Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 223
All through the first half of the game — football games are divided into three or four halves of about five minutes each — Ernest kept looking into my face in the strangest way. I felt that he had something that he wanted to say, and I looked back at him to try to read in his face what it was, but of course Ernest has the kind of face that is hard to read even when you look right into it.
Once Ernest seemed to be just going to say something, but at that very minute, there was a lot of shouting and yelling, something must have happened, I think, to do with the football. But presently, in the second half when the game was less exciting, because I think that both sides were exactly even or something, and the time nearly all gone, Ernest quite all of a sudden, put out his hand and took mine and said that there was nobody in the world who meant to him what I did and that ever since he had known me he cared for nothing except me, and that the law office are now giving him over four hundred dollars a month and that if I wouldn’t marry him he would give up the law altogether and take the first boat to Costa Rica.
And I said I didn’t know what father would say and Ernest said he didn’t care a damn what father would say (Ernest is so manly in the way he talks) and he offered to break my father’s neck for me if I liked. So I said that I hadn’t ever meant to get married but to be some sort of sister, but that if he liked, I would get married this time for his sake. And just then one of the caretakers came to tell us that the game was over and the people had gone and they wanted to sweep up the seats. So we went home together.
I think football is a perfectly wonderful game.
AS REPORTED BY PETER HASBIN BROWN, BROTHER OF EDWARD, SENIOR, AND UNCLE OF FLOSSIE, MARY AND TED.
Yes, I saw the game to-day. Pretty rotten. Ed’s boy Ted was playing, and so I went with Ed and his little boy, Billie, to see the game. I hadn’t seen a game since 1900, but of course Ed and I both played on the college team, though Ed was no good. As I see it, they’ve pretty well spoiled the old game. There doesn’t seem to be a rule that they haven’t changed. Why, nowadays you can hardly understand it. In my time, of course, the game was far more exciting.
Well, for one thing, the fellows could kick further, and the men were heavier and could shove harder and run faster. Now the whole game seems just dead. My nephew, Ted, has the makings of a good player in him; he plays something of the kind of game I did. I’ve told him a lot of things. But you take all these rules about yards, and downs and offside play, it’s all changed; a man can’t understand them. I sat next to my little nephew Billie — he’s Ed’s son, he’s eight — and I said, “Can you understand it, Billie?” and he said, “Not quite, Uncle Peter.”
There you are, he couldn’t understand it, and I said, “It was a darned sight better game thirty years ago, Billie,” and he said, “Was it, Uncle Peter?” He’s a bright kid.
But the way they have the game now, there is no interest in it. There was a whole lot of shouting and yelling, but no enthusiasm. A lot of them were waving their hats and hooting till they were hoarse, but there was no enthusiasm. When I used to play and some one would shout from the touch line (we used to stand right around the game then), “Go it, Pete!” well, that was enthusiasm. You don’t get that now.
Oh, no, the game is gone to hell.
AS REPORTED BY BILLIE COMINGUP BROWN, AGED 8, YOUNGER SON OF EDWARD BROWN, SENIOR.
Gee! It was wonderful! Gee!
BY MRS. UPTOWN BROWN — OTHERWISE “MOTHER” — PARENT OF FLOSSIE, MARY, TED, AND BILLIE, AND WIFE OF EDWARD CHUNK BROWN, SENIOR.
No, please don’t go yet. We’ve plenty of time for another rubber. They’re all at the football game. My little boy Ted is playing, and my two little girls are there, too. Now, do stay! And won’t you have another whiskey and soda?
Life in the Open REFLECTIONS VOUCHSAFED TO ME BY MY HOSTESS IN THE WILDERNESS
“YES, WE COME up every Fall,” she said. “We’re both so passionately fond of the open air. Ransome, will you close that window. There’s a draft.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.
“And we love to do everything for ourselves. Ransome, will you please pass me that ash-tray from across the table?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.
“And we live here quite without form or ceremony — that’s what makes it so nice, it’s all so simple. Gwendoline, you may put on the finger-bowls, and tell William to serve the coffee in the cardroom. . . .”
So I knew then that I was getting an opportunity to observe at first hand the life in the open, the simple life, right in the wilderness, of which my richer friends have so often spoken to me.
“We like, you know, the roughness of it,” my hostess went on after we were seated over our coffee— “the journey up and everything. Of course, it’s not quite so rough to come up now as it used to be, now that they have built the new motor highway. This time we were able to bring up both the town cars, and before that it was always a question just what we could bring up.
“I do think the big closed cars are so much nicer when one is roughing it — Gwendoline, will you pass the cigarettes, please? — they keep the air out so much better, and our new one, perhaps you noticed it, is the kind in which you can draw the curtains and arrange it something like a drawing-room on a train. We are able to come up at night in it. I always think it much nicer — don’t you? — to come up through the mountains at night. One sleeps better than in the day.”
There was a little pause, during which two noiseless maids removed the coffee cups and a noiseless man in a semi-feudal dress brought in picture-book logs for a fire six feet wide.
“Of course, it is not all so easy,” continued my hostess. “The food up here is always such a question. Of course, we can always get meat from the village — there is quite a village now, you know, though when my husband first came up twenty years ago there was nothing — and we can get milk and eggs and vegetables from the farmers, and, of course, the men bring in fish all the time, and our gardener manages now to raise a good deal of fruit under glass, but beyond that it is very difficult to get anything.
“Only yesterday, for example, the housekeeper came to tell me that we had not enough broilers for lunch; somebody had made a silly mistake and we were one short. We had to send Alfred (he drives fastest) back to the city with the big car to get one. Even then, lunch was half an hour late. Things like that happen all the time. One has to learn to be philosophical.
“But surely it is worth it — isn’t it? — for the pleasure of being up here in the wilderness, so far away from everything and everybody. I sometimes feel up here as if one were cut off from the whole world — William, will you turn on the radio?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the footman.
“I think it’s the municipal elections and, of course, my husband is tremendously interested. His company has been trying to get better city government for so long; they need pure government because of their franchises, and it has been costing them a tremendous lot of money to get it. What do you say, William, not working? Then will you please ask Jones to tell the electricians to look at it?”
My hostess smoked her cigarette in silence for a minute or two, while her attentive eye followed the maids as they moved about the room, picking up coffee cups and ash-trays and bringing cigarettes. “Gwendoline,” she said, “I think you had better tell James to give us more furnace heat and see that there are fires in the upper bedrooms to-night. It’s turning a little chilly.”
“I always like,” she continued, turning to me again, “to see to everything myself. It takes trouble, but it’s the only way. But, I beg your pardon, you were asking me something. Fishing! Oh, yes, there is the most glorious fishing up here. I must tell Gwendoline to tell Mrs. Edwards to see that they give you fish at breakfast. It’s just an ideal fishing country, my husband says. We send William out every morning, and sometimes William and Ransome both. Often, so my husband tells me, when the weather is really clear he has William up and out by four o’clock — my husband is so fond of early rising, though he can’t get up now himself the way he used to — but he always likes to get William and Ransome out early.
“They bring back the most beautiful fish. Trout? Yes, I think so. I don’t precisely know because, of course, I never go myself, but I think trout and sea-bass and finnan haddie — they keep us beautifully supplied. Was that finnan haddie that you caught this morning, William?”
“Doré, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am, just the same.”
“Thank you, William, you can take the glasses; we’re done with them. You see, William knows all about fish, as he comes from Newfoundland, do you not, William?”
“No, ma’am, Saskatchewan.”
“Some place of the sort, so I thought.”
“What do you say — our amusements here? Oh, we simply don’t have any. We have always both felt that up here in this beautiful air (that French window at the end of the room needs closing, Ransome) it is amusement enough just to be alive. So we have never bothered to think about amusements. Of course, my husband had the billiard-room built because that is really his one pastime, and this card-room because it is mine, and we put in the tennis courts, though it was hard to do, so as to have them for the children. But that is all. We have the golf links, of course — perhaps you noticed them as you came up.
“It was really quite a triumph for my husband making the course here. He did every bit of it himself. At one time he had nearly two hundred Italians working. My husband, as you know, is terribly energetic; I often call him a dynamo. The summer when he was building the golf course he never seemed to stop; always sitting with his cigar in his mouth first under a tree on one side, looking at his Italians, and then on the other side — in fact, he was always somewhere. I used to wonder how he could keep it up.
“But I am sorry,” concluded my hostess, “I am afraid it is time I was ordering you all off to bed. We keep such early hours here that we go to bed at midnight.
“But perhaps you’d rather stay up a little and play billiards or cards, and there are always one or two of the servants up — at any rate till about three, and then, I think, my husband is sending William fishing. Good night.”
Save Me from My Friends
Save Me from My Friends
I
FROM MY FRIEND THE DEADBEAT
HE HAS ABOUT him such a simple and appealing way, so friendly and so flattering and so humble. And each time I know that it is another ten dollars that he wants, just that, only that — not my affection nor my converse — just ten dollars. Yet he gets it — each time for the last time — he gets it.
Sometimes he meets me in the street, always on a fine day, a fine warm day with a touch of the springtime, or the summertime, or the soft touch of autumn or the sunny exhilaration of winter in the air. He would never stop me in the rain, or the sleet. He comes, by instinct, with the sunshine. And his manner, so cheery — the spring tulips are not in it with him.
“And how,” he asks, “is your little boy?”
I swallow the bait at once. “Fine,” I answer, “he was not so well last week, but since Tuesday he’s in great shape.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” says my deadbeat friend, literally beaming with pleasure.
It seems impossible to doubt his affectionate concern.
“By the way,” he continues, as if in a mere train of thought incidental to his pleasure over my little boy’s health, “I’m glad I ran into you this morning. It just happens that to-day I’m rather squeezed — in fact, I’m in a corner — —”
I recognize the situation at once. I realize that my friend’s troubles always take the form of an angular imprisonment. That corner — you’d think that he would learn to keep out in the open! But no, apparently he gets squeezed, shoved, pushed — all those things happen to him — and as a result of the squeezing and shoving and pushing he gets into a corner.
Picture then the situation? Here’s a man in a corner, a man with an affectionate regard for my little son, and ten dollars will take him out of that corner. Refuse him? Quite impossible.
And after all perhaps it’s worth it. If all my friends would greet me with the same winning friendliness and the same solicitude, I think I’d gladly invest ten dollars in each of them.
Unfortunately, however, being pushed into a corner is not the worst thing that happens to my friend. Sometimes apparently the ground opens under him and he falls into a hole. “Old man,” he pleads, “I’m in a hole — till Tuesday.” I note that there is always a termination of his sufferings in sight. By some incurable optimism, he really thinks so.
However deep the hole — and at times it is described, so to speak, as a hell of a hole — he will be out of it by Tuesday. And better than that, by next month at the latest, any next month, he expects to “see daylight.” This expectation, I know, he has cherished for years. Just what the daylight is, what form it takes, I don’t know. But my friend confidently expects to see it.
A man, then, who is sunk in a deep hole, but who expects daylight next Tuesday — certainly that’s worth ten dollars.
Sometimes I meet him with other people. And if I do I know that he is some one’s guest. If he is in a club, some one has brought him there. If he is at the theater, some one has paid for his seat. If he is at a concert, some one has given him a ticket.
And wherever he is, whatever he regards, always the same enthusiastic appreciation. Not for him to criticize! Not for him to find the company dull, or the music poor, or the play inferior. Everything is first rate always; for he is being treated, being paid for, and has lost the right to be disagreeable.
I have often wondered how it must feel to be such a man. Staggering along in life, in holes and pitfalls, beaming on surly acquaintances, cherishing the make-believe illusion of a friendship that he sold for twenty dollars long ago; homeless himself — for he lives nowhere — yet entering with admiring words the homes of others. “This is a charming room!” he says. Any room is charming to him, where there is a free seat, and the chance of lingering to a meal. How does it feel, I wonder, to be him?
But notice the queer thing about it. Never mind his motives, or why he does it, but just take the fact. How amiable he is! What an uncomplaining companion! What a fund of appreciation of our lightest jests, what a wealth of sympathy — in words, at any rate — with our most superficial sorrow.
Judge him just as an appearance, and what a man! What a heart!
Thinking thus of my friend, the deadbeat, I sometimes apply the same reasoning to the rest of us. How agreeable we are when we are forced to be. You, my dear reader, in the presence of your employer, how bright you are, how good-tempered. When you wish to tell something, or to get something, how easy and accommodating you are, how free from irritation. In other words, each of us, when we want something, instinctively takes on a pleasant bearing. And perhaps if we keep it up it sinks into our character and what was make-believe becomes reality.
So let it be, or rather so let it might have been, with my poor friend, the deadbeat.
Might have been, I say, for just of late, just within the last couple of months, a great change has come over him.
It appears that two months ago he saw daylight — actually saw it. What caused it I don’t know, but the first shape it took was a suit of new raiment, a stylish coat, a cane with a gold head, a hat in the latest fashion; and on this followed a suite of rooms in a first-class hotel, and membership, revived I know not how, in one of the most exclusive clubs.
What the source of this restored fortune may be I do not know, but of the existence of the change there seems no doubt.
Nor is the change limited to these externals only. It goes deeper than that. When I talk with my friend on the street now — which is rare, for he no longer lingers in the sunshine — he does not ask after my little boy. He has no time. He is too busy telling me of the house that he is building in the most secluded of the suburbs; he is too much occupied with explaining how rotten was the play he saw (from a box for which he paid) last night; how inferior the music and how poor the food at this or that reception.
And of my lost ten dollars, and my twenty, and the two fifteens and the big hole that cost me fifty — not a word. He has no thought of repayment. It has all passed from his mind. And after all, why should he repay? I realize that the repayment lay in his humble manner, in his gentle flattering interest, and in the pathos of his make-believe solicitude.
I must wait till perhaps he will have burned up his new daylight. And meantime I must keep a ten-dollar bill warm in my pocket for him.
II
FROM MY FRIEND THE REPORTER
HE CAME UP to me on the platform just after I had finished giving my address, his notebook open in his hand.
“Would you mind,” he said, “just telling me the main points of your speech? I didn’t get to hear it.”
“You weren’t at the lecture?”
“No,” he answered, pausing to sharpen his pencil, “I was at the hockey game.”
“Reporting it?”
“No, I don’t report that sort of thing. I only do the lectures and the highbrow stuff. Say, it was a great game. What did you say the lecture was about?”
“It was called ‘The Triumphal Progress of Science.’ ”
“On science, eh?” he said, writing rapidly as he spoke.
“Yes,” I answered, “on science.”
He paused.
“How do you spell ‘triumphal,’ ” he asked; “is it a ph or an f?”
I told him.
“And now,” he went on, “what was the principal idea, just the main thing, don’t you know, of your address?”
