Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 257
Three or four brook trout, small yet delicious in appearance, lay on the grass in a shaded spot near by and proved that their angling had not been in vain. The fragrant smoke of two Havana cigars rose softly on the afternoon air.
“A wonderful outing!” murmured the solicitor. “I don’t know when I have enjoyed a day more.”
“Delightful!” agreed the inspector, “a beautiful little spot to come to. I’m glad to know of it.” Then of a sudden a thought seemed to strike him. “Dear me!” he said, “I am afraid that we’ve been forgetting something.”
“What?” asked Mr. Everett.
“Why, the body that you said you noticed early this morning somewhere in this wood!”
Just then a voice from close beside them interrupted their conversation.
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” said a man emerging from the trees, “I’m rather afraid I’ve lost my way. Can you direct me to Finchley Junction?”
The inspector and the solicitor looked up.
They saw before them a man of middle age or even elderly, wearing a light gray suit and a gray Homburg hat. They observed that he wore white spats and that a heavy gold watch chain crossed his waistcoat.
“Finchley Junction?” said the inspector. “Yes, keep on directly up the brook and then along the first road to the right.”
“Thank you,” said the elderly gentleman. “I fear I had fallen asleep and must have slept a long time. Good afternoon.”
The police inspector and the solicitor exchanged glances.
“The mystery,” said Higgins, “is solved.”
“Ah, I grasp it,” answered the solicitor. “The man was merely asleep!”
“Never mind,” said Higgins. “After all, at this time of year, it’s far more pleasant to have it end that way.”
Little Lessons in Journalism
THE FEATURE REPORTER Interviews the Captain of Industry
What really happened. . . . The high class reporter, whose specialty is for doing Pen Pictures of Personalities for The Evening Limelight is sent to interview the great self-made Captain of Industry, Mr. O. Wattaswine. He finds the magnate seated in his shirt sleeves in his office, chewing a cigar. The office room is about as plain and unadorned as the waiting room of a trolley car station. After an angry exclamation and a few grunts, Mr. Wattaswine kicks the reporter out of his office.
The trained journalist having thus got his “material” retires to his office and writes up the incident in the following terms:
meeting a magnate
It was with a feeling of something like reverential awe that one passed from the waiting room to the deep quiet of the inner office.
“He will see you now,” said the young (man) secretary who had taken one’s card.
They were simple words and yet somehow they thrilled one to one’s innermost fiber. He would see one now! This man, at whose bidding half the industry of the continent must stand still or go sideways, would see one.
One entered. For a moment one’s eyes felt unaccustomed to the half light of the room. One looked about at the paneled room, richly wainscoted, the lustrous mahogany table that took the place of an office desk. One noticed the somber Rembrandt that hung opposite to one, and the exquisite Carlo Dolci, a veritable gem, beside the window. One’s eyes caught with delight the Piccolomini that stood, not more than an inch high, on the mantel and yet indubitably a Piccolomini. Nor need one have been a connoisseur, nor even a virtuoso to recognize instantly the miniature that stood beside it.
The great Magnate of Industry turned slightly in his chair and looked at one.
One had time to make a lightning appraisal.
The head, poised on the massive shoulders, recalled somehow the Ercole Farnese of the Vatican. The brow brought back in a haunting way the portrait of Francis Bacon, at Magdalen College (upstairs at the back of the hall) while the eye suggested at once the well-known portrait of Peter the Great in the Museum at Yakutsk (downstairs first turn to the left).
One scanned the face, broad, impassive, expansive in a vain attempt to seize and hold it.
One felt baffled.
Then the mouth opened.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said.
He spoke with the quick tone of a man not accustomed to be thwarted.
One sat down.
He turned in his chair until he faced one full. He put out his hand. One took it and shook it.
“Good morning,” one said.
“Wet, ain’t it,” he replied. The words were simple, even ordinary, and yet one felt the peculiar power of them. Here was a man immersed in the quiet of his inner office, his complicated brain busy with the finance of the whole world. Yet he knew that it was wet. Somewhere in the recesses of that busy consciousness the idea that it was wet had been registered and held with the tenacious grip that marked the man. Not till it was dry would he let it go.
He said nothing further but remained as if waiting for one to speak.
One felt non-plussed. One wished naturally to speak. Yet it would have seemed the worst of Mauvais gout, an unpardonable faux pas to begin at once to talk of finance. One felt in an impasse in which savoir faire would seem to dictate a detour.
One began to speak of the art treasures in the room.
“What exquisite objets d’art!” one exclaimed. “Your Piccolomini is perfect.”
“My which?” he asked.
One detected at once the quiet vein of sarcasm underlying the simple words, only two of them, and one felt it wiser to shift the topic. One realized that with such a man there was nothing for it but direct speech, for a plunge in medias res, and immediate ad hoc, in short a statement of one’s business in flagrante delictu.
“The Evening Limelight,” one said, “is anxious to ask you, Mr. Wattaswine, what is your opinion of the present expansion of business?”
“How’s that?” he said.
One realized the quiet astuteness, the characteristic acumen behind the remark. He wanted to know not only what it was but how it was.
“Of what,” one explained, “are the present buoyant conditions an index?”
“A which?” he said.
It is typical of the man that every word must be defined, must be explained, must, if need be, be spelled. Such a mind has no room for inaccuracy. It is too large. The inaccuracy, once let loose in it, would never be found again.
One hyper-simplified oneself.
“Is this good business going to last?”
The great man looked at one — calmly, dispassionately, and rather by the circular movement of the eye than by alteration in the neck — he looked at one.
“Search me,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t know! One sat amazed at the candor of it: one could hardly sit. He didn’t know, and he knew that he didn’t know. The whole of his labyrinthine mind was focused into the phrase.
One was searching for some tactful way to bring the interview to a close, some neat jeu d’esprit that would allow one to retire, when one was spared the trouble of looking for it.
The great man gave it to one himself.
“If that is all you want,” he said, “I guess you can get out of this office.”
He hit a bell.
“Show him the elevator,” he said.
Could quiet resolution assume a more tactful, more tasteful form? The man’s mind was too broad, his spirit too humanitarian to tolerate a dismissal. Instinctively he found a way out of the dilemma. It occurred to him that perhaps one had not seen an elevator: one could be shown one.
One was.
II
The Tabloid Journal Learns that Ella Smith Has Eloped with the Hired Man
What really happened was this. Ella Smith, a grown up girl of about nineteen or twenty or twenty-five, or around there, went off one afternoon with the hired man. Nobody noticed it much at the time. Mr. Smith, who owns a fifty acre farm about a thousand miles from New York and four miles from any other railway station was picking up pumpkins in the field when one of the younger children came and said, “Say, pa, Ella’s skipped off with Bill and ma says they’ve run away.” Mr. Smith said, “Well, Gosh ding that girl anyway!” In the latter part of the afternoon Ella and Bill were back again. They’d been over and got married before a justice of the peace at Centerville. They were back in time to help with the last load of pumpkins that came up to the barn. Ella is a quiet dub but the hired man they called Bill had come out from England only a year before and he had evidently had some schooling. As a matter of fact he had attended a night school in Bolton, Lancashire, where he took a course in plumbing, and a course in electric fixtures and internal heat. It was because he came from England that the Tabloid Weekly saw its chance to write up the episode thus:
HAPPY HOME BLASTED
dashing high school brunette elopes with oxford graduate
Inspired with desperate love which led her to disregard the agonized appeal of her parents, Ella Smith, a beautiful high school graduate of seven-teen, deliberately smashed a happy home by going, with William Rufus Montgomery, before a justice of the peace, a reckless young Oxford graduate, leaving her beautiful home near Centerville and getting married.
Pretty little Ella in conversation with a Tabloid reporter soon after her flight said, “I just had to do it. I love Billy so much.”
It appears that Mr. Smith at the time of the elopement was down in his pumpkin field, presumably playing golf. His wife, whose name is Mrs. Smith, was occupied indoors, probably sorting out calling cards from yesterday.
The whole neighborhood has been thrown into the wildest confusion. A posse, in fact half a dozen posses, of local farmers armed to the teeth with shotguns in their shirt sleeves are scouring the woods while the police are occupying every dive and speakeasy in Centerville that they can find. Mrs. Smith, the mother, is said to be prostrated with grief, absolutely flat.
The young man in question whose name is given as William Rufus Montgomery is described as “tall, short, dark but with spots of light.”
It is thought that the couple are making for the Canadian border, either that or the Mexican frontier or else Cuba.
Two Hours Later. Escorted by a large concourse of happy friends and falling into the arms of her weeping mother, pretty little Ella Smith all in tears sobbed out her appeal for forgiveness on her return home whither she had been tracked by bulldogs.
Ella and her new husband, handsome young William R. Montgomery, now reconciled with the young bride’s parents, will take up their home with the bride’s family, occupying the room over the summer kitchen.
More Literary Scandals
REPUTATIONS OF ADAM, Noah, and Tut-ankh-Amen Shaken to the Very Base
It appears that in England another great literary scandal has just broken out. Somebody has written up — in veiled form — the life of some Royal Duke or Royal Prince or Royal Person, and a terrific storm of discussion has ensued. I am not sure of the details of the matter, but it seems to be one of those biographical cyclones that sweep over the reading public every six months. The reputation of everybody concerned has been shaken to its base and the public is having a glorious time.
It appears from the book that the Countess of X (who has been dead only ninety years) was very seriously compromised with Prince Q (buried in 1840) and that Lord P (only 38 in 1819) was in reality a half-brother of the ex-King of Corfu who died of hydrophobia at Baden-Baden in 1850.
Things like these keep people in London awake all night.
The publishers of the new book wrap themselves up in mystery and deny any knowledge of anything.
But the outlook in the commercial sense is so encouraging that we may look forward to further sensations in the near future, as thus reported in the press of the next few months:
literary sensation for january: reputation of adam blasted
Terrific excitement has been aroused in the book world by the publication of a new work, ostensibly a novel, under the title “The First Gardener,” which is in reality a thinly veiled attack on Adam.
In the book Adam, who appears under the disguised name of McAdam, holds a position as caretaker in a zoological garden from which the public are excluded and which is plainly meant for the Garden of Eden. The book is intended to expose McAdam’s utter ignorance of gardening and lack of any qualification for the care of animals, McAdam having obtained his post merely, so it is implied, for the lack of a better man.
Keen controversy has broken out in literary circles as to whether the strictures in the book are justified by the facts. Among hostile critics of the book, Dean Ding Dong reminds his readers that after all, thanks to Adam’s care, we have the animals with us now and as the Dean says in his caustic way, “Look at them!”
Several of the leading scientists, however, take the other side and claim that the animals on the whole are a bum lot, much distorted from what they might have been by Adam’s ignorance of veterinary surgery.
Still greater interest centers around the personality of Eve, disguised as Eva in the book. It is hinted — indeed, more than hinted — that Eva was never properly married in church to McAdam. The sweeping effect of this indictment in its consequences for the whole human race is only too obvious.
The story closely parallels the accepted story of Adam and Eve at every point. Mr. Satin, Eva’s friend, who spends much time with the McAdams in their garden, is thought by the reviewers to represent a carefully veiled attack on Satan. The sale reached half a million copies last week.
literary sensation for february: reputation of noah exploded
“Life on the Ocean Wave.” This book, which has created the principal furor of the London season, is plainly and simply nothing more than an attack on the life of Noah. It is framed as a work of fiction, but the disguise is not difficult to remove, in so much as Captain Noherty is in command of a ship called the Ark which sails from Port Arrowroot. Keen-eyed reviewers at once called the public’s attention to the close resemblance between Noah and Noherty, Ararat and Arrowroot, Shem and Jim, and so forth.
In addition to showing Noah, or Noherty, as a hopelessly incompetent navigator, the novel represents him as having been twice married, so that Shem and Ham were only half brothers to Japheth. This last innuendo has excited London up to the boiling point.
The new book is having an enormous circulation, little else being talked of in fashionable and literary circles.
literary sensation for march: daring expose of tut-ankh-amen
A work professing to be a novel, but more daring in its personal denunciation than any of the recent literary sensations, has just appeared in the form of an attack on the reputation of Tut-ankh-Amen. The book is from cover to cover a scathing diatribe on the late King of Egypt, masked under the title “The Life and Times of Touting Common King of Ghejypt.”
The book presents a picture of the late ruler of Egypt very different from that which has been hitherto accepted as history. Most people have supposed that Tut-ankh-Amen was born in the year 3431 b.c. or the Egyptian year, 22,608; the new novel daringly changes the date of the king’s birth and sets him back five years, which makes him 105 years old at the time of his tenth marriage instead of one hundred, as most of us have thought.
The number of the king’s wives, hitherto put at twenty-five, is boosted up to two hundred and twenty-five. There are, moreover, chapters of intimate gossip between Tut-ankh-Amen and Methuselah that reveal things about both of them that had hitherto only been whispered. There are also some deliciously naughty chapters about Tut-ankh-Amen’s mother-in-law (aged 203) which all London is eating up with avidity.
In spite of the literary sensation and the commercial profit effected by the appearance of the “Life of Touting Common,” a certain amount of antagonistic feeling has been called forth against the future issue of such a publication. “After all,” says a distinguished M.P., “we ought to remember that the late king was the sovereign of a friendly and allied state with which our history has been closely connected. Whether true or not, the innuendoes of the book cannot but fail to be distasteful, indeed painful, to his descendants, of whom we believe there are several hundred thousand now in Soudan.”
On the other hand, it is also claimed that our current fiction needs just this kind of brightening up and that we want not less but more of it. There is room, it is said, for a snappy little book on Nebuchadnezzar and for a bright little skit on The Thirteenth Ming Dynasty of China. Indeed, it is whispered that an eminent firm is preparing to bring out a whole series to be called “Naughty Old Men” and sweep the market clean.
Who Reads What
TELL ME WHO You Are and I’ll Tell You What You Read
A little while ago the Psychological Department of one of the big colleges sent out a questionnaire to find out what kind of people read what kind of books. They sent the questions out to business men, to clergymen, to stenographers, to bootleggers — to all kinds of people.
So far as I know, the answers have not all come in yet or are not yet all sorted. But as far as the result goes, I am quite certain that I can give advance information as to what it will be, or at least as to what it ought to be. Let me take a few types of people and show the kind of things that they read.
I
Sophy of the Soda-Fountain
Here, for example, is the case of Sophy of the soda-fountain. All day she stands behind the fountain dishing out chocolate sundaes and ice cream eclairs. In her ear is all the noise of Broadway, in her eye the glitter of a thousand lights. And in the pauses of her labor she hops up on a high stool and draws from a shelf behind her a tattered book in a paper cover, and reads this — :
