Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 248
That was all at the moment.
And in fact, in a way, that is all of it.
Only one can’t help wondering just what Dan is going to do about it.
He said right away that he wouldn’t quit his job as janitor.
But two days later Dan decided that he’d take a trip out to the Coast anyway to see about things.
The next day he bought a new overcoat. It was a kind he used to covet when he was a boy.
However, he’s been working right ahead ever since — that is, talking mostly, half-way down the area steps. There are such a lot of people who want to stop to ask him about it all, and who like to be assured that he won’t quit his job, that it takes time to tell them.
Then they had him down at one of the newspaper offices to tell them about it there; and of course he had to get photographed in connection with it, with the legend under the photograph, “Won’t Give Up His Job.”
And one of the men on the top floor, Apartment A, who is a promoter, has been talking to Dan about how three quarters of a million dollars could easily be turned into real money, say, into a couple of million. And Dan himself has been thinking that, if he cared to, he could take this money, he could build an apartment house with it, a real dandy, with special janitor’s quarters to it, and then ride up and down with the elevator all day and be on a mighty friendly footing with the tenants.
And more than that, Dan and his wife have discovered that his wife has never traveled, never been anywhere. It’s a thing they never knew before.
So when Dan gets back from the Coast he may take the wife for a trip to Europe, or to Afghanistan, or somewhere — just for a trip.
But of course he’s not going to quit being a janitor.
The Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman
A PALPITATING STORY in Which a Woman’s Soul is Turned Upside Down and Then Right Side Up
Note: The following startling disclosures are, in our opinion, the most powerful piece of self-revelation that we have seen revealed this season. The writer lays her soul bare and jumps on it. She takes her readers into the most intimate recesses of a woman’s life, and if we know anything about readers, this hits them where they live. The writer does not spare herself.
chapter i
My (First) Childhood
I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.
First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.
And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.
My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.
While I am speaking of my father, I may as well set down something else about him that I only came to know gradually and that I did not fully understand at first, and that is that he was five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths high.
I recall as if it were yesterday my mother measuring him against the wall, and saying as she looked at the measuring tape, “Five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths.”
I was too young to know what seven-eighths meant at that time; later on I came to know. But to the best of my belief neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned to anybody that he was five feet, nine inches and seven-eighths high. They were proud people and kept things to themselves.
Now that I am speaking of my father and wish to leave nothing concealed, I may as well state the fact openly that he was a Vegetarian. I have decided, in putting down this life story, to leave nothing unsaid — that I can think of to say — and so I will simply chronicle the fact that my father was a Vegetarian and let the reader judge for himself.
But this I only came to know slowly as I passed gradually out of my childhood, a thing it took me a long time to do.
As a little child I thought he was an Episcopalian or at times I fancied him a Wesleyan Methodist. Later I came to know the truth. He was a Vegetarian. Only once or twice, however, did I ever hear him refer to the fact.
I remember once he took me on his knee and said, “I’ve been a Vegetarian all my life”; then he kissed me and put me down again and walked out of the house. He did not come back again for a long time; not till meal time. I grew to know that my father always came back at meal time. I think he was too proud to stay away.
My mother stands out less vividly before me, partly, perhaps, because I never knew her height as accurately as I knew my father’s.
But I will record here one thing about her that always seemed to me to mark her off from most people, and in a way to isolate her in a class by herself, and that is that as a girl she had lived for some years in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Why this should have been so, I never knew. My mother never explained it to me and never spoke of it. But I think it gave her a kind of loneliness.
Later on as I slowly grew up, which took years and years, I began to understand that my mother was a disappointed woman. She realized, I think, that she had been let in in marrying Father. Each time she looked at him she felt that he certainly was a prize package.
The idea, I imagine, grew in her mind that if she hadn’t married Father, she might have hit something better and could hardly have struck anything worse.
There comes into every woman’s life the knowledge that she has married the wrong man. So it was with Mother. The realization that Father was a nut more and more shadowed her life.
Once, in one of her rare moments of confidence, she told me that there was a Mr. Jones in Little Rock, Arkansas, whom she could have married who was very musical and played the gramophone to perfection, but he had lung trouble and drank whiskey and was a Communist. So she held him off and he went west for his lungs and got better and made a lot of money in cattle and joined the Republican party.
But meantime Mother had married Father.
I suppose every woman has a romance in her life like Mother’s. I often used to wonder where I would have been if Mother hadn’t married Father, but had married Mr. Jones. But I couldn’t think it out. It beat me to it.
And now let me try to give a more intimate and confidential picture of my home, because I want to make my reader feel that he knows me. Our house stood in the country on the tenth concession of the third township backwards and sideways from the road and a little edgeways. I can shut my eyes and see it; but when I open them I can’t.
It was only a mile down the road to the post office of Blank and five miles and ten rods to the village of Blank. Our country town was Blink and there was no large city nearer to us than Asterisk.
With these facts well in mind, the reader can form a pretty clear picture of my home and its surroundings. I should perhaps have added that our nearest railway station was at —— —— —— and our only telegraph office was at —— —— . Let the reader get these facts clearly before him and he will have a grip on my narrative which he otherwise might fail to get. Perhaps it is pertinent to say that the —— —— Express Company had an agency at * * * * * * and that there was a first class garage not more than three miles from * ! * ! * ! . . . . . .
At any rate, it was here in these quiet surroundings that I passed my first girlhood — not my second, my first.
And now I am going to give my reader something of the kind that he has been sitting up waiting for. I want to take him into all my secrets, and tell him some things that I suppose no woman ever tells to the world.
When I set myself to write these disclosures I said to myself that I would conceal nothing, but would tell my reader everything. If a great deal of what I have to say sounds unusual, I can only defend it on the ground that at least it is the truth.
I want to be quite frank with myself and speak of myself as if I were discussing somebody else. I want the reader to judge for himself everything that I have done. I don’t know whether I make my meaning quite clear. I am trying to state it as simply as I can.
I will only say that what I mean is that I am trying to say what I mean. I can find no other words to express it more simply, but if I can think of any later on I’ll use them.
I want to begin by saying that like a great many girls I was for a long time densely ignorant. I doubt whether society realizes even yet, in spite of all the revelations and confessions that have been published, how ignorant girls are. In my own case up to the age of —— ——
But stop. That’s a peach of a place to end up this first chapter.
chapter ii
What Girls Don’t Know
In the last, that is, the first chapter I was telling my readers in the most intimate language I could get hold of all about my girlhood.
I said that I was brought up ignorant, in the dense ignorance that enshrouds so many young girls to-day. Even with the resolution I have taken to conceal nothing from my readers, it is hard for me, without a blush of shame, to go into details of my ignorance.
But I will quote as a characteristic example the fact that till I was nine years old I could hardly spell properly. I mixed up words ending in ough with words ending in double f.
Figures also gave me great trouble. For a long time I used to think that 7 and 8 made 13. I was too timid and too reticent to take my difficulties to anybody, least of all to my parents. Sometimes I thought of going to the minister of our church and asking him what 7 and 8 made, and how to spell hemorrhage. But a false shame held me back, and I feared perhaps that even he might not know.
And since I am confiding so fully in my reader I will make another confession, namely, that for many years I did not know the names of the branches of the Amazon, and always imagined that the Xingu came in on the top side. I concealed this as best I could from the people about me.
Of physiology and the human body and of the laws of health I knew absolutely nothing. I could not have told where the œsophagus was nor the prosencephalon, nor the duodenum nor the semicolon nor the major axis of the patella. Once while quite a child I caught a cold and was quite sick for three days without being aware of it.
My first love affair took place when I was just turned sixteen. I had hardly turned it when a young man came to stay at our house as a summer boarder. His name was Joe Granger, and he was training for a minister. This ought to have warned me, but I was young and without guidance. In any case, he seemed to me little more than a boy, which was perhaps the case, as he was only five feet, one inch high. But he was quite stout.
There was, however, one thing about Joe that my parents kept from me at the time and that I only learned later on accidentally. It was this: He paid us $2.00 a week for his board, but he was supposed to help father pitch hay and to make himself handy around the place.
Well, for the first two or three weeks that Joe Granger was at our house, I hardly spoke a word to him. But one evening just as I was starting down the lane to the pasture to fetch up the two cows there was Joe standing beside the door of the barn.
It was lilac time and I had on a print dress with a bunch of lilacs at my throat and a branch of apple blossoms in my hair and a bunch of wild convolvulus and chickweed in my waist belt.
“Where are you going?” Joe asked. “Down to the pasture,” I answered, “to fetch up the cows.” “All right,” he said, “I’ll go too.” I was feeling in a kind of reckless mood, as if I didn’t care what happened to me. “Come on!” I said.
It was a hundred yards or perhaps more down the lane, but all the way Joe said nothing except, “Say, look at that oriole. That’s pretty early for orioles, isn’t it?” So I knew that he was keeping himself pretty well in hand.
When we got to the pasture, the two cows were there standing under the shade trees.
“You chase up the black one,” Joe said, “and I’ll start up the other.”
I was feeling in a sort of desperate mood, as if I didn’t care. “All right,” I said.
We got the two cows started up the lane, and Joe and I walked along behind them.
“They’re easy cows to drive,” Joe said. I don’t know just how much he meant by it, but I answered just recklessly, “They sure are.” “Some cows,” Joe said, “are much better milkers than others.” I didn’t even stop to think. “Is that so?” was all I could find to say. “Yes,” Joe went on, “when I was on a farm near Cobourg, Ontario, I used to milk six cows a day.” I don’t know just what he would have said next, but just then we came to the corner of the barn and there was Father.
Joe is a preacher now and has children of his own, but looking back on it seems strange. I often wondered how many cows he milked after he left Cobourg.
My next love adventure was a few months later; in fact, that same Autumn. I was walking along the road to the village and the rural mail delivery man stopped his cart. “Like a ride, sis?” he asked. “Kind o’ hot walking, ain’t it?”
Just for a minute I hesitated. The driver was a quite elderly man and had four or five children, and it should have warned me. But a sort of spirit of daring had got hold of me and for a minute I hesitated. Already he had made a place on the seat beside him. “Climb right in,” he said.
Then all of a sudden I realized my danger. “Thanks,” I blurted out, “I guess I’ll walk.” “All right,” the man said, “please yourself. Get up, there!” and he touched up his horse and was gone.
I stood in the road for quite a time, thinking of what I had escaped.
I never saw the man again, but years after I heard that he was still driving on the same mail route and that his eldest girl had just finished high school. A queer fact about the whole thing, however, is that the government has never promoted him and that he is still on the same route.
By this time, of course, I had begun to realize that men are all wolves and are not to be trusted.
There was a young man one day came to deliver a load of cord wood and after he had unloaded it, he asked for a drink of water. Quite unsuspectingly, I fetched him a glass of water from the pitcher and was just going to give it to him when he said, “Do you ever go to the pictures?”
I threw the water in his face and rushed upstairs to my own room, where I threw myself on the bed. But it was a narrow escape.
Well, it was along about this time that our home got all broken up and Mother and I had to move away. It was all on account of Father, because Father began to use alcohol. Of course, where we lived the law didn’t allow any one to buy alcohol and people couldn’t get it. But they could get it in indirect forms.
They say there’s a lot of alcohol in barber’s perfumes and things like that. Well, Father found out that there is alcohol in axle grease and he began smearing his face with it evenings. He only put on a little at first, just enough to make him feel bright, but then he got to putting it on thicker and thicker and he’d sit there evenings with his face covered with it and the axle grease stupefying his mind. He found, too, that there is alcohol in linseed oil and he’d go out to the barn and soak himself in it.
It got so bad that Father was soaked most of the time, and he’d just stagger round the place soaked and plastered.
So the end of it was that our home was broken up and Mother and I went to live in the city. I have promised to tell my readers all my sensations and feelings, and I suppose there are feelings that a girl gets when she goes to live in a city that she has never had before.
I am in a way ashamed to speak of it, but the truth is that for nearly two months, perhaps, I didn’t like going up and down in elevators.
And since I am telling everything, I may as well say straight out and be done with it that I don’t think the pie in the city is as good as in the country.
We hadn’t been very long in the city before I began to learn that the men are just as much wolves and hounds there as they are in the country.
A young girl, even though she weighs 175 pounds as I did, has got to be on her guard all the time. It was just the same old story, and it began right away.
The first one was the house-agent who showed us over the apartments. He managed to sidle pretty close up to me and he sort of whispered, “This is a very desirable location.” I just gave him one push in the chest that put him against the wall and I said, “You just cut that right out.”
Then there was the young feller that came to turn on the electric lights. He said: “If you wouldn’t mind holding this candle for me, I’ll adjust the meter.” “Don’t you get so darned smart,” I answered.
I found it was just the same way when I went out to look for work in the stores. The first man I went to looked up at me from his desk and he said, “Just sit down, please, and tell me what you can do.”
“You just quit that right now,” I answered, and I was out of that place in five seconds.
However, I had not been very long in the city before life all changed and I met my first husband and got married. But I want to tell my readers just how it feels for a young, inexperienced girl to find herself married to a man. — I think that will hold them down for another chapter.
chapter iii
Married Life
In what I wrote before, I told about my experiences as a young girl and how love first came into my life.
I want to talk now about my married life and I am going to speak just as plainly as I can and tell my readers things that I have never yet ventured to say to anybody.
It was a little while after Mother and I had moved into the city, on account of Father having taken to alcohol in the country, that I met my first husband. His name was Mr. Thomley, and Mother and I first met him in one of the big stores where we went to buy things for the apartment. All we knew about him was that his name was Mr. Thomley and that his salary was forty-two dollars a week, and that his people had come from Ashtabula, Ohio, and that he had had a ten-dollar raise last month and another one promised for New Year’s, and that where he boarded there wasn’t a word against him, although there were three young girls in the house, one from Kentucky. Beyond that, Mother couldn’t find out any more about him.
