Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 301
No music, no laughter about,
Oh, father, you put our whole house on the bum,
Oh, father, please, father, go out.
TUM AND PLAY DOLF. WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN MINIATURE GOLF GETS IN ITS EFFECT ON THE HUMAN MIND
A COUPLE OF little boys stood looking in at the lighted and attractive entrance of the miniature golf course. Little boys — well, that is what I took them to be at first sight. Their little frilled dresses, their bare knees with little white socks and slippers, seemed to belong to any age from four up to ten. But at a second look I saw that their faces were those of grown-up men.
“Is ‘oo goin’ in?” asked one of the other.
The other nodded. He had a piece of money held tight in one hand and a candy stick in the other.
“Tum on,” said the first.
Then, as the two little boys — or little boy-men — passed under the bright lights at the arched entrance, I recognized them as no “little boys” at all. One of them was the general manager of one of our banks and the other, the little fellow with the candy stick, one of his chief directors.
“ ’Oo wait outside, nurse,” they called back, and then I noticed for the first time a neat-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform, standing beside a large double perambulator.
Let me stop here to explain that I had been abroad for over a year and had just returned home. I knew nothing of the sudden and universal craze for Tom Thumb or Miniature golf which had invaded this entire country. Still less could I guess, or for the matter of that, still less could anybody guess, the extraordinary effect which it was producing upon the mentality of the present generation.
I stood looking with amazement at the varied concourse of people jostling eagerly about the entrance. Many of them were undoubtedly children, while others, though indubitably grown up in years and stature, seemed to have assumed the garb, or at any rate the expression, of little children. One saw a jumble of sailor suits, little frilled frocks and all the insignia of childhood.
I turned for a moment to the woman in the nurse’s uniform who still stood slightly aside from the entrance waiting beside the large double perambulator.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “I think I know the two — the two young folks in your charge. Did you bring them up from down town?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “I always call at the bank just at closing time for Master Charles and Master Freddy. You see, sir, Master Charles is general manager and he always rides down to his work in his own car in the morning as he has for years; but after the bank closes, sir, nothing will do Master Charles but he must ride up in this perambulator with Master Freddy. They say they take all the pennies they can find out of the cashier’s drawer when he isn’t looking, so as to have money to get in. I think they look real cute to-day in their new frocks, don’t you, sir?”
I remained lost in amazement, without an answer.
I was roused out of my reverie by a voice beside me.
“Queer sight, isn’t it?”
I turned to recognize the tall figure of my friend Dr. Chipton, the distinguished physician. His fine figure, his keen face and his neat and sober costume contrasted favourably with the motley juvenility around us.
“Queer sight, isn’t it?” he repeated, as he shook hands. “You’ve been away from town, haven’t you, so it must be all new to you. But it certainly is the most extraordinary phenomenon of the kind which I can recall. It is evidently a form of mob aberration, one of those phases of collective psychology which we are just beginning to investigate.”
The doctor’s eye rested on the entering crowd.
“Odd,” he kept murmuring, “very odd.”
Yet somehow as I watched him the doctor himself seemed to be feeling a special fascination in the motley liveliness, the blatant childishness of the spectacle.
He turned to me again.
“Would ‘oo like,” he began, and then with a frown, correcting himself, “Would you like to come in and look around for a minute? I dot tum pennies — I mean, I have some money.”
We entered.
I need not dwell on the details of the spectacle that confronted us on entering into the covered and lighted premises of the miniature golf. It was like passing through the portals of a baby world. Little wee hillocks of grass were interspersed with tiny roads and little trees. All of a sudden it brought back to me the world as I knew it at three years old, far beyond the mists of present memory. There it all was, the little square of green, the little frames of field and trees, all vague in distance to the infant mind, with neither proportion nor direction; something seen before the age of calculated distance, and of a brightness and sweetness long since lost in the arid pathways of life. . . .
“Goo-goo . . .” I began, and then with an effort of will checked the queer gurgling infantile language that seemed to come to my lips. . . . What was it I wanted to say? “Booful?” Was that the word? I gathered my faculties together and looked about me.
The scene before me, I repeat, is at present so familiar to so many thousands of people that I need not describe it. But to me it was all new, and it came to me with an unwonted suddenness which perhaps added to the innocence of my vision. It was not only that the landscape was transformed, but the people — all the little people, if they were little — all the children, if they were children, who flocked up and down the queer obstructions and alley-ways, chasing little balls about with tiny clubs.
I could see my two friends who had arrived together in the perambulator, in eager rivalry over a tiny tunnel that seemed to them no doubt a vast cavern. “Me ahead of ‘oo,” shouted Charlie, the bank president, while little Freddy turned angrily with his uplifted stick. “ ’Oo don’t play fair!” he cried, half sobbing. “ ’Oo hit ‘oo ball out of turn.”
Little scenes like this were being duplicated all over the course. The grown-up children seemed to be alternately laughing and crying, fighting and making friends with the happy carelessness of childhood. Little girls of fifty stood coyly round with admiring glances at funny little fat boys of sixty. “Would ‘oo like a peppermint tandy?” I heard one little boy (a judge in the outside world) saying to a pudgy little girl in light blue, whose grandchildren to my knowledge were already entering the university.
Grown-up attendants in monkey uniforms, carrying little bags of clubs, moved about among the players, aiding their game and composing their little quarrels.
One of them approached us. “Like to play, sir?” he asked the doctor. “Like to take some clubs?” His manner was firm, almost compelling, his eye fixed and direct.
“No, no,” said the doctor hastily, almost rudely, it seemed to me. He spoke like a man thrusting away temptation.
I turned to him. “What do you make of it all?” I asked the doctor.
He seemed to hesitate a moment before he answered, and his mouth seemed to frame the word “me” and “oo” several times before he could get started into articulate speech.
“I don’t think it’s hard to explain,” he said at last. “The psychological basis of it has been familiar for a long time. We know all about the extraordinary power of visual suggestion and the still greater power of collective hallucination. Look at India where hundreds of people sit round and see a man — who isn’t there at all — climb up into the air by a ladder which doesn’t exist. So here, all this collective fun and childishness — —” He broke suddenly off. “Would ‘oo like to take a ‘tick and ‘tart a game? . . .” Then he murmured, “Damn it,” and seemed to retire into himself. But I noticed that his hands were beginning to move in a queer uncontrolled way.
“There’s more to it than that,” continued the doctor after a pause, speaking now in a quiet and restrained voice. “Don’t you see that in real truth the world of the child is a prettier and brighter world than yours and mine? Don’t you see that it is a sort of lost paradise from which long ago we were ruthlessly expelled? The pretty world of infancy undisfigured by distance, by calculation, a world of unconscious freedom among the tossing flowers and the towering grass, a world without sorrow or death — this is what even the least imaginative is brought back to by the neat alleys and little crooked pathways of this place.
“Not but what,” the doctor continued, and he seemed as he spoke to have entirely recovered his mental poise, “there may be danger in it, mental danger. It may be a first sign. I’ve often wondered, you know, whether this machine age of ours isn’t too great a strain upon the human brain — whether we aren’t in danger of a sort of collective breakdown.”
“Have a set of clubs, sir,” said the attendant again. Something in his fixed gaze and steady voice seemed to suggest a sort of magic, something Eastern, a fascination hard to resist.
“No, no,” said the doctor quickly. “Not to-day, I tell you, not to-day. . . .” Then he resumed: “You can see the medical consequences of this thing also. You see that little boy there, yes, on the right, the one they are calling Eddie — well, not really a little boy, of course, he’s a middle-aged man, but if your eyes are getting as disturbed as mine are he looks like a little boy, at any rate, in that queer little suit with his hat on sideways. Well, anyway, he is, or he was till yesterday, one of our biggest men, president of an important railway, though I admit he always had an extraordinary leaning toward sport. What do you think he proposed yesterday at the board meeting?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the attendant, coming up again. “Were you reaching out for clubs?”
“No, no,” said the doctor, almost fiercely, “I was only gesticulating.”
The attendant moved aside, his eye still upon us.
The doctor sighed and continued: “Why, he actually proposed that instead of the present equipment they substitute a little wee railway with cars only two feet high and little wee tin stations with wooden poplar trees. They say the directors nearly voted it — a lot of them play this thing, and of course it has a damn queer sort of fascination, hasn’t it?”
“Clubs, sir,” said the attendant.
“No,” the doctor almost screamed— “and you see that other one playing near him, yes, the one he called Percy, well, that’s a leading stockbroker whom perhaps you know. Would you believe it, he proposed to the exchange yesterday that they use in future a tiny little house made of cardboard, with money all made of little wee pieces of tin. . . . He got so worked up over it they thought of taking him to the hospital — —”
The doctor broke off with a wild queer laugh, quite unlike his usual voice or intonation,
“ — though, as to the hospital,” he said, “it did strike me that it would be a damn funny idea — eh, what? — to do away with the huge fool building we have now, and have a tiny little wee hospital of beaverboard — you know — just big enough to crawl into — eh, what? — with cute little wee beds — —”
“Clubs, sir?” said the attendant.
“Yes, yes,” yelled the doctor, “by all means dim me a club. Mee doin’ a play dolf. Me doin’ a play — —”
He began throwing off his coat and trying to roll up his sleeves, and then:
“Dimme a club too,” I shouted. “Me play dolf wiz ‘oo! Look at booful dolf ground!”
And with that I waved my hand in wild excitement at the prospect.
Waved it and hit it. Hit it, I suppose, on the little railing or fence outside the entrance to the golf course. For that is where I found myself standing when the knocking of my hand against the wood brought me back to myself.
I looked around. There were people going in and out, suddenly grown prosaic and ordinary. There was a neat-looking woman waiting for two little boys — lights, people, the tall doctor standing beside me — and beyond that, nothing.
The gates of the lost world of childhood had closed again.
HO FOR HAPPINESS. A PLEA FOR LIGHTER AND BRIGHTER LITERATURE
“WHY IS IT,” said some one in conversation the other day, “that all the really good short stories seem to contain so much sadness and suffering and to turn so much on crime and wickedness? Why can’t they be happy all the time?”
No one present was able to answer the question. But I thought it over afterwards, and I think I see why it is so. A happy story, after all, would make pretty dull reading. It may be all right in real life to have everything come along just right, with happiness and good luck all the time, but in fiction it would never do.
Stop, let me illustrate the idea. Let us make up a story which is happy all the time and contrast it as it goes along with the way things happen in the really good stories.
Harold Herald never forgot the bright October morning when the mysterious letter, which was to alter his whole life, arrived at his downtown office.
His stenographer brought it in to him and laid it on his desk.
“A letter for you,” she said. Then she kissed him and went out again.
Harold sat for some time with the letter in front of him. Should he open it? After all, why not?
He opened the letter. Then the idea occurred to him to read it. “I might as well,” he thought.
“Dear Mr. Herald” (so ran the letter), “if you will have the kindness to call at this office, we shall be happy to tell you something to your great advantage.”
The letter was signed John Scribman. The paper on which it was written bore the heading “Scribman, Scribman & Company, Barristers, Solicitors, etc., No. 13 Yonge St.”
A few moments later saw Harold on his way to the lawyers’ office. Never had the streets looked brighter and more cheerful than in this perfect October sunshine. In fact, they never had been.
Nor did Harold’s heart misgive him and a sudden suspicion enter his mind as Mr. Scribman, the senior partner, rose from his chair to greet him. Not at all. Mr. Scribman was a pleasant, middle-aged man whose countenance behind his gold spectacles beamed with goodwill and good nature.
“Ah, Mr. Harold Herald,” he said, “or perhaps you will let me call you simply Harold. I didn’t like to give you too much news in one short letter. The fact is that our firm has been entrusted to deliver to you a legacy, or rather a gift. . . . Stop, stop!” continued the lawyer, as Harold was about to interrupt with questions, “. . . our client’s one request was that his name would not be divulged. He thought it would be so much nicer for you just to have the money and not know who gave it to you.”
Harold murmured his assent.
Mr. Scribman pushed a bell.
“Mr. Harold Herald’s money, if you please,” he said.
A beautiful stenographer wearing an American Beauty rose at her waist entered the room carrying a silken bag.
“There is half a million dollars here in five-hundred-dollar bills,” said the lawyer. “At least, we didn’t count them, but that is what our client said. Did you take any?” he asked the stenographer.
“I took out a few last night to go to the theatre with,” admitted the girl with a pretty blush.
“Monkey!” said Mr. Scribman. “But that’s all right. Don’t bother with a receipt, Harold. Come along with me: my daughter is waiting for us down below in the car to take us to lunch.”
Harold thought he had never seen a more beautiful girl than Alicia Scribman. In fact he hadn’t. The luxurious motor, the faultless chauffeur, the presence of the girl beside him and the bag of currency under the seat, the sunlit streets filled with happy people with the bright feeling of just going back to work, full of lunch — the sight of all this made Harold feel as if life were indeed a pleasant thing.
“After all,” he mused, “how little is needed for our happiness! Half a million dollars, a motor-car, a beautiful girl, youth, health — surely one can be content with that . . .”
It was after lunch at the beautiful country home of the Scribmans that Harold found himself alone for a few minutes with Miss Scribman.
He rose, walked over to her and took her hand, kneeling on one knee and pulling up his pants so as not to make a crease in them.
“Alicia!” he said. “Ever since I first saw you, I have loved you. I want to ask you if you will marry me?”
“Oh, Harold,” said Alicia, leaning forward and putting both her arms about his neck with one ear against the upper right-hand end of his cheekbone. “Oh, Harold!”
“I can, as you know,” continued Harold, “easily support you.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Alicia. “As a matter of fact, I have much more than that of my own, to be paid over to me when I marry.”
“Then you will marry me?” said Harold rapturously.
“Yes, indeed,” said Alicia, “and it happens so fortunately just now, as papa himself is engaged to marry again and so I shall be glad to have a new home of my own. Papa is marrying a charming girl, but she is so much younger than he is that perhaps she would not want a grownup stepdaughter.”
Harold made his way back to the city in a tumult of happiness. Only for a moment was his delirium of joy brought to a temporary standstill.
As he returned to his own apartment, he suddenly remembered that he was engaged to be married to his cousin Winnie. . . . The thing had been entirely washed out of his mind by the flood-tide of his joy.
He seized the telephone.
“Winnie,” he said, “I am so terribly sorry. I want to ask you to release me from our engagement. I want to marry someone else.”
“That’s all right, Hal!” came back Winnie’s voice cheerfully. “As a matter of fact, I want to do the same thing myself. I got engaged last week to the most charming man in the world, a little older, in fact quite a bit older than I am, but ever so nice. He is a wealthy lawyer and his name is Walter Scribman. . . .”
The double wedding took place two weeks later, the church being smothered with chrysanthemums and the clergyman buried under Canadian currency. Harold and Alicia built a beautiful country home at the other side — the farthest-away side — of the city from the Scribmans’. A year or so after their marriage, they had a beautiful boy, and then another, then a couple of girls (twins), and then they lost count.
