunity, I would go and visit the
place.

[143]

V.—Paris at Night

"WHAT Ah'd like to do," says the
Fat Lady from Georgia, settling
back comfortably in her seat
after her five-dollar dinner at the
Café American, while her husband is figuring
whether ten francs is enough to give to the
waiter, "is to go and see something real
wicked. Ah tell him (the word 'him' is used
in Georgia to mean husband) that while we're
here Ah just want to see everything that's
going."

"All right," says the Man from Kansas who
"knows" Paris, "I'll get a guide right here, and
he'll take us round and show us the sights."

"Can you get him heah?" asks the gentleman
from Georgia, looking round at the glittering
mirrors and gold cornices of the restaurant.

Can you get a guide? Well, now! Can
you keep away from them? All day from the[144]
dewy hour of breakfast till late at night they
meet you in the street and sidle up with the
enquiry, "Guide, sir?"

Where the Parisian guide comes from and
how he graduates for his job I do not know.
He is not French and, as a rule, he doesn't
know Paris. He knows his way to the Louvre
and to two or three American bars and to the
Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. But he doesn't
need to know his way. For that he falls back
on the taxi-driver. "Now, sir," says the
guide briskly to the gentleman who has
engaged his services, "where would you like
to go?" "I should like to see Napoleon's
tomb." "All right," says the guide, "get
into the taxi." Then he turns to the driver.
"Drive to Napoleon's tomb," he says. After
they have looked at it the guide says, "What
would you like to see next, sir?" "I am
very anxious to see Victor Hugo's house, which
I understand is now made open to the public."
The guide turns to the taxi man. "Drive to
Victor Hugo's house," he says.

After looking through the house the visitor[145]
says in a furtive way, "I was just wondering
if I could get a drink anywhere in this part of
the town?" "Certainly," says the guide.
"Drive to an American bar."

Isn't that simple? Can you imagine any
more agreeable way of earning five dollars in
three hours than that? Of course, what the
guide says to the taxi man is said in the French
language, or in something resembling it, and
the gentleman in the cab doesn't understand it.
Otherwise, after six or seven days of driving
round in this way he begins to wonder what
the guide is for. But of course, the guide's
life, when you come to think of it, is one full
of difficulty and danger. Just suppose that,
while he was away off somewhere in Victor
Hugo's house or at Napoleon's grave, the taxi-driver
were to be struck by lightning. How
on earth would he get home? He might,
perhaps, be up in the Eiffel Tower and the
taxi man get a stroke of paralysis, and then
he'd starve to death trying to find his way
back. After all, the guide has to have the
kind of pluck and hardihood that ought to be[146]
well rewarded. Why, in other countries, like
Switzerland, they have to use dogs for it, and
in France, when these plucky fellows throw
themselves into it, surely one wouldn't grudge
the nominal fee of five dollars for which they
risk their lives.

But I am forgetting about the Lady from
Georgia and her husband. Off they go in due
course from the glittering doors of the restaurant
in a huge taxi with a guide in a peaked
hat. The party is all animation. The lady's
face is aglow with moral enthusiasm. The
gentleman and his friend have their coats buttoned
tight to their chins for fear that thieves
might leap over the side of the taxi and steal
their neckties.

So they go buzzing along the lighted
boulevard looking for "something real wicked."
What they want is to see something really and
truly wicked; they don't know just what,
but "something bad." They've got the idea
that Paris is one of the wickedest places on
earth, and they want to see it.[Illus]

The lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm.

Strangely enough, in their own home, the[147]
Lady from Georgia is one of the leaders of the
Social Purity movement, and her husband,
whose skin at this moment is stretched as
tight as a football with French brandy and
soda, is one of the finest speakers on the
Georgia temperance platform, with a reputation
that reaches from Chattanooga to Chickamauga.
They have a son at Yale College whom
they are trying to keep from smoking cigarettes.
But here in Paris, so they reckon it, everything
is different. It doesn't occur to them that perhaps
it is wicked to pay out a hundred dollars
in an evening hiring other people to be wicked.

So off they go and are whirled along in the
brilliant glare of the boulevards and up the
gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre.
They visit the Moulin Rouge and
the Bal Tabarin, and they see the Oriental
Dances and the Café of Hell and the hundred
and one other glittering fakes and false
appearances that poor old meretricious Paris
works overtime to prepare for such people as
themselves. And the Lady from Georgia, having
seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least[148]
is pure—which is a beginning—and they go
home more enthusiastic than ever in the Social
Purity movement.

But the fact is that if you have about
twenty-five thousand new visitors pouring into
a great city every week with their pockets full
of money and clamoring for "something
wicked," you've got to do the best you can for
them.

Hence it results that Paris—in appearance,
anyway—is a mighty gay place at night.
The sidewalks are crowded with the little
tables of the coffee and liqueur drinkers. The
music of a hundred orchestras bursts forth
from the lighted windows. The air is soft
with the fragrance of a June evening, tempered
by the curling smoke of fifty thousand cigars.
Through the noise and chatter of the crowd
there sounds unending the wail of the motor
horn.

The hours of Parisian gaiety are late.
Ordinary dinner is eaten at about seven o'clock,
but fashionable dinners begin at eight or eight
thirty. Theatres open at a quarter to nine[149]
and really begin at nine o'clock. Special
features and acts,—famous singers and vaudeville
artists—are brought on at eleven o'clock
so that dinner-party people may arrive in time
to see them. The theatres come out at midnight.
After that there are the night suppers
which flourish till two or half past. But if
you wish, you can go between the theater and
supper to some such side-long place as the
Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin, which
reach the height of their supposed merriment
at about one in the morning.

At about two or two thirty the motors
come whirling home, squawking louder than
ever, with a speed limit of fifty miles an hour.
Only the best of them can run faster than
that. Quiet, conservative people in Paris like
to get to bed at three o'clock; after all, what
is the use of keeping late hours and ruining
one's health and complexion? If you make it
a strict rule to be in bed by three, you feel all
the better for it in the long run—health
better, nerves steadier, eyes clearer—and[150]
you're able to get up early—at half-past eleven—and
feel fine.

Those who won't or don't go to bed at
three wander about the town, eat a second
supper in an all-night restaurant, circulate
round with guides, and visit the slums of the
Market, where gaunt-eyed wretches sleep in
crowded alleys in the mephitic air of a summer
night, and where the idle rich may feed their
luxurious curiosity on the sufferings of the idle
poor.

The dinners, the theaters, the boulevards,
and the rest of it are all fun enough, at any
rate for one visit in a lifetime. The "real
wicked" part of it is practically fake—served
up for the curious foreigner with money to
throw away. The Moulin Rouge whirls the
wide sails of its huge sign, crimson with
electric bulbs, amid the false glaze of the Place
Blanche. Inside of it there is more red—the
full red of bad claret and the bright red of
congested faces and painted cheeks. Part of
the place is a theater with a vaudeville show
much like any other. Another part is a vast[151]
"promenoir" where you may walk up and
down or sit at a little table and drink bad
brandy at one franc and a half. In a fenced
off part are the Oriental Dances, a familiar
feature of every Parisian Show. These dances—at
twenty cents a turn—are supposed to
represent all the languishing allurement of
the Oriental houri—I think that is the word.
The dancers in Paris—it is only fair to state—have
never been nearer to the Orient than the
Faubourg St. Antoine, where they were
brought up and where they learned all the
Orientalism that they know. Their "dance"
is performed with their feet continuously on
the ground—never lifted, I mean—and is done
by gyrations of the stomach, beside which the
paroxysms of an overdose of Paris green are
child's play. In seeing these dances one
realizes all the horrors of life in the East.

Not everyone, however, can be an Oriental
dancer in a French pleasure show. To qualify
you must be as scrawny as a Parisian cab-horse,
and it appears as if few débutantes
could break into the profession under the age[152]
of forty. The dances go on at intervals till
two in the morning, after which the Oriental
houri crawls to her home at the same time
as the Parisian cab-horse—her companion in
arms.

Under the Moulin Rouge, and in all similar
places, is a huge dance hall: It has a "Hungarian
Orchestra"—a fact which is proved by
the red and green jackets, the tyrolese caps,
and by the printed sign which says, "This is
a Hungarian Orchestra." I knew that they
were Hungarians the night I saw them, because
I distinctly heard one of them say,
"what t'ell do we play next boys?" The
reference to William Tell was obvious. After
every four tunes the Orchestra are given a tall
stein of beer, and they all stand up and drink
it, shouting "Hoch!" or "Ha!" or "Hoo!"
or something of the sort. This is supposed
to give a high touch of local colour. Everybody
knows how Hungarians always shout out
loud when they see a glass of beer. I've noticed
it again and again in sugar refineries.

The Hungarians have to drink the beer[153]
whether they like it or not—it's part of their
contract. I noticed one poor fellow who was
playing the long bassoon, and who was doing
a double night-shift overtime. He'd had
twenty-four pints of beer already, and there
were still two hours before closing time. You
could tell what he was feeling like by the sobbing
of his instrument. But he stood up every
now and then and yelled "Hoch!" or "Hiccough!"—or
whatever it was—along with the
others.

On the big floor in front of the Hungarians
the dance goes on. Most of the time the
dances are endless waltzes and polkas shared
in by the nondescript frequenters of the place,
while the tourist visitors sit behind a railing
and watch. To look at, the dancing is about
as interesting, nothing more or less, than the
round dances at a Canadian picnic on the first
of July.

Every now and then, to liven things up,
comes the can-can. In theory this is a wild
dance, breaking out from sheer ebullience
of spirit, and shared in by a bevy of merry[154]
girls carried away by gaiety and joy of living.
In reality the can-can is performed by eight or
ten old nags,—ex-Oriental dancers, I should
think,—at eighty cents a night. But they are
deserving women, and work hard—like all the
rest of the brigade in the factory of Parisian
gaiety.

After the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin
or such, comes, of course, a visit to one of the
night cafés of the Montmartre district. Their
names in themselves are supposed to indicate
their weird and alluring character—the Café of
Heaven, the Café of Nothingness, and,—how
dreadful—the Café of Hell. "Montmartre,"
says one of the latest English writers on Paris,
"is the scene of all that is wild, mad, and
extravagant. Nothing is too grotesque, too
terrible, too eccentric for the Montmartre
mind." Fiddlesticks! What he means is
that nothing is too damn silly for people to
pay to go to see.

Take, for example, the notorious Café of
Hell. The portals are low and gloomy. You
enter in the dark. A pass-word is given[155]—"Stranger,
who cometh here?"—"More food
for worms." You sit and eat among coffins
and shrouds. There are muffled figures
shuffling around to represent monks in cowls,
saints, demons, and apostles. The "Angel
Gabriel" watches at the door. "Father
Time" moves among the eaters. The waiters
are dressed as undertakers. There are skulls
and cross-bones in the walls. The light is
that of dim tapers. And so on.

And yet I suppose some of the foreign
visitors to the Café of Hell think that this is
a truly French home scene, and discuss the
queer characteristics of the French people
suggested by it.

I got to know a family in Paris that worked
in one of these Montmartre night cafés—quiet,
decent people they were, with a little
home of their own in the suburbs. The
father worked as Beelzebub mostly, but he
could double with St. Anthony and do a very
fair St. Luke when it was called for. The
mother worked as Mary Magdalene, but had
grown so stout that it was hard for her to[156]
hold it. There were two boys, one of whom
was working as John the Baptist, but had been
promised to be promoted to Judas Iscariot in
the fall; they were good people, and worked
well, but were tired of their present place.
Like everyone else they had heard of Canada
and thought of coming out. They were very
anxious to know what openings there were in
their line; whether there would be any call
for a Judas Iscariot in a Canadian restaurant,
or whether a man would have any chance as
St. Anthony in the West.

I told them frankly that these jobs were
pretty well filled up.

Listen! It is striking three. The motors
are whirling down the asphalt street. The
brilliant lights of the boulevard windows are
fading out. Here, as in the silent woods of
Canada, night comes at last. The restless city
of pleasure settles to its short sleep.

[157]

THE RETROACTIVE EXISTENCE

OF MR. JUGGINS

[158]
[159]

The Retroactive Existence of Mr.

Juggins

I  FIRST met Juggins,—really to notice
him,—years and years ago as a boy out
camping. Somebody was trying to nail
up a board on a tree for a shelf and
Juggins interfered to help him.

"Stop a minute," he said, "you need to
saw the end of that board off before you put it
up." Then Juggins looked round for a saw,
and when he got it he had hardly made more
than a stroke or two with it before he stopped.
"This saw," he said, "needs to be filed up a
bit." So he went and hunted up a file to
sharpen the saw, but found that before he
could use the file he needed to put a proper
handle on it, and to make a handle he went to
look for a sapling in the bush, but to cut the
sapling he found that he needed to sharpen up
the axe. To do this, of course, he had to fix[160]
the grindstone so as to make it run properly.
This involved making wooden legs for the
grindstone. To do this decently Juggins
decided to make a carpenter's bench. This
was quite impossible without a better set of
tools. Juggins went to the village to get the
tools required, and, of course, he never came
back.

He was re-discovered—weeks later—in the
city, getting prices on wholesale tool machinery.

After that first episode I got to know
Juggins very well. For some time we were
students at college together. But Juggins
somehow never got far with his studies. He
always began with great enthusiasm and then
something happened. For a time he studied
French with tremendous eagerness. But he
soon found that for a real knowledge of
French you need first to get a thorough grasp
of Old French and Provençal. But it proved
impossible to do anything with these without
an absolutely complete command of Latin.
This Juggins discovered could only be obtained,[161]
in any thorough way, through Sanskrit, which
of course lies at the base of it. So Juggins
devoted himself to Sanskrit until he realised
that for a proper understanding of Sanskrit
one needs to study the ancient Iranian, the
root-language underneath. This language however
is lost.

So Juggins had to begin over again. He
did, it is true, make some progress in natural
science. He studied physics and rushed rapidly
backwards from forces to molecules, and from
molecules to atoms, and from atoms to electrons,
and then his whole studies exploded
backward into the infinities of space, still
searching a first cause.

Juggins, of course, never took a degree, so
he made no practical use of his education.
But it didn't matter. He was very well off
and was able to go straight into business with
a capital of about a hundred thousand dollars.
He put it at first into a gas plant, but found
that he lost money at that because of the high
price of the coal needed to make gas. So[162]
he sold out for ninety thousand dollars and
went into coal mining. This was unsuccessful
because of the awful cost of mining machinery.
So Juggins sold his share in the mine for
eighty thousand dollars and went in for
manufacturing mining machinery. At this he
would have undoubtedly made money but for
the enormous cost of gas needed as motive-power
for the plant. Juggins sold out of the
manufacture for seventy thousand, and after
that he went whirling in a circle, like skating
backwards, through the different branches of
allied industry.

He lost a certain amount of money each
year, especially in good years when trade was
brisk. In dull times when everything was unsalable
he did fairly well.

Juggins' domestic life was very quiet.

Of course he never married. He did, it is
true, fall in love several times; but each time
it ended without result. I remember well his
first love story for I was very intimate with
him at the time. He had fallen in love with
the girl in question utterly and immediately.[163]
It was literally love at first sight. There was
no doubt of his intentions. As soon as he had
met her he was quite frank about it. "I intend,"
he said, "to ask her to be my wife."

"When?" I asked; "right away?"

"No," he said, "I want first to fit myself
to be worthy of her."

So he went into moral training to fit himself.
He taught in a Sunday school for six
weeks, till he realised that a man has no business
in Divine work of that sort without first
preparing himself by serious study of the
history of Palestine. And he felt that a man
was a cad to force his society on a girl while
he is still only half acquainted with the history
of the Israelites. So Juggins stayed away. It
was nearly two years before he was fit to propose.
By the time he was fit, the girl had
already married a brainless thing in patent
leather boots who didn't even know who
Moses was.

Of course Juggins fell in love again. People
always do. And at any rate by this time he[164]
was in a state of moral fitness that made it
imperative.

So he fell in love—deeply in love this time—with
a charming girl, commonly known as the
eldest Miss Thorneycroft. She was only called
eldest because she had five younger sisters; and
she was very poor and awfully clever and
trimmed all her own hats. Any man, if he's
worth the name, falls in love with that sort
of thing at first sight. So, of course, Juggins
would have proposed to her; only when he
went to the house he met her next sister: and of
course she was younger still; and, I suppose,
poorer: and made not only her own hats but
her own blouses. So Juggins fell in love with
her. But one night when he went to call, the
door was opened by the sister younger still,
who not only made her own blouses and
trimmed her own hats, but even made her own
tailor-made suits. After that Juggins backed
up from sister to sister till he went through
the whole family, and in the end got none of
them.

Perhaps it was just as well that Juggins[165]
never married. It would have made things
very difficult because, of course, he got poorer
all the time. You see after he sold out his
last share in his last business he bought with
it a diminishing life annuity, so planned that
he always got rather less next year than this
year, and still less the year after. Thus, if he
lived long enough, he would starve to death.

Meantime he has become a quaint-looking
elderly man, with coats a little too short and
trousers a little above his boots—like a boy.
His face too is like that of a boy, with wrinkles.

And his talk now has grown to be always
reminiscent. He is perpetually telling long
stories of amusing times that he has had with
different people that he names.

He says for example—

"I remember a rather queer thing that
happened to me in a train one day——"

And if you say—"When was that Juggins?"—he
looks at you in a vague way as if calculating
and says,—"in 1875, or 1876, I
think, as near as I recall it—"[Illus]

Meanwhile he had become a quaint-looking elderly man.

I notice, too, that his reminiscences are[166]
going further and further back. He used to
base his stories on his recollections as a young
man, now they are further back.

The other day he told me a story about
himself and two people that he called the
Harper brothers,—Ned and Joe. Ned, he
said was a tremendously powerful fellow.

I asked how old Ned was and Juggins said
that he was three. He added that there was
another brother not so old, but a very clever
fellow about,—here Juggins paused and calculated—about
eighteen months.

So then I realised where Juggins retroactive
existence is carrying him to. He has passed
back through childhood into infancy, and presently,
just as his annuity runs to a point and
vanishes, he will back up clear through the
Curtain of Existence and die,—or be born, I
don't know which to call it.

Meantime he remains to me as one of the
most illuminating allegories I have met.

[167]

MAKING A MAGAZINE


(The Dream of a Contributor)

[168]
[169]

Making a Magazine

I  DREAMT one night not long ago that I
was the editor of a great illustrated magazine.
I offer no apology for this: I
have often dreamt even worse of myself
than that.

In any case I didn't do it on purpose: very
often, I admit, I try to dream that I am President
Wilson, or Mr. Bryan, or the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel, or a share of stock in the
Standard Oil Co. for the sheer luxury and
cheapness of it. But this was an accident. I
had been sitting up late at night writing personal
reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln. I
was writing against time. The presidential
election was drawing nearer every day and the
market for reminiscences of Lincoln was extremely
brisk, but, of course, might collapse
any moment. Writers of my class have to
consider this sort of thing. For instance, in
the middle of Lent, I find that I can do fairly[170]
well with "Recent Lights on the Scriptures."
Then, of course, when the hot weather comes,
the market for Christmas poetry opens and
there's a fairly good demand for voyages in
the Polar Seas. Later on, in the quiet of the
autumn I generally write some "Unpublished
Letters from Goethe to Balzac," and that sort
of thing.

But it's a wearing occupation, full of disappointments,
and needing the very keenest
business instinct to watch every turn of the
market.

I am afraid that this is a digression. I only
wanted to explain how a man's mind could be
so harassed and overwrought as to make him
dream that he was an editor.

I knew at once in my dream where and
what I was. As soon as I saw the luxury of
the surroundings,—the spacious room with its
vaulted ceiling, lit with stained glass,—the
beautiful mahogany table at which I sat writing
with a ten-dollar fountain pen, the gift of the
manufacturers,—on embossed stationery, the
gift of the embossers,—on which I was setting[171]
down words at eight and a half cents a word
and deliberately picking out short ones through
sheer business acuteness;—as soon as I saw;—this
I said to myself—

"I am an editor, and this is my editorial
sanctum." Not that I have ever seen an
editor or a sanctum. But I have sent so
many manuscripts to so many editors and
received them back with such unfailing promptness,
that the scene before me was as familiar
to my eye as if I had been wide awake.

As I thus mused, revelling in the charm
of my surroundings and admiring the luxurious
black alpaca coat and the dainty dickie
which I wore, there was a knock at the door.

A beautiful creature entered. She evidently
belonged to the premises, for she wore no hat
and there were white cuffs upon her wrists.
She has that indescribable beauty of effectiveness
such as is given to hospital nurses.

This, I thought to myself, must be my
private secretary.

"I hope I don't interrupt you, sir," said the
girl.[172]

"My dear child," I answered, speaking in
that fatherly way in which an editor might
well address a girl almost young enough to be
his wife, "pray do not mention it. Sit down.
You must be fatigued after your labours of the
morning. Let me ring for a club sandwich."

"I came to say, sir," the secretary went on,
"that there's a person downstairs waiting to
see you."

My manner changed at once.

"Is he a gentleman or a contributor?" I
asked.

"He doesn't look exactly like a gentleman."

"Very good," I said. "He's a contributor
for sure. Tell him to wait. Ask the caretaker
to lock him in the coal cellar, and kindly slip
out and see if there's a policeman on the beat
in case I need him."

"Very good, sir," said the secretary.

I waited for about an hour, wrote a few
editorials advocating the rights of the people,
smoked some Turkish cigarettes, drank a glass
of sherry, and ate part of an anchovy sandwich.[173]

Then I rang the bell. "Bring that man here,"
I said.

Presently they brought him in. He was a
timid-looking man with an embarrassed manner
and all the low cunning of an author stamped
on his features. I could see a bundle of
papers in his hand, and I knew that the
scoundrel was carrying a manuscript.

"Now, sir," I said, "speak quickly. What's
your business?"

"I've got here a manuscript," he began.

"What!" I shouted at him. "A manuscript!
You'd dare, would you! Bringing manuscripts
in here! What sort of a place do you think
this is?"

"It's the manuscript of a story," he faltered.

"A story!" I shrieked. "What on earth
do you think we'd want stories for! Do you
think we've nothing better to do than to print
your idiotic ravings? Have you any idea, you
idiot, of the expense we're put to in setting up
our fifty pages of illustrated advertising?
Look here," I continued, seizing a bundle of
proof illustrations that lay in front of me,[174]
"do you see this charming picture of an
Asbestos Cooker, guaranteed fireless, odourless,
and purposeless? Do you see this patent
motor-car with pneumatic cushions, and the
full-page description of its properties? Can
you form any idea of the time and thought that
we have to spend on these things, and yet you
dare to come in here with your miserable
stories. By heaven," I said, rising in my seat,
"I've a notion to come over there and choke
you: I'm entitled to do it by the law, and I
think I will."

"Don't, don't," he pleaded. "I'll go away.
I meant no harm. I'll take it with me."

"No you don't," I interrupted; "none of
your sharp tricks with this magazine. You've
submitted this manuscript to me, and it stays
submitted. If I don't like it, I shall prosecute
you, and, I trust, obtain full reparation from
the courts."[Illus]

With all the low cunning of an author stamped on his features.

To tell the truth, it had occurred to me
that perhaps I might need after all to buy the
miserable stuff. Even while I felt that my
indignation at the low knavery of the fellow[175]
was justified, I knew that it might be necessary
to control it. The present low state of
public taste demands a certain amount of this
kind of matter distributed among the advertising.

I rang the bell again.

"Please take this man away and shut him
up again. Have them keep a good eye on
him. He's an author."

"Very good, sir," said the secretary.

I called her back for one moment.

"Don't feed him anything," I said.

"No," said the girl.

The manuscript lay before me on the table.
It looked bulky. It bore the title Dorothy
Dacres, or, Only a Clergyman's Daughter.

I rang the bell again.

"Kindly ask the janitor to step this way."

He came in. I could see from the straight,
honest look in his features that he was a man
to be relied upon.

"Jones," I said, "can you read?"

"Yes, sir," he said, "some."

"Very good. I want you to take this manu[176]script
and read it. Read it all through and
then bring it back here."

The janitor took the manuscript and disappeared.
I turned to my desk again and was
soon absorbed in arranging a full-page display
of plumbers' furnishings for the advertising.
It had occurred to me that by arranging the
picture matter in a neat device with verses
from "Home Sweet Home" running through
it in double-leaded old English type, I could
set up a page that would be the delight of all
business readers and make this number of the
magazine a conspicuous success. My mind was
so absorbed that I scarcely noticed that over
an hour elapsed before the janitor returned.

"Well, Jones," I said as he entered, "have
you read that manuscript?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you find it all right—punctuation
good, spelling all correct?"

"Very good indeed, sir."

"And there is, I trust, nothing of what one
would call a humorous nature in it? I want
you to answer me quite frankly, Jones,—there[177]
is nothing in it that would raise a smile, or
even a laugh, is there?"

"Oh, no, sir," said Jones, "nothing at all."

"And now tell me—for remember that the
reputation of our magazine is at stake—does
this story make a decided impression on you?
Has it," and here I cast my eye casually at
the latest announcement of a rival publication,
"the kind of tour de force which at once excites
you to the full qui vive and which contains a
sustained brio that palpitates on every page?
Answer carefully, Jones, because if it hasn't, I
won't buy it."

"I think it has," he said.

"Very well," I answered; "now bring the
author to me."

In the interval of waiting, I hastily ran my
eye through the pages of the manuscript.

Presently they brought the author back
again. He had assumed a look of depression.

"I have decided," I said, "to take your manuscript."

Joy broke upon his face. He came nearer
to me as if to lick my hand.[178]

"Stop a minute," I said. "I am willing to
take your story, but there are certain things,
certain small details which I want to change."

"Yes?" he said timidly.

"In the first place, I don't like your title.
Dorothy Dacres, or, Only a Clergyman's
Daughter is too quiet. I shall change it to read
Dorothea Dashaway, or, The Quicksands of
Society."

"But surely," began the contributor, beginning
to wring his hands——

"Don't interrupt me," I said. "In the next
place, the story is much too long." Here I
reached for a large pair of tailor's scissors
that lay on the table. "This story contains
nine thousand words. We never care to use
more than six thousand. I must therefore cut
some of it off." I measured the story carefully
with a pocket tape that lay in front of me,
cut off three thousand words and handed them
back to the author. "These words," I said,
"you may keep. We make no claim on them
at all. You are at liberty to make any use of
them that you like."[179]

"But please," he said, "you have cut off all
the end of the story: the whole conclusion is
gone. The readers can't possibly tell,——"

I smiled at him with something approaching
kindness.

"My dear sir," I said, "they never get beyond
three thousand words of the end of a
magazine story. The end is of no consequence
whatever. The beginning, I admit, may be,
but the end! Come! Come! And in any
case in our magazine we print the end of each
story separately, distributed among the advertisements
to break the type. But just at present
we have plenty of these on hand. You see,"
I continued, for there was something in the
man's manner that almost touched me, "all
that is needed is that the last words printed
must have a look of finality. That's all. Now,
let me see," and I turned to the place where
the story was cut, "what are the last words:
here: 'Dorothea sank into a chair. There we
must leave her!' Excellent! What better end
could you want? She sank into a chair and you
leave her. Nothing more natural."[180]

The contributor seemed about to protest.
But I stopped him.

"There is one other small thing," I said.
"Our coming number is to be a Plumbers' and
Motor Number. I must ask you to introduce
a certain amount of plumbing into your story."
I rapidly turned over the pages. "I see," I
said, "that your story as written is laid largely
in Spain in the summer. I shall ask you to
alter this to Switzerland and make it winter
time to allow for the breaking of steam-pipes.
Such things as these, however, are mere details;
we can easily arrange them."

I reached out my hand.

"And now," I said, "I must wish you a
good afternoon."

The contributor seemed to pluck up courage.

"What about remuneration"—he faltered.

I waived the question gravely aside. "You
will, of course, be duly paid at our usual rate.
You receive a cheque two years after publication.
It will cover all your necessary expenses,
including ink, paper, string, sealing-wax and
other incidentals, in addition to which we hope[181]
to be able to make you a compensation for
your time on a reasonable basis per hour.
Good-bye."

He left, and I could hear them throwing him
downstairs.

Then I sat down, while my mind was on it,
and wrote the advance notice of the story. It
ran like this:

The author has lately leaped into immediate
recognition as the greatest master of the short
story in the American World. His style has
a brio, a poise, a savoir faire, a je ne sais quoi,
which stamps all his work with the cachet of
literary superiority. The sum paid for the
story of Dorothea Dashaway is said to be the
largest ever paid for a single MS. Every
page palpitates with interest, and at the con[182]clusion
of this remarkable narrative the reader
lays down the page in utter bewilderment, to
turn perhaps to the almost equally marvellous
illustration of Messrs. Spiggott and Fawcett's
Home Plumbing Device Exposition which
adorns the same number of the great review.

I wrote this out, rang the bell, and was just
beginning to say to the secretary—

"My dear child,—pray pardon my forgetfulness.
You must be famished for lunch.
Will you permit me——"

And then I woke up—at the wrong minute,
as one always does.

[183]

HOMER AND HUMBUG

AN ACADEMIC DISCUSSION

[184]
[185]

Homer and Humbug, an Academic Discussion

THE following discussion is of course
only of interest to scholars. But, as
the public schools returns show that
in the United States there are now
over a million coloured scholars alone, the appeal
is wide enough.

I do not mind confessing that for a long
time past I have been very sceptical about the
classics. I was myself trained as a classical
scholar. It seemed the only thing to do with
me. I acquired such a singular facility in
handling Latin and Greek that I could take a
page of either of them, distinguish which it
was by merely glancing at it, and, with the
help of a dictionary and a pair of compasses,
whip off a translation of it in less than three
hours.

But I never got any pleasure from it. I lied
about it. At first, perhaps, I lied through vanity.
Any coloured scholar will understand the feel[186]ing.
Later on I lied through habit; later still
because, after all, the classics were all that I
had and so I valued them. I have seen thus a
deceived dog value a pup with a broken leg,
and a pauper child nurse a dead doll with the
sawdust out of it. So I nursed my dead Homer
and my broken Demosthenes though I knew in
my heart that there was more sawdust in the
stomach of one modern author than in the
whole lot of them. Observe, I am not saying
which it is that has it full of it.

So, as I say, I began to lie about the classics.
I said to people who knew no Greek that there
was a sublimity, a majesty about Homer which
they could never hope to grasp. I said it was
like the sound of the sea beating against the
granite cliffs of the Ionian Esophagus: or words
to that effect. As for the truth of it, I
might as well have said that it was like the
sound of a rum distillery running a night shift
on half time. At any rate this is what I said
about Homer, and when I spoke of Pindar,—the
dainty grace of his strophes,—and Aristophanes,
the delicious sallies of his wit, sally[187]
after sally, each sally explained in a note calling
it a sally—I managed to suffuse my face
with an animation which made it almost beautiful.

I admitted of course that Virgil in spite of
his genius had a hardness and a cold glitter
which resembled rather the brilliance of a cut
diamond than the soft grace of a flower. Certainly
I admitted this: the mere admission of it
would knock the breath out of anyone who was
arguing.

From such talks my friends went away sad.
The conclusion was too cruel. It had all the
cold logic of a syllogism (like that almost
brutal form of argument so much admired in
the Paraphernalia of Socrates). For if:—

So continued lying brought its own reward in
the sense of superiority and I lied more.[188]

When I reflect that I have openly expressed
regret, as a personal matter, even in the presence
of women, for the missing books of
Tacitus, and the entire loss of the Abacadabra
of Polyphemus of Syracuse, I can find no words
in which to beg for pardon. In reality I was
just as much worried over the loss of the
ichthyosaurus. More, indeed: I'd like to have
seen it: but if the books Tacitus lost were like
those he didn't, I wouldn't.

I believe all scholars lie like this. An ancient
friend of mine, a clergyman, tells me that in
Hesiod he finds a peculiar grace that he doesn't
find elsewhere. He's a liar. That's all.
Another man, in politics and in the legislature,
tells me that every night before going to bed
he reads over a page or two of Thucydides to
keep his mind fresh. Either he never goes to
bed or he's a liar. Doubly so: no one could
read Greek at that frantic rate: and anyway
his mind isn't fresh. How could it be, he's in
the legislature. I don't object to this man talking
freely of the classics, but he ought to keep
it for the voters. My own opinion is that be[189]fore
he goes to bed he takes whiskey: why call
it Thucydides?

I know there are solid arguments advanced
in favour of the classics. I often hear them
from my colleagues. My friend the professor
of Greek tells me that he truly believes the
classics have made him what he is. This is a
very grave statement, if well founded. Indeed
I have heard the same argument from a great
many Latin and Greek scholars. They all
claim, with some heat, that Latin and Greek
have practically made them what they are.
This damaging charge against the classics
should not be too readily accepted. In my
opinion some of these men would have been
what they are, no matter what they were.

Be this as it may, I for my part bitterly regret
the lies I have told about my appreciation
of Latin and Greek literature. I am anxious to
do what I can to set things right. I am therefore
engaged on, indeed have nearly completed,
a work which will enable all readers to judge
the matter for themselves. What I have done
is a translation of all the great classics, not in[190]
the usual literal way but on a design that brings
them into harmony with modern life. I will
explain what I mean in a minute.

The translation is intended to be within reach
of everybody. It is so designed that the entire
set of volumes can go on a shelf twenty-seven
feet long, or even longer. The first edition will
be an édition de luxe bound in vellum, or perhaps
in buckskin, and sold at five hundred dollars.
It will be limited to five hundred copies
and, of course, sold only to the feeble minded.
The next edition will be the Literary Edition,
sold to artists, authors, actors and contractors.
After that will come the Boarding House Edition,
bound in board and paid for in the same
way.

My plan is to so transpose the classical writers
as to give, not the literal translation word
for word, but what is really the modern
equivalent. Let me give an odd sample or two
to show what I mean. Take the passage in the
First Book of Homer that describes Ajax the
Greek dashing into the battle in front of Troy.
Here is the way it runs (as nearly as I remem[191]ber),
in the usual word for word translation
of the classroom, as done by the very best professor,
his spectacles glittering with the literary
rapture of it.

Now that's grand stuff. There is no doubt
of it. There's a wonderful movement and
force to it. You can almost see it move, it
goes so fast. But the modern reader can't get
it. It won't mean to him what it meant to the
early Greek. The setting, the costume, the
scene has all got to be changed in order to let[192]
the reader have a real equivalent to judge just
how good the Greek verse is. In my translation
I alter it just a little, not much but just
enough to give the passage a form that reproduces
the proper literary value of the verses,
without losing anything of the majesty. It
describes, I may say, the Directors of the
American Industrial Stocks rushing into the
Balkan War Cloud.—

There! That's Homer, the real thing! Just
as it sounded to the rude crowd of Greek
peasants who sat in a ring and guffawed at the[193]
rhymes and watched the minstrel stamp it out
into "feet" as he recited it!

Or let me take another example from the so-called
Catalogue of the Ships that fills up nearly
an entire book of Homer. This famous
passage names all the ships, one by one, and
names the chiefs who sailed on them, and
names the particular town or hill or valley
that they came from. It has been much admired.
It has that same majesty of style that
has been brought to an even loftier pitch in the
New York Business Directory and the City
Telephone Book. It runs along, as I recall it,
something like this,—

"And first, indeed, oh yes, was the ship of
Homistogetes the Spartan, long and swift, having
both its masts covered with cowhide and
two rows of oars. And he, Homistogetes,
was born of Hermogenes and Ophthalmia and
was at home in Syncope beside the fast flowing
Paresis. And after him came the ship of
Preposterus the Eurasian, son of Oasis and
Hyteria," . . . and so on endlessly.

Instead of this I substitute, with the permis[194]sion
of the New York Central Railway, the
official catalogue of their locomotives taken almost
word for word from the list compiled by
their superintendent of works. I admit that
he wrote in hot weather. Part of it runs:—

Please observe that if Homer had actually
written that last line it would have been quoted
for a thousand years as one of the deepest
sayings ever said. Orators would have rounded[195]
out their speeches with the majestic phrase,
quoted in sonorous and unintelligible Greek
verse, "some men can hold their jobs and some
can not": essayists would have begun their most
scholarly dissertations with the words,—"It has
been finely said by Homer that (in Greek)
'some men can hold their jobs'": and the clergy
in mid-pathos of a funeral sermon would have
raised their eyes aloft and echoed "Some men
can not"!

This is what I should like to do. I'd like to
take a large stone and write on it in very plain
writing,—

"The classics are only primitive literature.
They belong in the same class as primitive machinery
and primitive music and primitive medicine,"—and
then throw it through the windows
of a University and hide behind a fence
to see the professors buzz!![196]