Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 246
We usually arrived home a little before daybreak, bringing home breakfast for my mother and my younger brother. Father would generally bring home a satchel of coal with him, and would give some also to any of our neighbors who lived in the same basement as we did; for, after all, as my father said, the coal cost only the trouble of carrying it. We generally got to bed right after breakfast, as we kept early hours.
On Sunday, Father and I went to church, or rather to several churches, where Father tended fires in the basements, from which we could hear the organ. My father had no religious prejudices, and told me that he would just as soon fire one church as another. But he was rather bitter, for so mild a man, against Quakers and others that refuse to have heat in their places of worship. My father regarded them as misguided.
Meantime, I attended night school regularly, as Father laid great stress on education. He would have wished me to go from night school to a night college, and if possible to take a degree. Father said he had known several college graduates in furnace work, and considered them fully equal to first-class men. He always spoke of Oxford with great respect, and recalled that when he was a young man in marine boiler work on night shift, they looked on Oxford men as better suited for that than anything else.
But I was young enough and ardent enough to view education with impatience. I wanted to get forward in life, and dreamed already of being a night orderly in a hospital or a night guard in a penitentiary. Father had some influential friends in the penitentiary, and he said that when they came out he would see what they could do. But the chance never came my way. We also talked of banking, and Father said that if you could once get a footing in a bank at night, there was no telling what it might lead to. He had a friend who was very high up in one of the banks; in fact he worked on the principal vault itself, but nothing came of that idea either. Sometimes, too, we talked of the sea, and of course Father, as I said, had been a sailor himself (in the stokehold), and my imagination was fired as that of any boy is with the romance of the sea. I loved to picture myself in the stokehold of some great ship, sifting ashes and raking out clinkers.
Among such day dreams, or rather night dreams, I grew gradually toward manhood. Meantime, I had tried out a few desultory occupations, but found none to my liking. For a while I held a post as night porter in a family hotel, my hours being from 1 a.m. to 7. But it was too disturbed. I found that I had hardly settled down to my morning newspaper, next morning’s, for an hour or so, when there might be a ring of a bell, or a casual arrival that necessitated my presence.
The surroundings were not congenial, for though the lounge room was fairly comfortable, the library was poorly selected and unsatisfactory. I worked also as night clerk in a fire station, which I found congenial and quiet, but in the second month of my work there was an outbreak of a fire in a neighboring part of the city and I left. Chance fate, however, decided where deliberate intention failed.
I returned home one day to find that my father had given up his job to accept a more or less permanent position in the county penitentiary. His removal there was not wholly of his own choice, but his duties were entirely congenial, as he found himself in charge of five night furnaces where his companions were men of education and culture, several of them college graduates. Indeed, his circumstances were such that at the expiration of his original contract, which I believe had been for three years — a matter of insistence on the part of the authorities — Father was invited to stay on as a salaried member of the staff. The change involved very little disadvantage, except that he lost his uniform and had to supply his own clothes.
Meantime, as a compensation for Father’s removal from his family — a matter on which his contract insisted — influential friends obtained for me the post of night watchman in a large downtown office building.
This position I have now held for fifty years, during which time I have every reason to believe that my career in and through the building has been a complete success. My hours are from midnight, when the last of the day staff leave, until 6 a.m., when the first of them come back. During this time it is my duty to visit all the doors of the offices and try the locks of the rooms, though, thus far, I have never been able to get into them. It is also necessary to punch a time clock on each floor of the building every half-hour. It is a crowded life, and in a way I shall not be sorry when some day the time for retirement comes.
I have found by experience that it is scarcely possible to do any serious reading, as it is interrupted every hour by duties. After the first twenty years I read less and less, and after the first thirty years I got into the way of contenting myself with reading the telephone book and the calendar. The necessity of keeping posted all the time as to which day of the month it is prevents intellectual stagnation.
Nor is it, as my reader might imagine, a life without incident. Every ten years or so something happens. I recall distinctly how, about twenty years ago, the burglar alarm rang, but I heard it in ample time to leave the building. On another occasion there was a great fire a few blocks away, which prevented all thought of sleep.
But yet I have begun to find that in the long run the position has a certain monotony, a kind of dullness about it. This feeling did not dawn on me at first, and often I forget it for five years, but it comes back. I ask myself, is this after all quite the work and quite the life for an active man? I asked myself this six years ago, and very soon I intend to ask it of myself again.
I am well aware that at my age, seventy, the time has hardly come to think of retiring. There is a man engaged in the next building on the street (I was talking to him only two years ago) who is nearly ten years older than I am. But without retiring from work altogether, I often think I may give up my present job and strike out into something more strenuous.
But no doubt many people think that.
Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal
NOTE: NO APOLOGY is needed for the publication of the manuscript here presented as the Confessions of a Super-Extra-Criminal. The eager and unsatiated demand of the public for revelations of the underworld is a guarantee of the absorbing interest with which the story will be received. Needless to say, the name assigned to the writer is a purely fictitious one. His real name we are not at liberty to mention, inasmuch as the mere whisper of his whereabouts will lead to his immediate execution in four different countries. If the government of Mexico, either government, could get hold of him, he would be garroted at once, while his condemnation to the guillotine in France only awaits his own consent. More than that, there are a number of his fellow criminals of the past who would knife him at sight, and others who wouldn’t even wait to see him. Our readers will understand this when they read what he writes. We may add that we have done nothing to edit or improve the style of this confession. We couldn’t. It is written in that straight-out, right-here-and-now, let-me-say-at-once form of composition that carries conviction with it — either present or past.
I want to say right here and now at the very start that there was no reason why I should have grown up to be a garage man. It was entirely my own fault. I had a good home and every opportunity to keep straight, and I had, too, gentlemen, the best of mothers.
“Ed,” Mother would often say to me, “keep straight,” and if I had listened to her, gentlemen, I wouldn’t have been through all that I went through, gentlemen.
But perhaps there was something wild in my blood that disinclined me to ordinary steady industry. My father had a regular job with a municipal garbage wagon where they trusted him with everything, and he would have taken me into it with him so that I would have grown up in that. However, nothing would do me but loafing around with a loose crowd of boys and talking about this man or that who’d made a clean-up as a plumber or garage man or a dry cleaning explosives expert, and never got caught.
We used to see them around the pool rooms nights. There was Dick Dynamite, or Dynamite Dick, as we used to call him, who was a nitro-glycerine man and worked in dry-cleaning shops blowing the buttons off vests; and there was Blow Torch Peter, who was one of the most daring men in the plumbing game, and Short Circuit Charlie, who had tied up the electricity in a downtown office for four hours single-handed with nothing but a pair of pliers and a screwdriver; and there was Water-Power William, a big hulking-looking fellow with a face as innocent as they make them, who had frozen up the water taps in one of the big hotels. All these men went about openly dressed in mechanics’ clothes, but it was mighty hard to prove anything against them. Every one knew, for instance, that Blow Torch Peter was a plumber, but they couldn’t prove it on him. It was known, too, that Dynamite Dick worked in dry cleaning, especially as he was reckless in his work and each explosion was bigger than the last, so that sometimes he’d blow off a thousand buttons in one day, but they could prove nothing.
And, of course, if any of these men got pinched, they always had enough money to hire one of the judges of the supreme court to defend them and got off pretty light.
But most of all we were attracted by the garage men because they seemed both the most expert and the most reckless. I have known Gasoline Jim to wreck a car in five minutes by merely crawling underneath it. The owner had brought it into the garage (I was loafing around there and saw it all) and he said, “Will you take a look at this car? It seems to be knocking or something.” Jim crawled under it and stayed there for about two minutes, chewing tobacco. Then he came out. “You’ll have to leave it here for two years,” he said. “Great Cæsar!” says the man, “is it as bad as that? Surely not. Take another look.” Jim went under the car again, but this time he took a sandwich with him and a flask. He didn’t come out for at least ten minutes. When he did, he said, “Three years, and you’ll have to make a deposit of a thousand dollars.” Of course the man paid the money, but the next day Jim told him that he doubted if the car was much good; he said he found that the whole of the inside asphyxiation was pretty badly fuselated and that he’d have to send the car to Florida anyway to get it washed. I don’t think the man ever came back.
Well, I used to hang around and pick up ideas and watch the men work. So one day when a lot of cars were coming in Jim called out to me, “Here, Ed, see what’s the matter with this gentleman’s car.” Well, I knew Jim meant to give me a chance to see what I could do. So I rolled the car away back into a dark corner of the garage. Well, I felt pretty nervous about it, as I was mighty anxious to make good. So I got busy with a pair of pliers and an iron bar and in a few minutes I managed to get a hole knocked through the radiator and removed most of the ignition.
“How do you find it?” says Jim when I came back to the front of the shop where he stood with the owner. “I think, sir,” I said, “that most of the interior litigation is pretty well rotted out.” “What can you do with it?” asked the owner. “All I can suggest,” says Jim, “is to leave it with us and we’ll put a new engine into the body and then when we get it adjusted, put a new body around the new engine. But we’ll want two hundred dollars as a deposit and we don’t promise anything, and of course there’ll be storage to pay.”
The owner paid us the two hundred and Jim gave me my thirty per cent on it.
Well, of course, I felt pretty good about it, and that night I treated all the boys around town and began to feel myself mighty big stuff. Jim handed me over a car every day, sometimes two or three of them, and I was cleaning up money fast.
But I want to say right now and here that that kind of thing can’t last.
I wouldn’t want to think that anything in these confessions might attract anybody to the kind of life I’d fallen into. Often I’d think of how mother used to say, “Ed, keep straight.” And then some one would come into the garage with, say, a brand-new car and ask, “What’s wrong with the starter of this car?” and I couldn’t resist the temptation. I’d look at the car and say, “There’s nothing wrong with the starter, sir, the trouble is that the lining of the esophagus has got burned out. Give me a hundred dollars.”
Of course, the thing had to come to an end. There’s only one end to that sort of thing. All the time I had a feeling that I’d get pinched, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when one day a detective that I knew stopped me on the street. “Ed,” he said, “I guess you’ll have to come along with me.” Well, I knew there was no good to resist, and so he took me along to the police station.
When he told the police who I was, they hit me over the head with a police club till I was quiet and then gave me some coffee. “How are you now, Ed?” they asked, and hit me a few more times; after which they gave me some more coffee and bundled me into a cell.
Next day I was brought into the dock and charged with garage work. I hadn’t been able to get any judge of the supreme court, as they were all busy. The result was I got a sentence to ten years, with more if needed.
Now I’m not going to try to describe my life in prison beyond saying that it was dull; that’s the straight fact about it — a dull life. Indeed, I want to say right here and now, gentlemen, that prison isn’t worth while. I suppose that to those who have never been there, there is a glamor about it, a sort of romance. But I want to tell you that when you get to prison life itself, it’s dull. I don’t know how it is, but there’s a peculiar monotony, — I might describe it as a sort of sameness, about it, that gets you in the long run.
In prison each day seems very much like any other day. You get up and have your bath and loaf around, take a little bit of exercise, file into the dining-room to eat a bite of lunch and so on. It may sound all right, but in reality it’s wearisome. Many and many a time I used to wish I was out of it.
However, there are good things, too, about prison; and one good thing I got out of it was my association with the prison chaplain, the Reverend Mr. Hardnail. I don’t know if he will see these lines, because perhaps he can’t read, but anyway I want to express my gratitude.
Yes, I want right here and now to hand one to that prison chaplain. He was a real man, that fellow, just a straight, up and down, square-sided, slab-headed man. There was no whining and sniffling about him. He’d just come into my cell and sit and talk and not a word about religion or anything like that. “Ed,” he’d say, “have you got a chew of tobacco?” And I’d give him some and he’d sit there and yarn away about horse races and dog fights.
I’ll tell you he was a real man, the chaplain. He didn’t talk any soft stuff about repentance, but just made himself a friend and a companion. “Eddie,” he’d say, “how about a little snort? Have you got any of the hard stuff around the cell?” Well, generally I’d have a little of it hidden away. “Here you are, Mr. Hardnail,” I’d say, “and you’re welcome to it.” So we’d sit and drink the booze out of a jail mug like a couple of old pals, and Mr. Hardnail would stay right there and chat away till it was all gone before he’d go.
But as I say, I’m not going to talk in detail of prison life. Later on, if I could see any money in it, I might. But not now.
I served my ten years, increased to twelve for good conduct, and came out of that prison with a feeling as if I had grown older since I went in.
The Life of J. Correspondence Smith
J. CORRESPONDENCE SMITH was born in an isolated district in the western part of the east, the homestead being situated at a considerable distance even from any village. Fortunately, however, there was rural mail delivery at the very door. The infancy of the child was a period of great danger and anxiety, especially as no direct medical aid was available either for the boy or his mother. A treatment by correspondence, however, was successful in pulling them both through, although it was not until the postscript of the third letter that the worst of the danger was over. Smith’s father, meanwhile, kept up his courage by means of a correspondence course in Optimism, obtained from a central psychological college. Even at that, it often took ten cents’ worth a day to keep him up.
The years of childhood that followed, bright and innocent, often seemed to Smith in retrospect the best period of his life. He did not lack for plenty of little playmates, for, although there were no other children in the neighborhood, little J. very soon joined a Little Folks Correspondence Circle. In this way he came to know (by correspondence) Lizzie M. (aged 5) and Johnny O’D. (aged 6) and Only Child (aged 4). The children carried on, through correspondence, all kinds of merry games.
The pleasant days of childhood naturally gave place to school and college. Young J.’s education was carried on entirely by correspondence courses, in which he achieved distinction from the very first. In his high-school work he ranked ahead of all his classmates by six cents’ worth of stamps a week, and carried off the prize essay in English by a lead of four and a half ounces, second class postal matter.
When the time came for college, Smith selected as his alma mater the well-known correspondence institution, the University of Okacheechee, Box D, general delivery, third floor. It was out of this box that J. Smith finally graduated.
Smith’s college course had immensely broadened his outlook. He had not only taken the routine subjects of mathematics, physics, and the elementary sciences, but had also had correspondence courses in College Life, Good Fellowship, and on the Influence of Social Intercourse on Human Happiness. He had taken also two courses on Patriotism, internal and external, and half a course on Religion — a fixed requirement for graduation.
But there is no doubt that all the experiences of earlier life are as nothing when compared to the first coming of love. It came to J. Correspondence Smith with the same first blissful awakening of dreams and fancies that it has brought to all of us. Never could he forget that beautiful summer evening when he stood beside the lilacs in the dooryard and read:
“Young lady, brunette, lonesome, would like to exchange letters with gentleman. Send photo and postage stamps for return.”
