Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 225
I could reveal all this if I like. But it would be unfair and might make nation-wide trouble.
Suffice it to say that the whole thing is not only certain, but it is guaranteed. The Man in the Pullman Car has offered to pay me, “cash down,” a hundred dollars if his forecast is not correct. Where it will be put down, I don’t know.
When the election had been reduced to a certainty, the Man in the Car asked me how the big fight suited me, and whether the races down at Jacksonville had suited me, and passed rapidly through a succession of fights, scraps, championships, world series, world’s record swims, high dives, flights, and oyster-eating contests. How he remembers all this, I can’t conceive. They ought to give courses in this kind of thing at the colleges.
But his range goes further than that.
He pointed to an item in his paper. “I see,” he said, “where this guy Mussolini is getting busy again.” Then he gave me a brief résumé of European world news. Mussolini, it appears, is a slick guy, but my acquaintance would not be surprised if presently Mussolini got it in the neck.
The King of Spain, nifty though he appears, may get it in the bean at any time; in fact, most of the remaining kings and potentates of Europe may get similar strokes on the bean, neck, or cocoanut any day — except King George, who is all right. What Europe really needs is the introduction of the municipal home rule that they have in my acquaintance’s own home town — I forget its name — in the Middle West.
The future of Europe, however, is not a topic of sufficient importance to hold a man’s interest very long. The whole place is so obviously doomed that unless it can retrace its steps, introduce the short ballot, with the Oregon system of the recall, the Illinois tax system, and Massachusetts primary law, it will slide over the abyss.
So he changed the topic.
“How did that last Atlantic flight suit you?” he asked. It is always his flattering assumption that the world’s events must be trimmed to suit my fancy.
Then he told me about the Atlantic, the real Atlantic, as gathered up into the little “books of handy facts” and absorbed by the Pullman Car Man.
Who could guess, for example, that the Atlantic is 3,160 miles across; that it is 210 feet deep in the shallowest place and 5,300 in the deepest; that if the entire population of the United States stood side by side and held hands, they would just nicely reach across it; that if the whole population of Trenton, New Jersey, or Akron, Ohio, stood on one another’s heads, they would just reach to the bottom of it?
You don’t get these things in a college education. Somehow they get left out of it. But now that the Atlantic has been flown across, it has been “put on the map,” and the Man in the Car has to have his vital facts about it.
We spent thus a pleasant half hour in discourse together. And then something occurred to spoil it.
Another Man came in.
Now conversation with the Man in the Pullman Car is all right and most agreeable, provided that he has the field to himself. The danger is that there may come in a man with the same equipment as himself, the same range of knowledge, who talks back at him. Then there is trouble — as happened on the day of which I speak.
The second man had hardly had time to unpack his grip and get out his almanacs and his railroad folders when his quick ear caught something.
“Mussolini,” he said, “him slick?” And then he proceeded to tell the exact length of time that Mussolini would last among really slick men. I think it was four minutes.
This inevitably suggested the presidential election of the present year: and it came out right away that the whole forecast that the first man had given me, and that he now repeated, was “bunk.” The second man, it seems, had just come from the whole of the South and most of the Middle West and the entire Atlantic Seaboard, and he was prepared not only to deny the forecast, but to back up the denial with cash down. I gathered that I was to hold stakes for the two of them, for about forty weeks, at the rate of $1,000 a side.
When I presently left them, they were still in angry dispute, offering a thousand dollars if the presidential election went the other way, guaranteeing that Mussolini would or would not be made King of Austria, putting up money that Erie, Pennsylvania, had more population than Burlington, Iowa, and that the distance across the Atlantic was more, or was less, than 3,000 miles.
I heard afterwards that the train ran off the track after the next station, and that the Pullman Car was rolled down the embankment.
But they probably never noticed it.
II
THE CRIMINAL BY PROXY
“HERE’S A PRETTY slick one,” he said, looking up from his newspaper with a glitter of interest through his spectacles, “about this fellow who got away with the trust funds. Did you see it?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t see it.”
We were seated side by side in chairs in the hotel rotunda. I didn’t know the man; I just happened to be sitting beside him.
“The way it was,” he continued, “this fellow seems to have got himself up like a clergyman, see, and then he came in and presented this check drawn on the Orphans’ Trust Fund and a letter with it. Of course, the letter was phoney and so was the check. But it was the get-up that fooled them. It seems he got away with a thousand dollars. Pretty slick trick, eh?”
“It certainly was,” I answered, “especially as it was orphans’ money.”
“Sure,” he rejoined, burying himself again in his paper.
Presently he looked up again.
“Here’s one about a fellow in Albany,” he said, “who worked one nearly as good, or perhaps better. He was a mighty smart customer! He came into this bank all dressed up in black and said his mother was dead and asked them to telegraph the bank in a place he called his home town, see, and get him money. Of course, he made out he was all broken up about his mother dying and they sent the message and in about half an hour they got what they thought was an answer saying to give him the money. You see, it wasn’t an answer at all! Just a message he got sent to them by a fake messenger boy.
“They give him the money all right, two hundred dollars, and he gets clear away before they get the real answer that the bank don’t know him. That was a good one, wasn’t it?”
“Excellent,” I said. “The man that did that must be a splendid fellow!”
“I’ll say so!” said my new acquaintance.
He sat quiet for a while absorbed in his paper, with little murmurs from time to time such as, “I see the guy in France who choked the two women got clean off.” “I see the boys who broke out at Atlanta aren’t caught yet.” “Well, sir, here’s a darned funny one about asphyxiating an old cashier with gas — ain’t that a peach?”
Presently he spoke again.
“What won’t these fellers think out next! Hear this. It’s from Cedar Springs, Vermont.
“ ’Yesterday two men dressed as if for hunting and carrying double-barreled shot-guns and fishing-rods entered the Cedar Springs Central Bank during the noon hour. Their peculiar costume enabled them to approach the president and the cashier without suspicion and to cover them by laying down the guns across the counter. After securing some $10,000 in currency, they tied up the president and the cashier, shoved the money into a fishing-basket, locked the bank door on the outside, and sauntered off into the woods.’ That’s a good one, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” I said, and I added, “You seem a good deal interested in that sort of thing.”
“Well, I do,” he answered with a chuckle. “Perhaps I have more humor than most men. But at any rate I can’t help admiring the slickness with which these fellers seem to get away with it. It’s a caution the kind of dodges they think out. I like to read about them. I can almost forgive these fellows when the thing is ingenious enough. There’s an element in it you’ve got to admire.”
“In that case,” I said, “listen to this. I don’t think it’s in your paper. Mine’s a second edition. This only happened early this morning; in fact, I heard some one talking about it as I came down in the car.”
I read from the paper.
“ ’Last night, under pretense of having come in response to a burglar protection automatic alarm,’ — that’s terribly clever, isn’t it?— ‘thieves gained access to a chemical warehouse — —’ ”
“A chemical warehouse!” the man interrupted. “Well, well, I’m in that business myself.”
“ ’In Madison Street.’ ”
“Gosh! that’s my street!”
“ ’The watchmen of the building were under the impression that they were searching for burglars. The thieves successfully opened a large safe on the fifth floor in which valuable drugs — —’ ”
My acquaintance seized the paper in excitement.
“What’s that, show it to me!” he cried. “Great Scott, that’s my warehouse! My heavens! they’ve got away with the stuff in my safe. The dirty hounds! Great Cæsar, what are the police doing! They ought to be hanged for a thing like that! That’s criminal! Great Scott, that’s robbery, plain robbery! . . .”
He had risen, fairly hopping with anger and excitement, and left me to dash across the rotunda. When I last saw him he was careering round the hotel, shouting for a telephone to call up the central police station.
It occurred to me, as I laid down the paper, that the “slickness” of crime depends a good deal on the slant from which you see it.
III
THE PEOPLE JUST BACK FROM EUROPE WHO NEVER SHOULD HAVE LEFT HOME
“YES,” SAID MY hostess as she poured me out a cup of tea, “we’re back from Europe.”
“You were there some time, were you not?” I asked.
“We were on the Continent all summer,” she said; “we had a perfectly glorious time!”
“How did you like Paris?” I asked.
“Fine. There were some people from Kentucky in the same hotel with us — the Johnsons from Louisville, perhaps you know them — and we went round with them all the time; and of course we got to know a lot of other Americans through the steamship company and through the hotels and like that.”
“The French,” I said, “are so easy and agreeable to meet, are they not?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, we met people from all over — from Maine, and from Chicago and from the Middle West, and quite a lot of Southern people, too. In fact, we were quite a cosmopolitan crowd.”
“Very much so,” I said, “and did you see much of the monuments and the historical things around Paris?”
“Just about everything, I imagine,” my hostess replied with animation. “There was an American gentleman from Decatur, Indiana — I think he’s professor of French in the Baptist College there — and he took us all round and told us all about everything. He showed us Washington’s Monument in the big square and Benjamin Franklin and that tablet there is — perhaps you’ve seen it — to President McKinley — oh, yes, indeed, we saw everything.”
“Of course you saw the pictures — —”
“Oh, certainly. There’s just a lovely picture done this year by a young girl from the art school in Omaha and they’ve got it hung up right there in the annual exhibition. We thought it the best thing there.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said, “and I suppose you liked the restaurants and the French cooking?”
“We did indeed, and, say, we found the cutest little place — it’s in the Roo something or other, near that big church where the American Legion went — and they have everything done in real American style. My husband said you couldn’t get a better steak in Chicago than what they had there, and they had pancakes and waffles with maple syrup. Really, as we all agreed, we might just as well have been at home.”
“But you didn’t stay in Paris in the hot weather, did you?”
“Oh, no, we took a trip to Switzerland. We drove in our own car all down the valley of that big river.”
“It’s beautiful country, isn’t it?” I said, “and the people are so interesting.”
“Yes, we were with some perfectly lovely people from Memphis, Tennessee — the Edwardses — perhaps you met them — and they had their car, too, and they had some friends (from Buffalo) staying at a place that’s just about halfway. And of course these friends introduced us to a lot of Americans that were staying there.”
“And did you like Switzerland?”
“Yes, ever so much — won’t you have some more tea? We found it so hard to get tea the way we like it, over in Europe. Oh, yes, we just loved Switzerland. We saw a ball game in Lucerne — or no, I’m wrong, it wasn’t in Switzerland that we saw the ball game. That was in Germany.”
“Oh, you went to Germany?”
“Indeed we did. I think we must have been all over it.”
“And did you get on all right with the Germans?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. We met some people in Berlin — the Phillipses — that actually came from the same town in Connecticut where my grandmother was raised. It just shows how small the world is.”
“It does, indeed,” I agreed.
“Oh, but Germany — they’re so up to date! It was there that they had the ball games, twice a week, and of course we took them all in. It was just like being back home. And then they had the radio and we listened in on a speech all the way from Philadelphia — just think of it; and they have our moving pictures and quite a lot of American newspapers. In fact, as Pa said, we might just as well have been sitting in New York.”
“Just as well. And where else did you go?”
“Oh, we were down in Italy for a while — at Rome and at Venice — —”
“Venice is wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, isn’t it? We were with some people there from Tallahassee, Florida, and they said — these people said — that really when you look at all the lagoons and marshes around where Venice is, it might as well be Tallahassee.”
“You didn’t go to Spain, I suppose.”
“No, we didn’t. In fact, we were pretty well warned not to. They say that in Spain it’s all Spanish and it’s very hard to get around; and so you don’t find anybody there. In fact, they told us that there was nobody at all in Spain last year.”
“Well,” I said, as I rose to take my leave, “I’m sure you’ve had a most interesting trip. I hope you’re going to make some use of it.”
“I certainly am,” replied the lady brightly, “I’m doing a paper for our Ladies’ Fortnightly Culture Club on the National Characteristics of the European Nations. I’ve got to have it ready on Friday so I guess I’ll have to hustle some.”
“You certainly will,” I murmured to myself as I went away.
IV
THE MAN WITH THE ADVENTURE STORY
“I HAD A pretty narrow shave the other day,” he said, as the little group settled themselves into the smoking end of the Pullman.
“Talking of shaves,” interrupted one of the others, “I wonder if any of you fellows have seen this new safety razor that you can sharpen without taking it to pieces? It’s certainly a peach. But I beg your pardon,” he added, “I’m interrupting you. . . .”
“It’s all right,” said the man. “I was just saying that I had a pretty narrow shave for my life the other day — in fact a matter of touch and go. I’d got off the train away up north at a flag station right out in the bush country where there’s such a lot of prospecting and so much talk of deposits of copper and nickel — —”
“I see where International Nickel touched a hundred yesterday,” said another man, comfortably lighting his pipe.
“You don’t say so!” chorused three or four of them, — and then there was a running series of remarks. “I think myself she’s good for 200 anyway.”— “There’s no limit to what they may get out of that.”— “I know a man, an engineer, who was all over that property long before they began to develop it and he said twenty years ago that there were millions there. . . .”
It took some time for this little chorus to die down. Then the Adventure Man began again.
“Well, I got off at this place, — it was just getting dusk and I put on my snowshoes for what would be a five-mile tramp anyway, into the camp. I was to walk straight west along the trail and I knew that a man was to come out from the camp to pick me up part way, do you see, for I didn’t know just where the new camp was located. The trail struck off into the timber and for the first mile or so it went through big pine trees, thousands of them, all straight as a die, and just as silent and lonesome . . .”
“I’ve seen the time,” interrupted an old man in the corner who hadn’t spoken yet, “when you could buy all that pine you wanted at seven dollars, yes, sir, at seven dollars, — right there at the saw mill, or they’d dress it for you at a dollar, and hemlock, the very best of it at three dollars. . . .”
“Not at three dollars!” said one of the listeners incredulously. “You mean three dollars a thousand feet?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I do, three dollars a thousand, board measure.”
All men, at least all men who smoke in the end of a Pullman car know about the prices of lumber just as all women know about the prices of dress material. So there broke out another little chorus of interruption.
“Well, I paid forty-five dollars for hemlock when I built my garage.” “I can get all the hemlock I want at thirty.” “I’ve seen the time — —” and so forth.
Till at last the old man in the corner brought the talk back onto the track by saying to the Adventure Man— “What was you saying about that cheap pine you seen up north?”
“I didn’t say it was cheap pine,” he answered, “I don’t know anything about that. I was only talking of a narrow escape I had a while back when I was prospecting up there and started to walk through the bush, — this big pine bush, — just about dark. I hadn’t got more than half a mile or so into it,” continued the speaker, warming at last to his narration as he felt his audience at last becoming silent, “before I began to feel something about the stillness that began to get me. It was all so quiet, no wind, the trees absolutely still, and the white snow with the night shadows falling on it, — there was something spooky about it, something eerie — —”
