Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 242
With it changed their Elegy and Epitaph: till now, with no thought of a parody, but only of adaptation, it may well run thus:
The factory whistles blow across the way,
Some cattle in a freight car still I see.
The employees have finished for the day,
And there is no one on the street but me.
Now they have lighted the electric light,
And all the people in the stores have gone,
Except the cop on duty for the night,
And round the corner p’rhaps a motor horn.
Save that from yonder little railway tower,
The Switchman now often is heard complain,
When some one in a motor at this hour
Compels him to lift up his gates again.
Here on the corner of this policeman’s beat,
A Funeral Parlor Open Day and Night,
Shows where the decent people of the street
Have one by one passed out of human sight.
No morning whistle blowing six o’clock,
No morning street car clattering down the track,
No morning milkman singing round the block,
Shall call them from their funeral parlor back.
For them no more the radiator coil
Shall warm the parlor for their coming home;
No busy wife put coffee on to boil,
Nor little folks turn on the gramophone.
Yet these were boys who once could hustle hard,
Full time and overtime for six days straight
They worked in factory or railroad yard,
Or poured their pig-iron into boiler plate.
Let not the people in the upper town,
The class of supercilious social pup,
The people on the boulevards look down
On what they did because they were hard up.
The social column, social graft and pull
And all the high-class beauty parlors do,
What does it come to when the time is full?
The crematorium awaits them too.
A bang-up funeral, a motor hearse,
A write-up in the papers, lots of space, ——
What good is that? These boys are none the worse
Because they only had this little place.
Some men more full of brains than you would think
Have passed perhaps this undertaker’s wicket,
Who might have been elected, but for drink,
To Congress on the Democratic ticket.
Here, say, was one who had the mental range,
But for the schooling he could not afford,
To make a fortune on the Stock Exchange,
As big a man perhaps as Henry Ford.
The trouble was they never went to school,
Or never got enough to make it tell,
Straight poverty just made each seem a fool,
And sort of paralyzed his brains as well.
Of course, you take it on the other hand,
The very ignorance that made them fail,
The very things they didn’t understand,
Combined, perhaps, to keep them out of jail.
I’d like to add my epitaph to theirs,
Just as Gray did with his to glory ’em,
And promise when I settle my affairs
To join them in their crematorium.
FINIS
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
CONTENTS
PICTURES OF THE BRIGHT TIME TO COME
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
Further Progress in Specialization
When Social Regulation is Complete
Isn’t It Just Wonderful?
The Last of the Rubber Necks
Athletics for 1950
The Criminal Face
Astronomical Alarms
GREAT LIVES IN OUR MIDST
Memoirs of an Iceman
The Memoirs of a Night Watchman
Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal
The Life of J. Correspondence Smith
Eddie the Bartender
Janus and the Janitor
The Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Little Conversations of the Hour
Travel is so Broadening
Tommy and Milly at the Farm
Life’s Little Inconsistencies
New Words — New Things
More Messages from Mars
Portents of the Future
Rural Urbanity
COLLEGE NOW AND COLLEGE THEN
All Up!
Willie Nut Tries to Enter College
Graduation Day at the Barbers College
Correspondence Manual Number One
IN THE GOLF STREAM
The Golfomaniac
The Golfer’s Pocket Guide
The Golf Season in Retrospect
FUTURITY IN FICTION
Long After Bedtime
The Newer Truthfulness
A Midsummer Detective Mystery
Little Lessons in Journalism
More Literary Scandals
Who Reads What
Overhauling the Encyclopedia
Jazzled Journalism
This Heart-to-Heart Stuff
ALSO: ——
Forty Years of Billiards
The Hero of Home Week
Conversations I Can Do Without
Mr. Chairman, I Beg to Move ——
Fifty Cents Worth
PICTURES OF THE BRIGHT TIME TO COME
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman
“PARDON ME,” SAID the Iron Man to the Tin Woman, “I hope I don’t intrude.”
He spoke in the low deep tones of a phonograph. His well-oiled cylinders were working to perfection, and his voice was full and mellow. The revolutions of his epiglottis, running direct from its battery with a thermostatic control to register emotion, was steady and unchanged.
“Not at all,” said the Tin Woman, “pray come into the drawing-room.”
She was working at a higher revolution, but speaking evenly and clearly.
The Iron Man inclined himself fifteen degrees forward from his third section, recovered himself by his automatic internal plumb line, turned seventy-five degrees sideways and took four steps and a quarter, as dictated by his optometric control, to a chair where he turned one complete revolution and a quarter and sat down.
But, stop! It is necessary to interrupt the story a moment so as to explain to the reader what it is about.
Everybody has been struck by the invention of the Iron Man, the queer mechanical being recently fabricated in Germany and exhibited there and in the United States. He is called a Robot, but he might just as well be called a Macpherson.
The pictures of the Iron Man show him with a head like a stovepipe, and a body like a Quebec heater. He is cased in nickel, jointed in steel, and one kick from his pointed iron foot would scatter a whole football team.
In other words, he has us all beaten at the start.
The Iron Man talks with a phonograph drum, sees with high-power convex mirrors, and gets his energy from electricity stored inside of him at 2,000 volts.
The Iron Man, it seems, is able to walk. He can walk across the floor of a room, step up on a platform, bow and take his seat. In this one act he displaces all public chairmen, chancellors of universities, and heads of conferences.
He is able, if you put a speech into his stomach, to reel it off his chest without a single fault or error. In this he outclasses at once all public speakers, platform orators and after-dinner entertainers. He can not only make a speech, but while making it he can move up and down, saw his arms around in the air, and gyrate with his head. In other words, the Iron Man can act, and after this there is no more need for living actors to keep alive.
Consequently, the Iron Man will rapidly take over from us a large part of the activity of the world. Anybody of sufficient means will soon have an Iron Man made as a counterpart of himself. When he has anything to do peculiarly difficult or arduous or needing great nerve, he will let the Iron Man do it. For myself, I intend to have an Iron Man do all my golf for me, which will reopen at once the whole question of the local championship. That, however, is only a personal matter. The point is that each and all of us will very soon be making use of an Iron Man.
Equally is it evident that some one will now invent a Tin Woman. She will be made of softer metal outside, but just as hard inside, with eyes that revolve further sideways and a phonograph drum of double capacity to go two words to one from the Iron Man.
So these are the two beings that are going to replace us individually in the world, to do our work and leave us to play. The timid human race will shrink behind its metal substitute. And even such a thing as a proposal of marriage, arduous, nerve-racking, and disturbing — will be gladly handed over to the deputy.
With which, let us continue the story.
The Tin Woman moved sideways eighteen degrees as guided by the reflected rays from the Iron Man’s concave eye-pieces and adjusted herself at half a right angle, with her base on a sofa.
There was a pause. Both waited until the situation grew warm enough to raise their temperatures to the speaking point.
“I have come — —” began the Iron Man in a low voice. Then there was a click in his throat and he paused. He was not yet warmed up.
The Tin Woman, under the impact of his phonograph, altered the angle of her neck.
“Yes — —” she murmured. Her phonograph seemed to revolve, but almost without sound.
“I have come,” said the Iron Man again, this time in a firm strong voice, while the hum of his self-starter seemed to give him an air of confidence, “to ask you a question.”
The ophthalmic plates of the Tin Woman, delicate as gold leaf, had been so adjusted that the sound-unit of the word “question” would start something in her.
“It is so sudden — —” she murmured.
The Iron Man made an upright move on his seat so that his body-cylinder was perpendicular to his disc.
“I want you to marry me,” he said. He had to say it. These were the last of the words that had been put into him. He had no more.
But it was enough.
The mistress of the Tin Woman, whom she here represented, had had her adjusted so that as soon as the word “marry” hit her, it would set her going.
“ —— Oh, John — —” she gasped. She rose up on her spring legs and fell forward with her tin bodycase flat on the floor.
The Iron Man stooped his body to eighty-five degrees, picked her up with his magnetic clutch, and then placed his facial cylinder close against hers so that his magnetic lamps looked right into her.
He put one steel arm around her central feedpipe and for a moment put her under a pressure of two thousand volts.
But he spoke no word. He couldn’t. He had used up all his perforated strip of words.
He stood the Tin Woman up against the wall, revolved twice on his feet to get oriented, and then clumped off out of the house.
The proposal was over.
And a few minutes later the Man — the real man, if he can be called so — was telephoning to the Real Woman.
“Darling, I am so pleased. My Iron Man has just come home and as soon as I opened him I knew your answer — —”
“I’m so happy, too,” she said, “I could hardly wait to unlock Lizzie. I nearly took a can-opener to her, and when I heard your voice, I nearly died with happiness.”
“And we won’t wait, will we?” continued the man. “Let’s have John and Lizzie go through the Church Service part of it right away — —”
“Just as soon as I can get Lizzie a new tin skirt, from the hardware store,” said the woman.
And a week after, Iron John and Tin Lizzie were married by a Brass Clergyman and a Cast Iron Sexton, while a Metal Choir sang their cylinders loose with joy.
Further Progress in Specialization
IN THE OLD days, of say twenty years ago, when a man got sick he went to a doctor. The doctor looked at him, examined him, told him what was wrong with him, and gave him some medicine and told him to go to bed. The patient went to bed, took the medicine, and either got better or didn’t.
All of this was very primitive, and it is very gratifying to feel that we have got quite beyond it.
Now, of course, a consulting doctor first makes a diagnosis. The patient is then handed on to a “heart-man” for a heart test, and to a nerve man for a nerve test. Then if he has to be operated on, he is put to sleep by an anesthetist, and operated on by an operating surgeon, and waked up by a resurrectionist.
All that is excellent — couldn’t be better.
But just suppose that the other professions began to imitate it! And just suppose that the half professions that live in the reflection of the bigger ones start in on the same line!
We shall then witness little episodes in the routine of our lives such as that which follows:
“Mr. Follicle will see you now,” said the young lady attendant.
The patient entered the inner sanctum of Dr. Follicle, generally recognized as one of the greatest capillary experts in the profession. He carried after his name the degrees of Cap. D. from Harvard, Doc. Chev. from Paris, and was an Honorary Shampoo of half a dozen societies.
The expert ran his eye quickly over the face of the incoming patient. His trained gaze at once recognized a certain roughness in the skin, as if of a partial growth of hair just coming through the surface, which told the whole tale. He asked, however, a few questions as to personal history, parentage, profession, habits, whether sedentary or active, and so on, and then with a magnifying glass made a searching examination of the patient’s face.
He shook his head.
“I think,” he said, “there is no doubt about your trouble. You need a shave.”
The patient’s face fell a little at the abrupt, firm announcement. He knew well that it was the expert’s duty to state it to him flatly and fairly. He himself in his inner heart had known it before he had come in. But he had hoped against hope: perhaps he didn’t need it after all; perhaps he could wait; later on, perhaps, he would accept it. Thus he had argued to himself, refusing, as we all refuse, to face the cruel and inevitable fact.
“Could it be postponed for a day or so more?” he asked. “I have a good many things to do at the office.”
“My dear sir,” said the expert firmly, “I have told you emphatically that you need a shave. You may postpone it if you wish, but if you do I refuse to be responsible.”
The patient sighed.
“All right,” he said, “if I must, I must. After all, the sooner it’s done, the sooner it’s over. Go right ahead and shave me.”
The great expert smiled. “My dear sir,” he said, “I don’t shave you myself. I am only a consulting hairologist. I make my diagnosis, and I pass you on to expert hands.”
He pushed a bell.
“Miss Smith,” he said to the entering secretary, “please fill out a card for this gentleman for the Shaving Room. If Dr. Scrape is operating, get him to make the removal of the facial hair. Dr. Clicker will then run the clippers over his neck. Perhaps he had better go right to the Soaping Room from here; have him sent down fully soaped to Dr. Scrape.”
The young lady stepped close to the expert and said something in a lower tone, which the patient was not intended to hear.
“That’s unfortunate,” murmured the specialist. “It seems that we have no soapist available for at least an hour or so. Both our experts are busy — an emergency case that came in this morning, involving the complete removal of a full beard. Still, perhaps Dr. Scrape can arrange something for you. And now,” he continued, looking over some notes in front of him, “for the work around the ears, have you any preference for any one in particular? I mean any professional man of your own acquaintance whom you would like to call in?”
“Why, no,” said the patient, “can’t Dr. What’s-his-name do that, too?”
“He could,” said the consultant, “but only at a certain risk, which I hesitate to advise. Snipping the hair about and around the ears is recognized as a very delicate line of work, which is better confided to a specialist. In the old days in this line of work there were often some very distressing blunders and accidents due purely to lack of technique — severance of part of the ear, for example.”
“All right,” said the patient, “I’ll have a specialist.”
“Very good,” said the Hairologist, “now as to a shampoo — I think we had better wait till after the main work is over and then we will take special advice according to your condition. I am inclined to think that your constitution would stand an immediate shampoo. But I shouldn’t care to advise it without a heart test. Very often a premature shampoo in cold weather will set up a nasal trouble of a very distressing character. We had better wait and see how we come along.”
“All right,” said the patient.
“And now,” added the expert, more genially, “at the end of all of it, shall we say — a shine?”
“Oh, yes, certainly.”
“A shine, very good, and a brush-up? To include the hat? Yes, excellent. Miss Smith, will you conduct this gentleman to the Soaping Room?”
The patient hummed and hawed a little. “What about the fee?” he asked.
The consultant waved the question aside with dignity. “Pray do not trouble about that,” he said, “all that will be attended to in its place.”
And when the patient had passed through all the successive stages of the high-class expert work indicated, from the first soap to the last touch of powder, he came, at the end, with a sigh of relief, to the special shoe-shining seat and the familiar colored boy on his knees waiting to begin. Here, at last, he thought, is something that hasn’t changed.
