Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 271
Well, they are no sooner straightened out than in come the farmer and his son Jack and Ned, Hope’s husband. The farmer seems very old and infirm, though suffused with the same air of peace and happiness as all the others. The two young men help him into an arm rocking chair. “Easy now.” Then Hiram sits down with that expression of difficulty “ay-ee-ee,” always used to symbolize stage rheumatism. There is no need for the farmer to become so suddenly old in the last act. But it was a favorite convention of 1880 to make all the old people very infirm and very happy at the end of the play.
So they begin to talk, just to pile on the happiness.
“I’m getting old, lads, I’m not the man I was.”
“Old, Father,” laughs Jack, “why, you’re the youngest and spryest of all of us—”
“I’m getting past work, boys,” says the farmer, shaking his head, “past work—”
“Work,” says Jack, “why should you work?” And as the talk goes on you get to understand that Jack will never go to sea again but will stay and work the farm and they’ve just received the “papers” that appoint him keeper of the light in his father’s place, with a pension for the old man. And Ned, Hope’s husband, is going to stay right there too. His father has bought him the farm just adjoining with house and stock and everything and he and Hope are all ready to move into it just as soon as —
But wait a minute.
His father! Lawyer Ellwood! And the terrible enmity and feud!
Oh, pshaw, just watch that feud vanish! In the fifth act of an old time melodrama a feud could be blown to the four winds like thistledown.
Like this: —
There’s a knocking at the door and Ned goes to it and comes back all smiling and he says:
“There’s someone at the door to see you, Mr. Haycroft. An old friend he says, shall he come in?”
“An old friend?” And in slips Ellwood — the farmer’s enemy, Hope’s father-in-law — looking pretty hale and hearty, but with the same touch of the old age of the fourth act visible.
He comes over and says:
“Well, Hiram, have you a shake of the hand for an old friend?”
And the farmer, rising, unsteadily:
“Why, Ephraim, it’s not your hand I should be taking; it’s your forgiveness I ought to ask for my mad folly these two years past.”
“Forgiveness,” says the lawyer; how honest and cheery he looks now, not a bit like the scoundrel he seemed in the second act— “forgiveness!”
And off he goes with his explanation.
That’s the whole purpose of the fifth act, — explanation.
And what do you think! He’d been Hiram’s friend all along and was not in earnest about wanting the money back from Hiram — didn’t want it at all! And he knew all about Hope’s love affair and Jack’s safe return with his son and was tickled to death over it — and that night two years ago when the farmer drove him out he had come over to tell the Haycrofts that the debt was cancelled, and he was going to buy a farm and start the young people, Ned and Hope, in life — and it was the cancelled mortgage that Jack was trying to sneak over and put in the drawer when his father shot him down! — and — why, dear me, how simple it all is in the fifth act. Why didn’t he explain? Why didn’t he shout out, “Hiram, I’m not a villain at all, I’m your old friend—” Oh, pshaw, who ever did explain things in the second act of a melodrama? And where would the drama be if they did?
So they are still explaining and counter-explaining and getting happier and happier when the last climax is staged.
The audience hear Martha’s voice as she comes on to the stage, talking back into the wings, “Carry him carefully there, Phœbe, for the land’s sake, if you drop that precious child—”
And in they come.
Martha and Hope! Looking as sweet and fresh as when she started out years ago in the first act. And bringing up the rear Phœbe — carrying the Baby.
Yes, believe it or not, a baby! — or the very semblance of one all bundled up in white.
Hope’s baby!
No melodrama was ever brought to its righteous end without a baby.
How the women all cuddle round it and croon over it! They put it on the farmer’s lap — and say, isn’t he just clumsy when he tries to take it — and when Rube offers to help, and Phœbe slaps his face with a dish rag, the audience just go into paroxysms of laughter.
So there you are — and everybody saved. All happy, the baby installed on the farmer’s knees and explanations flowing like autumn cider.
All that is needed now is the farmer to get off the Final Religious Sentiment which is the end and benediction of the good old melodrama. So he utters it with all due solemnity: “Ay, lads, pin your hope in Providence and in the end you land safe in port.”
It sounds as convincing as a proposition in Euclid. Then the curtain slowly comes down and the matinee audience melts away, out into the murky November evening, with the flickering gas lamps in the street, and the clanging bells of the old horse-cars in their ears, but with their souls uplifted and illuminated with the moral glow of the melodrama.
How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90. Related in the Manner of the Best Models in the Magazines
I WAS LEANING up against the mantelpiece in a lounge suit which I had made out of old ice bags, and Beryl, my wife, was seated at my feet on a low Louis Quinze tabouret which she had made out of a Finnan Haddie fishbox, when the idea of a bungalow came to both of us at the same time.
“It would be just lovely if we could do it!” exclaimed Beryl, coiling herself around my knee.
“Why not!” I replied, lifting her up a little by the ear. “With your exquisite taste—”
“And with your knowledge of material,” added Beryl, giving me a tiny pinch on the leg. “Oh, I am sure we could do it! One reads so much in all the magazines about people making summer bungalows and furnishing them for next to nothing. Oh, do let us try, Dogyard!”
We talked over our project all night, and the next morning we sallied forth to try to find a site for our new home. As Beryl (who was brimming over with fun as the result of talking all night) put it, “The first thing is to get the ground.”
Here fortune favored us. We had hardly got to the edge of the town when Beryl suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, look, Dogyard, look, there’s exactly the site!” It was a piece of waste land on the edge of a gully with a brickyard on one side of it and a gravel pit on the other. It had no trees on it, and it was covered with ragged heaps of tin cans, old newspapers, and stones, and a litter of broken lumber.
Beryl’s quick eye saw the possibilities of the situation at once. “Oh, Dogyard!” she exclaimed, “isn’t it just sweet? We can clear away all this litter and plant a catalpa tree to hide the brickyard and a hedge of copernicus or nux vomica to hide the gravel pit, and some bright flowers to hide the hedge. I wish I had brought some catalpa seed. They grow so quickly.”
“We’d better at least wait,” I said, “till we have bought the ground.”
And here a sudden piece of good fortune awaited us. It so happened that the owner of the lot was on the spot at the time — he was seated on a stone whittling a stick while we were talking, and presented himself to us. After a short discussion he agreed to sell us the ground for one dollar in cash and fifty cents on a three years’ mortgage. The deed of sale was written out on the spot and stamped with a two-cent stamp, and the owner of the lot took his departure with every expression of good will. And the magic sense of being owners of our own ground rendered us both jubilant.
That evening Beryl, seated on her little stool at my feet, took a pencil and paper and set down triumphantly a statement of the cost of our bungalow up to date. I introduce it here as a help to readers who may hope to follow in our footsteps:
Ground site
$1.50
Stamp for mortgage
.02
Car fare
.10
Total
$1.62
I checked over Beryl’s arithmetic twice and found it strictly correct.
Next morning we commenced work in earnest. While Beryl cleared away the cans and litter, I set to work with spade and shovel excavating our cellar and digging out the foundations. And here I must admit that I had no light task. I can only warn those who wish to follow in our footsteps that they must be prepared to face hard work.
Owing perhaps to my inexperience, it took me the whole of the morning to dig out a cellar forty feet long and twenty feet wide. Beryl, who had meantime cleaned up the lot, stacked the lumber, lifted away the stones and planted fifty yards of hedge, was inclined to be a little impatient. But I reminded her that a contractor working with a gang of men and two or three teams of horses would have taken a whole week to do what I did in one morning.
I admitted that my work was not equal to the best records as related in the weekly home journals, where I have often computed that they move 100,000 cubic feet of earth in one paragraph, but at least I was doing my best. Beryl, whose disappointment never lasts, was all smiles again in a moment, and rewarded me by throwing herself around my neck and giving me a hug.
That afternoon I gathered up all the big stones and built them into walls around the cellar with partition walls across it, dividing it into rooms and compartments. I leveled the floor and packed it tight with sand and gravel and dug a drain ten feet deep from the cellar to the gully about thirty feet away.
There being still a good hour or so of daylight left, I dug a cistern four feet wide and twenty feet deep. I was looking round for something more to dig by moonlight, but Beryl put her foot down (on my head while I was in the drain) and forbade me to work any more for fear I might be fatigued.
Next morning we were able to begin our building in good earnest. On our way we stopped at the fifteen cent store for necessary supplies, and bought one hammer, fifteen cents; a saw, fifteen cents; half a gallon of nails, fifteen cents; a crane, fifteen cents; a derrick for hoisting, fifteen cents, and a needle and thread, for sewing on the roof, fifteen cents.
As an advice to young builders, I may say that I doubt if we were quite wise in all our purchases. The fifteen cent derrick is too light for the work, and the extra expenditure for the heavier kind (the twenty-five cent crane) would have been justified. The difference in cost is only (approximately) ten cents, and the efficiency of the big crane is far greater.
On arriving at our ground we were delighted to find that our masonry was well set and the walls firm and solid, while the catalapa trees were well above the ground and growing rapidly. We set to work at once to build in earnest.
We had already decided to utilize for our bungalow the waste material which lay on our lot. I drew Beryl’s attention to the fact that if a proper use were made of the material wasted in building there would be no need to buy any material at all. “The elimination of waste,” I explained, “by the utilization of all by-products before they have time to go by, is the central principle of modern industrial organization.”
But observing that Beryl had ceased to listen to me, I drew on my carpenter’s apron which I had made out of a piece of tar-paper, and set to work. My first care was to gather up all the loose lumber that lay upon and around our ground site, and saw it up into neatly squared pieces about twenty feet long. Out of these I made the joists, the studding, the partitions, rafters, and so on, which formed the frame of the house.
Putting up the house took practically the whole morning. Beryl, who had slipped on a potato bag over her dress, assisted me by holding up the side of the house while I nailed on the top.
By the end of the afternoon we had completed the sides of our house, which we made out of old newspapers soaked in glue and rolled flat. The next day we put on the roof, which was made of tin cans cut open and pounded flat.
For our hardwood floors, mantels, etc., we were fortunate in finding a pile of hardwood on a neighboring lot which had apparently been overlooked, and which we carried over proudly to our bungalow after dark. That same night we carried over jubilantly some rustic furniture which we had found, quite neglected, lying in a nearby cottage, the lock of which oddly enough, was opened quite easily with the key of Beryl’s suitcase.
The rest of our furniture — plain tables, dressers, etc. — I was able to make from ordinary pine lumber which I obtained by knocking down a board fence upon an adjacent lot. In short, the reader is able to picture our bungalow after a week of labor, complete in every respect and only awaiting our occupation on the next day.
Seated that evening in our boarding house, with Beryl coiled around me, I calculated the entire cost of our enterprise — including ground site, lumber, derricks, cranes, glue, string, tin-tacks and other materials — as four dollars and ninety cents.
In return for it we had a pretty seven-roomed house, artistic in every respect, with living-room, bed-rooms, a boudoir, a den, a snuggery, a doggery — in short, the bungalow of which so many young people have dreamed.
Seated together that evening, Beryl and I were full of plans for the future. We both have a passionate love of animals and, like all country-bred people, a longing for the life of a farm. So we had long since decided to keep poultry. We planned to begin in a small way, and had brought home that evening from the fifteen-cent store a day-old chicken, such as are now so widely sold.
We put him in a basket beside the radiator in a little flannel coat that Beryl had made for him, and we fed him with a warm mash made of breakfast food and gravel. Our printed directions that we got with him told us that a fowl eats two ounces of grain per day and on that should lay five eggs in a week. I was easily able to prove to Beryl by a little plain arithmetic that if we fed this fellow 4 ounces a day he would lay 10 eggs in a week, or at 8 ounces per day he would lay 20 eggs in a week.
Beryl, who was seized at once with a characteristic fit of enthusiasm, suggested that we stick 16 ounces a day into him and begin right now. I had to remind her laughingly that at 8 ounces a day the fellow would probably be working up to a capacity, and carrying what we call in business his peak load. “The essential factor in modern business,” I told her, “is to load yourself up to the peak and stay there.”
In short, there was no end to our rosy dreams. In our fancy we saw ourselves in our bungalow, surrounded by hens, bees, cows and dogs, with hogs and goats nestling against our feet. Unfortunately our dreams were destined to be shattered. Up to this point our experience with building our bungalow had followed along after all the best models, and had even eclipsed them. But from now on we met a series of disasters of which we had had no warning. It is a pity that I cannot leave our story at this point.
On arriving at our bungalow next day we found notices posted up forbidding all trespassers, and two sour-looking men in possession. We learned that our title to the ground site was worthless, as the man from whom we had bought it had been apparently a mere passer-by. It appeared also that a neighboring contractor was making serious difficulties about our use of his material. It was divulged further that we had been mistaken in thinking that we had taken our rustic furniture from an empty cottage. There were people living in it, but they happened to be asleep when Beryl moved the furniture.
As for our hen — there is no doubt that keeping fowls is enormously profitable. It must be so, when one considers the millions of eggs consumed every day. But it demands an unremitting attention and above all — memory. If you own a hen you must never forget it — you must keep on saying to yourself— “How is my hen?” This was our trouble. Beryl and I were so preoccupied with our accumulated disaster, that we left our one-day-old chick behind the radiator and never thought of him for three weeks. He was then gone. We prefer to think that he flew away.
Softening the Stories for the Children. But Don’t Do It: They Prefer Them Rough
“WHAT IS THE story that you are reading, Peggy?” I asked of a wide-eyed child of eight, who sat buried in a story book.
“Little Red Riding Hood,” she answered.
“Have you come to the part,” I asked, “where the grandmother gets eaten?”
“She didn’t get eaten!” the child protested in surprise.
“Yes, — the wolf comes to her cottage and knocks at the door and she thinks that it is Little Red Riding Hood and opens the door and the wolf eats her.”
She shook her head.
“That’s not it at all in this book,” she said.
So I took a look at the page before her and I read:
“Then the wolf pushed open the door of the cottage and rushed in but the grandmother was not there as she happened not to be at home.”
Exactly! The grandmother, being a truly up-to-date grandmother, was probably out on the golf links, or playing bridge with a few other grandmothers like herself.
At any rate she was not there and so she escaped getting eaten by the wolf. In other words, Little Red Riding Hood, like all the good old stories that have come down from the bad old times, is having to give way to the tendencies of a human age. It is supposed to be too horrible for the children to read. The awful fate of the grandmother, chawed up by the wolf, — or, no, swallowed whole like a Malpecque oyster, is too terrible for them to hear. So the story, like a hundred other stories and pictures, has got to be censored, reëdited, and incidentally, — spoiled.
All of which rests on a fundamental error as to literature and as to children. There is no need to soften down a story for them. They like it rough.
“In the real story,” I said to the little girl, “the grandmother was at home, and the wolf rushed in and ate her in one mouthful!”
“Oh! that’s much better!” she exclaimed.
“And then, afterwards, when the hunters came in, they killed the wolf and cut his stomach open and the grandmother jumped out and was saved!”
“Oh, isn’t that splendid!” cried the child.
In other words, all the terror that grown-up people see in this sort of story is there for grown-up people only. The children look clean over it, or past it, or under it. In reality, the vision of the grandmother feebly defending herself against the savage beast, or perhaps leaping round the room to get away from him, and jumping up on top of the grandfather’s clock — is either horrible, or weird, or pathetic, or even comic, as we may happen to see it. But to the children it is just a story, — and a good one, — that’s all.
