Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 307
“I didn’t get it out of an old book, mother, and you know I didn’t, because I can’t read the funny old letters in them.”
“Well, wherever you got the idea it was very wrong of you to say it. Surely you know that some of the best and noblest people in the world go to jail. Your father tells me that every time he goes he meets the most distinguished people — really brilliant men — financiers, bankers, senators—”
“Crooks,” muttered little Edward.
“Edward!” exclaimed his mother. Mrs. Afterthought looked at her two children in silence. They often puzzled her. They seemed so old-fashioned.
“Then why did father have to go to jail?” asked little Clara.
“He didn’t have to, Clara,” said her mother.
“Well, they took him in a van,” said Edward, “with wire over it.”
“Certainly, Edward, because otherwise his subconscious self might have made him leap out.”
“Then what did he go for?” asked Edward.
“Atavism,” said Mrs. Afterthought.
“What?”
“An attack of atavism. The judge himself said so. Father’s had it again and again.”
“Atavism,” said little Edward. “What does that mean?”
“It means when you go back and copy things done by your great-grandfather, or your great-great-grandfather, or any number of greats.”
“But how could papa imitate his great-great-grandfather when he never saw him?”
“But he did. He brought home from the club, dear, a fur coat that didn’t belong to him.”
“Did great-great-grandfather do that?” asked little Clara.
“He must have, dear, because your father did it.”
“But wouldn’t father go to jail for doing that?”
“No, but on the same day he atavistically carried away some money (lying on the desk of a bank, I think) and a gold watch which he had, by pure atavism, taken from a gentleman’s coat pocket while the coat was hung up.”
“So what happened?” asked Edward.
“Well, Judge Gloop — you’ve seen him here, dears, very often at lunch with papa, suggested six months in jail. Your father said no, in fact he was against it from the start. He thought a sea voyage, or a trip to Monte Carlo might be better. However, they insisted — in the court I mean — and in the end your father had to give way. It happened, however, that two other gentlemen that your father knew very well were going too, so they agreed to go together and share expenses.”
“What did they steal, the other two?” asked Edward.
“My dear Edward!” exclaimed his mother in gentle protest. “How can you drag up those terrible words out of old books and belonging to the mediæval days? They didn’t steal anything. They had amnesia.”
“Amnesia?”
“Yes, amnesia. They forgot their own names and in attempting to write their own wrote down other people’s. The judge said that it seemed to him that jail was the only place for them. They said no, and suggested a long rest — they thought of South America. Indeed I believe that one of them had taken a ticket for South America to go and begin to rest when he received, just as he was getting on the ship, this other suggestion about going to jail instead.”
“And did he turn back?”
“Yes, on condition that they’d put in a new billiard table. I believe they did it. The judge said it seemed eminently fair.”
“But I don’t see—” began little Edward. He was about to continue but at that moment a soft light appeared on the wall and a voice said: “I beg your pardon, I think I was to call you up this morning, was I not? It is the secretary of the High School speaking — about your little boy’s geometry, you remember. Have you decided to have it done?”
“I really don’t know. It’s so hard to decide. Would he be in bed long?”
“Oh, dear, no,” said the voice with a pleasant suggestion of a laugh, “only one afternoon, perhaps not that. At his age, you know, it’s really a mere nothing. I think it could be done at home if you like, only it’s not so easy to give the anæsthetic.”
“I see. And it’s really quite simple, is it?”
“Oh, a mere nothing as far as that goes.”
“And I suppose it’s not very expensive, is it?”
“Oh, not at all; not for plane geometry. It’s only ten dollars (a thousand pounds). Of course if you wanted spherical geometry, it’s much more and still more for Einstein; it’s hard to get the plasm for those. And in any case those can be acquired, you know, afterwards by vocal teaching.”
“What do you think yourself, Eddie?” asked his mother, turning to the little boy.
“I don’t care, mum,” said Eddie, “I didn’t mind algebra a bit. They don’t hurt you and once it’s in it feels just like arithmetic or anything else, you know. Do you know, mother, I heard our headmaster say that long ago in his great-great-grandfather’s time or something they used to beat it into them with sticks. How do they do that? It sounds so cruel and unnatural?”
“It was, dear, but I can’t talk about it now.”
Mrs. Afterthought spoke to the wall again. “I think if you don’t mind I’ll talk it over with my husband again before I decide. He’s rather old-fashioned about that sort of thing. He has a feeling, he says, as if it weren’t quite honest. He’s so strict, you know. He’s in jail just now, and I hate to disturb him.”
“Oh, well, by all means let it wait. There’s no hurry. Good-bye.”
“Mother,” said Edward, “while you’re talking you might as well have asked about the war.”
“I didn’t need to,” said Mrs. Afterthought, “there isn’t any today. It was announced last night that the war would stop for today.”
“Oh!” said both the children, “why?”
“It was put off for the Dog Race in the Sahara. The Harvard Dog is racing the Oxford Dog, and so there wouldn’t be enough power for the war as well. And by the way, children, please remember if grandfather comes in this afternoon, don’t say anything about the war.”
“Oh, mother, why not — isn’t grandfather commanding a ship? I thought he was commanding one of the big battleships.”
“Yes, dear, and that’s why. Grandfather lost his ship — lost with all hands, it seems — nothing left afloat except a little wreckage.”
“Mother! How dreadful!”
“And grandfather’s terribly put out about it. I don’t think they can say it’s exactly his fault, but he feels it terribly. He says the loss is very serious, especially some of the officers; not the captain — he was worn out, but the chief navigating officer (I think he said) was absolutely new and equipped with every latest device that grandfather could put in him. In fact grandfather had spent months working on him. But wait, children, it’s time to ring for Jane and get the things cleared away. I’ll tell you all about it presently.”
Mrs. Afterthought pressed a button as she spoke and sat watching with her children as the servant came in through the door from the kitchen. Jane moved around the table in her characteristically rigid and mechanical way that would have seemed laughable to the children but that they were so familiar with it. She seemed to move in straight lines and exact circles, picking up the plates with a round sweep of her arm. Here and there, if a plate or dish was out of Jane’s reach the mother or the children passed it into her hand, but no one spoke to her. “Jane’s slow,” said little Clara as the servant finished and went out.
“I don’t think you wound her up properly on Monday, mum,” said Edward.
“I don’t think it’s that, dear. I’m afraid that she’s getting all out of repair. The electrician looked at her yesterday and said that she needed a new sheet of tin on her back side. But it costs such a lot.”
“Well, mother,” said Clara, “I saw the loveliest butler in a shop yesterday, an imported English butler, marked at only thirty thousand pounds — three hundred dollars, isn’t it?”
“I know, darling, but we couldn’t afford it. Papa says it takes more power to make an English butler move than for four ordinary servants. But, good gracious—”
Mrs. Afterthought broke off suddenly at the sound of a noise, a queer bumping noise that seemed to come from under their feet.
“What is it, mum?”
“Why, don’t you hear it? I’m afraid that it means there’s a ghost in the cellar again.”
“Hooray!” shouted Edward. “A ghost! Come on, Clara, get your Badminton racquet. Come and chase it out.”
The two children sprang —
BUT THERE — Any reflective reader can see that a place like the Real Utopia couldn’t possibly be understood in that fashion. It is far too different from the World-as-it-is. Not the place — but the people. The apparatus, the machinery, the setting, is all there already. But the effect is still to come.
So we must begin all over again and learn Utopia, bit by bit.
Part II. Grandfather Goes to War
Chapter I. War Stuff
WAR MEMOIRS AND war reminiscences cannot be understood without a knowledge of the nature and circumstances of the war of which they treat. War itself has greatly altered in its character from age to age. Take only the modern age of the last century or two and we can see how great has been the alteration not only in war itself, but in the attitude of mankind towards it. To the generations of the eighteenth century war was an intermittent part of national life, not very terrible, and ending always in peace. Sometimes one side won and sometimes the other, but generally both. In those days war held the place now occupied by the World’s Baseball Series, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and the Nobel Prize. It was the only way the nations had of getting together.
To the people of the late Victorian Age, war had passed into a scourge inflicted by Providence upon yellow, black and brown people as part of their elevation towards civilization. From England it had gone forever.
For the Americans of the United States there had only been one war, the Civil War, a matchless epic of devotion. It could never come again, because in the united country after the war there was henceforth no North and no South — so many people having moved West.
But in our day, at this little moment of infinite time called the year 1932, the case is different. We are sitting waiting for the next crash. The nations are now so intimately connected that the quarrels of each are the quarrels of all. With a central agency in the League of Nations and with the universal transmission of irritation by radio, a dispute can spread over the whole world in five minutes.
In older days the world was protected by its blanket of ignorance. Europe took no part in the Great Mongolian Conquest of China (Second Dynasty, Subdivision Five) because it never heard of it. In our own time, in all common sense, the fact that Poland wants a Corridor ought to matter to you and to me in North America about as much, and as little, as that Pussy wants a Corner.
But we are given to understand that this desire of Poland to keep a Corridor along with the immutable resolution of the Czechs rather to die in an enclave than to live in an anschluss, are among the reasons why we are all presently to be overwhelmed in the disaster. The mixed collection of peoples who used to seem to us a picturesque set of organ-grinders, now appear to hold the destinies of the world in the hollow of their organs.
In other words, we of the outside world, barely recovering from the staggering shock of the Great War, are sitting waiting for the next blow. All the best authorities are in agreement about it. And the war hounds, the real hot dogs who talk of nothing else — assure us that the next great war is going to be something awful. And it appears that the people who get it in the neck are not these war hounds themselves, but us — you and I — the ordinary plain people who never saw a gun fired in anger outside of a bar-room.
It seems, so they say, that the whole attention of the armies will be devoted to destroying civilians — women and children a specialty. Bombs will be dropped on us from the air; we will be blown up on our own golf links; killed with gas while at the movies. Churches will be no place for people who fear death and sick people had better keep away from hospitals.
These war hounds keep cheering us up with news of bigger and brighter bombs, higher and higher explosives, yellower and yellower gas. They have an explosive now that will blow us five hundred feet in the air; last year we were only up to four. And there’s a new gas that you can’t see as it approaches; it has no smell, so you can’t smell it; it gives no feeling, so you don’t feel it. Without having the least idea of it you are dead.
But anyone who is familiar with the history of war in past ages will take but little stock in this awful picture. In reality war is coming to an end. In fact it is almost there now.
It may be, or it may not be, that there will be one more war. If so, this one more war that will follow as an aftermath of the Great War, will be the War of Desolation and that will be the end. The reason is that war has lost what you might call its charm, the peculiar drowsy fascination that it had up till about fifty years ago. In those good old days war was the greatest of open-air sports. The life was free and open, the food good, lots of fun, and the danger practically nothing, or nothing more than being at home.
Think of the wonderful attraction for a young officer setting off to war. He embarked upon a troop ship — a huge floating castle under sail; music, sunshine, tears, farewells, brandy and soda! Glorious. Any danger of a bomb from the air? Good heavens, no! never dreamed of. Any fear of being blown up at night by a submarine? Good Lord, no! Any danger of anything? Not till we get to the scene of the war. When do we get there? Oh, in about six months.
Thus used to sail the French and the English to the West Indies; brandy and soda on deck all day and cards played under an awning for ten rupees a punto; that’s the life!
Thus sailed a United States naval expedition somewhere about a hundred years ago for the island of Sumatra. Why? To punish a native chief. Now if anybody can think of better fun than what “punishing a native chief” used to be, I want to hear of it. Time of this expedition, four months out and four back. Warfare involved — bombardment of Quettah Boola, or some such place, for half an hour, then a native banquet with hams, yams, clams, and a native drink called “hooroo”! And at all these banquets, of course, there were girls, lots of them, yellow, tan, brown, anything. They always collected them in any of the dear old expeditions. After which they collected the ransom and sailed home.
Danger in the old wars never came till you were ready for it, all keyed up for it, wanting it. And it was over in no time — it was like a thunderstorm, fearsome and full of light and then gone! In any good old campaign the armies always laid off for winter, and always took time off for saints’ days, holidays, and generals’ birthdays on both sides. They stopped for wet weather, muddy weather, or when there was too much static in the air. A campaign lasted as a rule all summer with a battle once a month, lasting anywhere from twenty minutes to all day. Waterloo began after early lunch, and all concerned were finished for late dinner. Wolfe’s battle at Quebec lasted twenty minutes. It had taken from the first week in January till the middle of September to get it ready.
As to the danger of death, the open air life was so superior to sedentary work at home that it was on the whole safer to be at war. England lost, in twenty-two years of war with France, only one hundred thousand soldiers — about five thousand a year. About half of these died of fever in the West Indies without any battles at all. Apart from fever, the mortality at home was far greater.
Can we wonder that war flourished. For the officers it was, literally, a picnic; as for the common people, they didn’t matter in those days. But they probably liked it fairly well — better than home anyway.
Gradually the thing began to get spoiled. New weapons were invented which were really dangerous to handle. Napoleon’s wars were fought with an old flint-lock gun, which, if handled carefully, was not very dangerous. If fired too fast, it might kick or burst and do damage.
The American Civil War, was, as we can see it now, the real turning point. The Americans, as usual, took hold of a good thing, improved it, and spoiled it. They got busy inventing iron-clad warships, submarines, trench mortars, and heaven knows what. General McClellan had the right idea; he proposed four years’ drill before beginning war. Grant butted in and spoiled it.
The Civil War was — in all reverence — the last of the heroic age of war. In place of it has come the War of the Machine Age, the war of gases, bombs, depth charges — where personal valour is of no avail — where right does not conquer — where the weak go down — where the Mass Production of Death reaps its wholesale harvest.
No, it won’t do. All people are sick of it. War is finished. It’s too dangerous. The League of Nations can try as they like to keep it alive. Their votes and debates and disputes in the old days would have started a war every six months. But not now. Any two nations who start fighting are now looking over their shoulder for someone to intercede and stop them.
War, therefore, will die out. But when it is gone the world will begin to feel a dull place without it. So much so that — But stop — let us see it as a series of pictures as the world saw it in the adventurous past, in the appalling present, and will see it in the Utopian future.
Chapter II. He Goes in A.D. 1810
EVERY TIME THAT Admiral Halftop’s two little grandchildren were taken to see him, they always set themselves to make their grandfather tell them stories about the war.
The little old admiral, in his faded blue suit, cheery and ruddy and hearty at seventy-five, was a great favourite with children, and most of all with little Clara and Edward, his grandchildren.
“Story?” the admiral would say, “story about the war? Tut, tut, I’ve told you all about it long ago. Fiddlesticks!”
“Oh, please do tell us a story!” said little Clara.
All three of them knew that he was going to in any case.
