Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 238
Mr. Hackit’s Voice — Rot blast it!
(There is the sound of more rushing water; steam ascends above the screen. There is a clatter as of soap dishes, etc., falling around.)
Mr. Hackit’s Voice — Ding bust it!
Mrs. Hackit — Whatever is the matter, Alfred? Haven’t you finished washing yet?
Mr. Hackit’s Voice — Washing! I’m not wishing — I’m going to shave myself!
Mrs. Hackit (In obvious alarm) — To shave yourself! Oh! Alfred! For heaven’s sake, be careful!
Mr. Hackit’s voice — Nonsense! There’s not the slightest danger. With this new device of mine —— Wow!
Mrs. Hackit — What is it?
Mr. Hackit’s Voice — I nearly cut my finger! How on earth do you fix in this confounded blade?
Mrs. Hackit — Why, surely, Alfred, you must remember that. You take hold of the blade (B) between the finger (F) and thumb (T) and slide it gently into the grooves (G) and (G) till it comes fast across the frame (F). Surely that’s on all your directions?
Mr. Hackit’s Voice (Grudgingly) — I suppose it is. Anyway, I can’t do it.
(There is a tinkling clatter as of a razor-blade and its fastenings falling to the floor.) — Oh! drat the thing!
Mrs. Hackit — Wait a minute, Alfred, hand it to me over the top of the screen, and I’ll go and get the paper of directions.
Mr. Hackit’s Voice — No, no. I won’t try any more.
(There is a final splashing and gurgling of water, and then Mr. Hackit emerges from behind the screen. His face is covered with a luxuriant growth of beard and whiskers like those of a California Forty-niner. He says as he comes out:)
After all, why should I bother to start now? I never shaved in my life. I was just curious to see how the thing works.
V
PREDICTING WITH A GREAT PREDICTOR
Mr. Talkleton, the great predictor of business conditions, is seen in his inner office. Mr. Talkleton is known far and wide as the statistician who calculated the Japanese Chow crop of 1928 to within a bushel and who predicted the crisis of 1921 less than six months after it happened. He is seated at his desk. A litter of papers covered with figures lies all about him. The great man is absolutely absorbed in his work. His massive brain is motionless, poised over his task.
Near him at another desk is his stenographer with a telephone.
The telephone rings.
The Stenographer (Speaking into the telephone) — I’m so sorry you can’t speak to Mr. Talkleton this morning. He is making a forecast. (She rings off.)
Mr. Talkleton (Without moving his head) — How much is 6 times 7?
The Stenographer — I’ll look it up. (She takes down an encyclopedia and searches in it. Then she says:) Forty-eight.
Mr. Talkleton — Thank you.
(There is silence for a little time.)
Mr. Talkleton (Without moving his head) — How much is 8 and 17 and 4?
The Stenographer — 8 and 17 and 4? I’ll just work it out for you, Mr. Talkleton.
Mr. Talkleton — Thank you.
(The stenographer moves across to an adding machine and pounds at it furiously for two or three minutes. Then she draws a paper slip out of it and reads:) One hundred.
Mr. Talkleton (As before) — Thank you.
(The telephone rings again.)
The Stenographer — I’m sorry. Mr. Talkleton is busy. You want a forecast? Oh, yes, I’ll ask him. (She puts hand over the phone.) Mr. Talkleton, there is a lady wants a forecast on the peach crop for 1929. Shall I say yes?
Mr. Talkleton — Yes. Tell her we’ll have it today and get the office boy to predict it. Give him money to buy a couple of peaches to predict it with. Don’t disturb me again.
The Stenographer — Yes, Madame, we will make it for you today. Will you send a taxi and get it? Thank you.
(She rings off. There is another little silence.)
Mr. Talkleton — Add me up 4 and 6 and 3 and then subtract 3.
(There is a terrific clattering of the adding machine. The stenographer draws out the slip and announces:) Six plus four. . . . (Presently she says:) — What are you working on this morning, Mr. Talkleton?
Mr. Talkleton — It is a forecast of general business conditions for one year, and now will you kindly supply me with a few necessary data? The calculation is practically complete and I need only a few data which I find difficult to remember. How many ounces are there in a pound avoirdupois?
The Stenographer — Twenty.
Mr. Talkleton — Thank you. I never can remember it. And how many inches in a foot?
The Stenographer — I’ve got that somewhere in our files, Mr. Talkleton. I’ll look it up later.
Mr. Talkleton — Thank you — and let me have at the same time the number of gallons in a firkin, and the number of perches in a furlong. And now I think I’m ready. Will you take this dictation, please?
“I calculate from the data gathered from various indexes and reduced to a common basis that the general trend of business for the year will be upward and downward. There is every indication of a sharp decline in the percentage of the fall of values upwards. But there may be a sharp jolt sideways. In fact, the entire year 1927 — —”
The Stenographer — Which year, Mr. Talkleton?
Mr. Talkleton — 1927.
The Stenographer — Surely not 1927?
Mr. Tackleton — That’s the year I’m predicting on.
The Stenographer — Why, Mr. Talkleton, 1927 is over — months ago.
Mr. Talkerton (In alarm) — All over! I never noticed it. When did it end?
The Stenographer — Last December.
Mr. Talkleton (In despair) — Last December! And I’ve spent months and months on it!
The Stenographer — Oh, never mind, Mr. Talkleton. Call it 1928 — and I am certain it will be just as good as any other of your predictions.
Mr. Talkleton (Brightly and with renewed animation) — Will it? That’s fine. All right! Type it out while I get my hat and coat, and then fetch me my arithmetic primer, and the multiplication table, and we’ll go out to lunch.
Literature and the Eighteenth Amendment
I AM PRIVILEGED to make a unique announcement on behalf of the Mayor and Council of my place of residence, the City of Montreal. To be more exact, let me add that this announcement has not yet been sanctioned by the Mayor and Council, but I feel certain that as soon as they hear of it, they will be all for it.
It concerns, in a word, a proposal to extend to United States authors and playwrights an invitation to use the peculiar facilities enjoyed by the City of Montreal for the laying of plots, scenes, etc., and for the domicile of literary characters. Put quite simply, this new plan will restore to the American author the literary setting lost under the Eighteenth Amendment.
Ever since the Eighteenth Amendment was appended to the Constitution of the United States, writers of fiction, poetry, and the drama have found themselves under a handicap. In the stories of to-day they are unable to give their characters a drink. At first sight this seems nothing. But when we realize how much of our literature both in America and in England for centuries past has depended, rightly or wrongly, for conviviality on the drinking of toasts and healths, on wassail and on Xmas, on stirrup cups and Auld Lang Synes — we can see how hard it is, in literature, to do without it.
Let me illustrate:
I met casually the other day in New York a writer whom I knew to have been, only a few years ago, one of the most successful writers of fiction of our day. He looked despondent. And I was pained to notice that his clothes were ill kept and his appearance seedy.
“You look down on your luck, old man,” I said.
“I am,” he answered.
“Come along, then,” I said, “and have a chocolate ice-cream sundae to pick you up.”
A few minutes later we were standing beside the counter of a drug store with a smoking chocolate ice-cream sundae in our hands.
“That’s better,” said my friend, as he drained his sundae at one draught.
“Have another,” I suggested, “and then tell me of your troubles.”
Warmed and invigorated by the ice-cream, to which was presently added, on my proposal, a pint of buttermilk, my friend proceeded to explain.
“I can’t get used to this new situation,” he said. “You see all my stories are novels of to-day, with the plot laid in the present time — you understand?”
“Perfectly,” I said, “have some more buttermilk.”
“Thank you. Well, the trouble is, I can’t get used to the present situation at all. For instance, in my last novel (you haven’t seen it for the simple reason that I can’t sell it) I bring in a dinner party. In fact, I nearly always bring in a dinner party. It makes such a good setting, don’t you know.”
“Quite so,” I answered. “What about a quart of sour milk?”
“No, thanks,” he said, “not now, I want to keep my head clear. Well, I always used, as I say, to have descriptions of dinner parties, in which there were tables smothered with flowers, and glittering glass, and at which — let me see — —”
Here he paused and pulled out some scraps of paper, evidently literary notes, from his pocket.
“Yes, at which, for example, ‘Meadows (that was always the butler) noiselessly passed the champagne’; in which ‘The conviviality of the party had now reached its height. Lord Dangerdog pledged his beautiful vis-à-vis in a brimming glass of champagne’; and in which ‘Lady Angela and the Duchess exchanged smiles over their claret’; and in which finally ‘the host instructed Meadows to bring up some of the port, the old port, from the dusty bin in the cellar where it had been first laid down by Winthrop Washington Beverly Robinson, his ancestor, in the year of the Declaration of Independence; a “noble port,” said Lord Dangerdog as he sipped the tawny wine with the air of a connoisseur. . . .’
“How’s that?” said my friend, breaking off in his reading.
“Excellent,” I answered, “and it is amazing how really dependent our literature used to be for its mirth and happiness on just that kind of thing.”
“Precisely,” he answered, “that is what I am finding. I can’t replace it. Here’s what I put into my new story (the one that I can’t sell) for the dinner party scene:
“ ’As the pea soup circulated freely, a new animation seemed to come to the guests. Lord Dangerdog, already at his second plateful, smiled across at Lady Angela . . . while the young girl herself hid her blushing face in her soup to avoid the boldness of his eye.
“ ’ ”Come,” said the host, turning to his English guest, “let me pledge you in another stick of celery,” and, suiting the action of the word, he held aloft a magnificent bunch of Kalamazoo celery, and with the words, “Let us eat to our English visitor,” he devoured the entire bunch in a single mouthful.
“ ’Then beckoning to the noiseless butler to whom he passed at the same time the key of the cellar, “Meadows,” he said, “fetch me up some of the old soup: it’s in the fourth trough on the left.” ’ ”
“There!” said my friend as he finished reading. “What do you think of it?”
“You’re quite right,” I said. “It hardly seems the same.”
Since then I have been looking more closely into this question of conviviality and literature. I find that drink of some kind is associated not only with scenes of gaiety, but with almost every aspect of literature. Take the familiar literary theme of the gradual ruin and downfall of a young man, happily married, and with all life before him.
In the stories of yesterday we used to read, for example:
“It was with a devastating sense of despair that Agatha watched her husband go to the sideboard and with a shaking hand pour himself out a glass of neat brandy, which he drained at a gulp . . .” etc., etc.
In an up-to-date story all that we can say is something of this sort:
“It was with a devastating sense of despair that Agatha realized that her husband was becoming addicted to consommé. She watched him as he surreptitiously drank a second ladleful of it, and asked herself what would happen if he took a tureenful.”
There is only one thing to be done. Move the stories and scenes up to the city of Montreal, where the old and familiar literary background still survives, where Xmas is Xmas, and a Party is a Party and not a Stuffing Match.
Let any writer of one-act plays in the United States consider, for instance, the brightness of such an opening as this:
Scene: The Bar of a Montreal hotel. There are present Lord Dangerdog, Lady Evelina, The Bishop of Labrador, General the Hon. Sir Evelyn Everhard.
The Bishop (Wiping his face) — What an excellent cocktail.
The General — Is it not, and so mild! It’s only American rum and absinthe, I believe.
Lady Evelina (Putting down twenty-five cents) — Mix the boys up another of those.
When Montreal offers a chance for a scene like this, what a shame to lay a plot in Indianapolis.
Now I am entitled, in fact, I am invited, by a hotel in Montreal to say that any American dramatists visiting it are entirely welcome to lay one-act plays in the bar-room. Another hotel also announces that authors may lay one-act plays in the bar or in the grill room and serve liquor to their characters at any time up to midnight.
And if any author has occasion to entertain his characters in a club — a real club, such, I have been told, as no longer exists in the United States — I invite him, as a personal matter, to put them into the University Club, Montreal, where they will find everything needed for the best class of fiction.
They will then be able to reinsert into their stories such little lost touches as:
“It was the habit of Sir John to drop into his club for a glass of sherry and bitters before driving home to dinner.”
There is so much more class in that than in saying that he generally stopped at a soda fountain for a pint of chocolate squash.
If the plan that I have outlined is carried through, the first train-load of American authors will probably be shipped in within a month. Scene-laying will begin at once. And next season’s crop of novels will begin:
“The sun was slowly setting on both sides of the St. Lawrence, illuminating with its dying beams the windows of the hotels and clubs of Montreal, in one of which, licensed to sell wine and beer up till midnight, a man and a woman — —”
And the story is off to a good start and literature comes into its own again.
The Hunt for a Heroine HOW THE FICTION WRITER STRUGGLES TO MAKE AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN
BY A SILLY kind of convention, handed down from our great-grandfathers’ time, every work of fiction has to have in it the class of person known as a Heroine.
These heroines were found everywhere. You found them in stories of adventure, mixed up with pirates and heroic lieutenants in the navy, in stories of English country life where they lived in rectories or worked as governesses, or in historic and romantic novels where they rode on “palfreys” and had “varlets” to wait on them.
Nor was there any great trouble, in the literary sense, in creating them. The author merely described what he thought an attractive girl and let it go at that. He suited himself. Some writers, for example, liked them small; they preferred to make their heroine what they called a “sylph,” which meant a being so dainty and so frail that she could just about get around by herself and no more. This little “wee-wee” heroine used to “stamp her little foot imperiously” and “toss her little head disdainfully,” — in fact she had quite a lot of tricks like that and made a terrible hit.
But other writers liked the heroine to be what they called “divinely tall,” and “willowy.” She would just nicely get under a doorway, and was as thin and bendable as a stethoscope. But the idea was that if she ever “twined her arms about her lover,” — as she did on the last page of the book — it was a pretty high-class piece of twining.
But in those days the thing was simple. The circulation of books was limited. There was none of the world-wide appeal of to-day. Nowadays the author has to try to please, not some of the people, but all of the people. He has got to make a heroine to suit not merely his own taste but everybody’s. Otherwise there will be a lot of people who can’t read the story because they don’t like the heroine.
The result is that in the romances of to-day the heroine must not belong to any one type but to all of them at once. In a subtle way the writer must suggest to every reader the girl of his particular preference. This is very hard to do. Some writers can’t do it at all. But when it is really well done the resulting description of the up-to-date heroine sounds something such as the following pen portrait, taken, almost word for word, from one of the most popular novels of the year:
“Margaret Overproof was neither short nor tall. Her perfect figure, slender and at the same time fat, conveyed at times an impression of commanding height while at other times she looked sawed off. Her complexion, which was of the tint of a beautiful dull marble like the surface of a second-hand billiard ball, was shot at times with streaks of red and purple which almost suggested apoplexy. Her nose which was clear-cut and aquiline was at the same time daintily turned up at the end and then moved off sideways. A critic might have considered her mouth a trifle too wide and her lips a trifle too full, but on the other hand a horse buyer would have considered them all right. Her eyes were deep and mournful and lit with continuous merriment. Her graceful neck sloped away in all directions till it reached her bust, which stopped it.”
There! a reader who is not satisfied with Margaret would be pretty hard to please. But, by the way, her name ought not to be anything so simple as Margaret, if she is to be a heroine of to-day. In earlier times, say, a hundred years ago, the heroines were called by flowing classical names such as Dulcinea, Althusia, or Ambrosia. Then they went through a stage of being called by the simple old home names such as Margaret and Catherine and Mary Ann. They then passed through a period of cat-like nicknames, such as “Puss,” and “Dot,” “Kit,” and “Vi.”
