Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 236
“Crawling cautiously towards him I was almost within touching distance when the beautiful creature elevated itself on its glorious hind legs, sniffed the air about me with its exquisite snout, and then beat it into the deep woods.”
The Old Men’s Page A BRAND NEW FEATURE IN JOURNALISM
I OBSERVE THAT nowadays far too much of the space in the newspapers is given up to children and young people. Open almost any paper, published in any British or American city, and you may find a children’s page and a girls’ page and a women’s page — special columns for tiny tots, poetry by high-school girls, notes for boy scouts, fashion notes for young women, and radio hints for young men.
This thing is going too far — unless the old men get a chance. What the newspapers need now is a special page for old men. I am certain that it would make an enormous hit at once.
Let me try to put together a few samples of what ought to go on such a page. My talented readers can carry it on for themselves.
I
NOTES FOR OLD MEN SCOUTS
A general field meeting of the (newly established) Old Men Scouts will be held next Saturday. The scouts will assemble at the edge of the pine woods about seven miles out of town. Every scout will tell his chauffeur to have the car ready for an early start, not later than ten-thirty. The scout will see that the chauffeur brings a full kit of cooking utensils and supplies. A good chauffeur can easily carry 150 pounds and the scout will see that he does it.
Each scout is to have a heavy greatcoat and a thick rug and folding camp-chair strapped together in a bundle and will see to it personally that these are loaded on the chauffeur.
Each scout, in advancing into the woods, will carry his own walking stick and will smoke his own cigar.
In passing through the woods, the scout is expected to recognize any trees that he knows, such as pine trees, lilac trees, rubber trees, and so forth. If in any doubt of the nature or species of a tree, the scout may tell the chauffeur to climb it and see what it is.
The scouts will also recognize and remark any species or genera of birds that are sitting on the path which are familiar to them, such as tame canaries, parrots, partridges, cooked snipe, and spring chicken.
Having arrived at an open glade, the scouts will sit about on their camp-chairs, avoiding the damp, while the chauffeurs kindle a fire and prepare lunch. During this time the Scout Master, and other scouts in order of seniority, may relate stories of woodcraft, or, if they can’t think of any stories of woodcraft, they may tell any other kind that they know.
As exercise before lunch, the scouts may open the soda water bottles.
After lunch, each scout will place his rug and cushion under a suitable tree and smoke a cigar while listening in silence for any especial calls and wood notes of birds, bees, and insects, such as the cicada, the rickshaw, the gin-ricki, and others that he has learned to know. Should he see any insect whose call is not familiar to him, he should crawl after it and listen to it, or, if he prefers, tell his chauffeur to follow it up.
At 5 p.m., the scouts should reload the chauffeurs and themselves, and, when all are well loaded, drive to any country club for more stories of woodcraft.
Every old man — being really just a boy on a disguised form — is naturally interested in how to make things. One column in the old men’s page, therefore, ought to contain something in the way of
HINTS ON MECHANICS — CARPENTRY FOR OLD MEN
How to Make a Rustic Table. — Get hold of any hard-working rustic and tell him to make a table.
How to Make a Camera Stand. — Put it right on the table. It will stand.
How to Tell the Time by the Sun. — First look at your watch and see what time it is. Then step out into the sunlight with your face towards the sun and hold the watch so that the hour hand points directly at the sun. This will be the time.
How to Make a Book-Case. — Call up any wood factory on the telephone and tell them to cut you some plain boards, suitable for making a book-case. Ask them next where you can get nails. Then send your chauffeur to bring the boards and nails. Then advertise for a carpenter.
To stain your table, when it is complete, a good method is to upset soda water on it.
No column of the sort which I am here proposing would be complete unless it contained some sort of correspondence. And here the topic that is opportune and welcome to the old, as well as the young, is the eternal subject of love. But it must be treated in a way to suit it to those whose hearts have passed the first mad impulses of unrestrained youth.
PROBLEMS OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Mr. Elder, Bachelor’s Court,
Lone Street:
I can quite understand your dilemma in regard to your cook. It is one that many a bachelor has had to face and to think out for himself, and I am sure that you will face it bravely and clearly.
You say that you do not know whether your cook loves you or not, and I gather that you do not give a hoot either way. But the point is that she has an excellent offer to be cook in an Old Man’s Home and you are likely to lose her. Your problem is whether to let her go and try to get another, or to marry her, or to move into the Home where she is going to cook.
Mr. Oldspark, Evergreen Alley,
Blossom Street:
It is very difficult indeed to advise you, especially as you are at an age (you tell me you are only 61) when your heart is apt to run away with you. You say that three young girls each want to marry you. You have been letting one of them drive you out in her car and she has a certain right to think you have given her encouragement.
On the other hand, one of the others has taken you to the matinée. In the case of the third, though you do not know her so well, you were told by some one at the golf club that she had said that you were “a perfect darling.”
You say that you are very fond of all three, but that you cannot tell whether what you feel is really love. It may be indigestion.
Mr. O. O. Overslow, Linger Lodge:
Your case is one in which it is difficult for an outsider to give advice. You say that you have been paying attention to a lady, of about your own age, for a little over thirty years. You have taken her to an evening church service each third Sunday for some years back, and you have, for nearly ten years now, sent her an Easter card and an April fool card. Her father, who is ninety-six, is distinctly favorable to your suit, but as he has lost most of his faculties, he may not know one suit from another.
You rightly feel that you ought to be cautious and not act hastily. You have fifteen thousand a year of your own, but you hate to part with any of it.
Your problem is, should you propose to her, or wait a little? My advice is by all means wait — keep on waiting — wait till her father is dead, and her mother is dead, and you are half dead — and then propose to her and wonder why you have spent your life waiting.
Don’t you remember — look back over thirty years and try to remember — that evening long ago when you stood with her on the bridge over the little river in the dusk of a summer evening, and so nearly, oh, so nearly, proposed to her? But you waited. You had only a thousand dollars a year then, so you waited.
And don’t you remember five years later on, that winter evening by the fireside when you were left alone with her for ten minutes, and again the words almost came to your lips. But you had only three thousand a year then, and you waited.
Oh, yes, my dear old friend, by all means keep on waiting. It is all that you are fit for.
J.J.X. — No, we don’t lend money to old men through this column.
A Guide to the Underworld A LITTLE UNSOCIAL REGISTER FOR THE USE OF READERS OF UP-TO-DATE FICTION
I AM GIVEN to understand — from the best and latest fiction and from the movies — that there is a place called the Underworld. By this I don’t mean Hell; we know all about that, and all anxiety in regard to it has long since been removed except in the schools of Tennessee. No one outside of these schools, we understand, goes there now.
But the Underworld is quite different. Without it, our up-to-date fiction couldn’t last a day. Just where it is or how you get to it, I don’t know. But it is supposed to be filled with Apaches and Sleuths and Vampires and Master Criminals whose brains are so vast that they ramify over two continents.
Many people feel that if they could ever find this Underworld, they would leave home and never come back.
So let me set down here for persons interested a brief directory of the people of the Underworld put for convenience in the form of questions and answers. Any reader may test with these the extent of his knowledge of up-to-date fiction.
THE APACHE
Who is the most ordinary and frequent character found in stories of the Underworld?
A person called an Apache.
Right. What is he like?
Young, very pale, dressed with a black silk shirt around his abdomen, and smoking cigarettes at ten cents a package for fifteen hours a day.
Correct. What effect has this on his nervous system?
It works him up into a terrible state of irritability.
With what result?
This — that he would stick a knife into you in the dark if he had an opportunity.
Is there really anything terrible in this?
Nothing whatever. Of course an Apache would put a knife into you in the dark if he had a real chance. But then so would I. This distinction between people who would put knives into you and people who wouldn’t is quite false and misleading. Most people would put knives into most people.
Personally, I have the strongest inclination in the world to put a knife into whole classes of people: actors, story tellers, ugly women who talk about themselves, plumbers, public lecturers — quite a long list of them.
All quite true, and now tell me what is an Apache really like?
If one could see the Apache as he really is, he would turn out to be nothing more than a silly young simp who is, let us say, a plumber’s assistant by day, but can’t stay home at night.
Exactly. And now tell me who is the principal female character in the Underworld?
THE QUEEN OF GEHENNA
She is called, colloquially, the Queena Gehenna.
Tell me about her.
In every well regulated Underworld, there is always a lady designated by some such title as the Queena Gehenna. She is supposed to be the last word in vampires. Her beauty is supposed to be so alluring that she casts a spell for three or four blocks around. She would eat a man as quick as look at him.
Quite so. And does she really exist?
Oh, no. The Queena Gehenna is as much a myth as all the other characters of the Underworld. Her real name is Georgie Simpson, and she works as a cashier in a cafeteria and supports her mother. Georgie wouldn’t really eat a man at all, and you ought to see the nice letters she writes to her cousin Joe in Keokuk, Iowa.
As a matter of fact, you see plenty of Queens of Gehenna all over the place. But they are not really dangerous — not when you know them. It is only when they are put into fiction that they look like that.
Absolutely right. And now tell me — are there any other women in the Underworld?
Lots of them — they are called Women of the Street, Women of the Pavement, Women of the Basement, Women of the Subway, Women of the Underground Railway; in short, women who inhabit any place more than ten feet below the level of the soil.
True. And what do these women turn into when they get older?
Each of them turns into what is called an Old Crone — the name given in the Underworld to any woman of sixty. Old Crones are supposed to be found, like mushrooms, in any dark cellar or underground dwelling.
What do they live on?
They live on gin. They would eat, but they have no teeth, or at best only one. An Old Crone calls everybody “dearie,” but she would sell a human life, so it is always explained, for a drop of brandy, one drop. For a bottleful, she would sell a whole village. But after all, so would most of us. That’s nothing.
Is there any way to reach the heart of an Old Crone?
Yes. She seems scarcely human, but if you remind her of her Lost Daughter, she breaks down and tears of gin run from her eyes. She will then betray the entire Underworld.
Are there really any such persons as Old Crones?
No. The Old Crone, like all the rest of the people of the Underworld, is just a myth. Fetch her up into the sunlight, dress her in a black alpaca suit, wipe her eyes, and she could then be used to sit and take hat checks at a theater with the best of them.
Very good. Now let me ask you a further question. The Underworld is full of mysteries. How do these get unraveled?
By means of a Sleuth.
What is that?
A Sleuth (plural Sleeth) is the name given in the Underworld to one who solves mysteries.
How does he do it?
The business of a Sleuth in the Underworld is to sit around apparently doing nothing, but in reality his brain is working with lightning rapidity. His favorite location is what is called a low drinking joint, and he sits there giving every sign of being drunk — lucky fellow — but he isn’t. It is the rule of the Underworld that the way to investigate or find out anything really complicated is to get extremely drunk and go and sit in a joint.
In the course of time, some one is sure to say something, or rather to let something slip, which gives the whole mystery away. It often happens that the Sleuth, in the course of business, gets badly beaten up; sometimes they merely knock him insensible (that never hurts him owing to the nature of his brain), but at other times they tie him hand and foot and throw him down a sewer, and it takes him nearly half an hour to crawl through.
All very correct. And now tell me, is there any Hero in a story that deals with the Underworld?
Oh, certainly a Hero. And a Heroine.
Never mind the Heroine — for a moment. Stick to the Hero. How can you distinguish him?
Very easily. He is always so completely disguised that you can tell him in a moment. Suppose, for example, you meet in the story a drunken sailor asleep on a bench and quite oblivious to the world — that’s the Hero. Suppose there comes in an aged man very much bent and with a white beard eighteen inches long — that’s the Hero. At any moment he can unbend himself and unbob his beard and there he is.
Is not the Hero in reality very strong and athletic?
Oh, very. He can, break an iron bar with his teeth, and he played end man on his college ping-pong team.
All quite right. And what is the Hero doing all through the story?
Looking for the Heroine.
Can he find her?
No. He always looks in exactly the wrong place. He enters one end of the Underground Cabaret at the very moment she goes out of the other.
Quite so.
And now what about the Heroine? How do you know her?
By her extraordinary innocence. She knows nothing. It is doubtful whether she knows that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side, or how much 47 times 13 is.
And what is she doing in the story?
Hard to say. She just wandered in from her home.
Her home. Where was that?
The site is not indicated clearly. Somewhere among the Honeysuckles, apparently. It is also made clear that there are lilacs around the porch; and there is evidence that while the Heroine is lost in the Underworld, she still seems to hear the bees humming around the door of her mother’s home.
Did these bees sting her?
They should have.
And now, finally — does a story of the Underworld end happily?
Oh, always. The Sleuth tracks down the Master Criminal (himself a graduate of Oxford or Harvard) whose capacious brain has held all the tangled filaments of crime that kept the Underworld together. The Hero finds the Heroine just in time to save her from a fate worse than death (what it is, is not stated). The Old Crone turns out to be the mother of the Queena Gehenna, and the Queen is so affected that the shock knocks the henna out of her. She reforms, opens a Beauty Parlor, and there she is to this day.
Love Me, Love My Letters THE USE OF INK FOR THE FIRST INKLINGS OF LOVE
THERE IS A proverb which says a man is known by the company he keeps. There is a saying also that a man is best known by the song he sings. It is claimed, too, that people can always be distinguished by the books that they read, and by the pictures that they admire, and by the clothes that they wear.
All this may be true. But to my thinking, the truest test of character is found in the love letters that people write. Each different type of man or woman — including girls — has his, or her, perhaps their, own particular way of writing love letters.
As witness to which, let me submit to the reader’s judgment a carefully selected set of love letters present and past. I need hardly say that the letters are not imaginary, but that each of them is an actual sample taken right out of the post office — no, I don’t think I need to say it.
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THE OLD-FASHIONED STYLE
Love letter of the year 1828 sent by messenger from Mr. Ardent Heartful, The Hall, Notts, England, to Miss Angela Blushanburn, The Shrubberies, Hops, Potts, Shrops, England, begging her acceptance of a fish:
“Respected Miss Angela:
“With the consent of your honored father and your esteemed mother, I venture to send to you by the messenger who bears you this, a fish. It has, my respected Miss Angela, for some time been my most ardent desire that I might have the good fortune to present to you as the fruit of my own endeavours, a fish. It was this morning my good fortune to land while angling in the stream that traverses your property, with the consent of your father, a fish.
“In presenting for your consumption, with your parents’ consent, respected Miss Angela, this fish, may I say that the fate of this fish which will thus have the inestimable privilege of languishing upon your table conveys nothing but envy to one who, while what he feels cannot be spoken, still feels as deeply as should feel, if it does feel, this fish.
