Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 337
THROWN OUT
I WAS SITTING in the rotunda of the hotel, one of those old-fashioned rotundas — it was years ago — where the chairs were in a sort of big horseshoe, with a huge open fire-place in the centre. It was the custom of the guests — these were called ‘guests’ in those days — to sit around the rotunda in their off hours and the manager would sit among them.
I was at the end of the row but one, and the end one was the manager. He and I were old friends. I said to him, ‘What’s the matter with you to-night? You look as if you had something on your mind.’ I knew him as well as that.
‘I have,’ he answered. ‘I’ve just had a mean business to get through, one of those things that you’ve got to do in the hotel business, whether you like it or not.’
The manager spoke in a low, throaty tone, as soft and easy as a gargle. He was too heavy a man to shout. Anyway hotel men talk low. They have to.
‘What was the trouble?’ I asked.
‘Case of getting rid of a loafer,’ the manager continued in his low, confidential tone. ‘Fellow you may have seen round — been here for two months or more — never paid for his room, not a cent, hung up the dining-room, and as for the bar, he seemed to think he could drink free in there all day.’
The manager’s rising indignation began to raise his voice with it. He began to speak with animation and anger, looking me right in the face as he spoke. Some of the guests had half turned to listen.
‘So at last I said to him,’ the manager said, dropping as best he could into his quiet tone, but losing it entirely as he continued, ‘Look here, you loafer!’ As he said this, the manager stood up, turned squarely in front of me and smacked one hand with the palm of the other (that made every one turn and listen), as he went on, ‘Listen to me. You’ve loafed round this hotel for two months. You haven’t paid a cent on your room or your board — and I’m sick of it. Out you go, to-night!’
With that, the manager put his hands in his pockets, and walked off about his business, cooling down as he went.
But the news round town that I’d been thrown out of the hotel for debt nearly cost me my job!
WHAT I READ THEN; WHAT YOU READ NOW
AN ESSAY FOR THE YOUNG
I AM SIXTY-EIGHT years old. Sixty years ago, able to ‘read for myself,’ I first passed through that magic gateway into the Garden of Imagination. How greatly has it changed in sixty years to become the very different garden, the very different world that you young people know to-day.
The world in which I lived, as compared with yours, was vast and empty and voiceless. Look at the map of it as it hung on the walls of our school-room. There was Africa, a huge continent with nothing but an outside rim to it, rivers that seemed to come from nowhere, and queer names along the coast now mostly vanished — Mozambique, Zanzibar, Sofala; Asia, a lot of it just about as empty, with a great desert smeared across the middle, with its northern coast, inaccessible and unknown, washing into the Arctic Sea. Over the heart of the continent were still inscribed such queer and romantic names as Turkestan and Bokhara and the Kurghis Steppes. Arabia was marked as a great empty desert, closed and forbidden. Of our own continent great stretches were still one vast emptiness of prairie and forest, the Rocky Mountains infinitely far away, as yet pierced only with the thin thread of two or three railway lines; in Canada still huge and impenetrable. South America seemed on the map, as far as its insides went, an unexplored jungle.
In such a world the sense of distance, of mystery and of the unknown was far more impressive than is possible to-day. Your little world is shrunken, crowded — noisy and quarrelsome — it is like a street alley where was once a silent wood.
I went the other day to the ‘pictures’ and there before me on the screen was the young King Farouk of Egypt in a tarboosh and his Queen Farida in a Paris dress, just bowing themselves off in time to give the Japanese a chance to bomb Shanghai — also in a hurry, because Dartmouth was going to play hockey against McGill in a minute. The game was timed to allow Mussolini to come out on the roof of the Vatican (it went fast, I’m not sure what roof it was) and give a talk meant for Hitler, who appeared on the terrace of the Tiergarten — followed by the last minute of a fight in Madison Square Garden.... What a world! Rushing with voices that come from currents of cosmic force running through our very bodies themselves — quivering with power we cannot control, dangers we can see but not avoid.
I am not placing my world above yours — I am only exchanging one mystery for another. Our life, in any case, is framed in mystery, floating in the unknown; but the world of to-day seems to me, as an old man, in a way terrifying, like a thing rushing to its doom! But don’t worry over that, my young friends. Old men have always thought the world was hurrying to its doom: and the joke is, it wasn’t the world at all, but just the old men themselves.
But at least the contrast is great. Oh, to be back in the silent world of sixty years ago, in which a little boy with a book under an apple tree could be transported to the Rocky Mountains, and there sit with Trapper Ben and Siwash Jo, beside a crackling fire of resinous pine, over a dish of buffalo meat. You can’t sit there, you see, because if you did, Trapper Ben would say to Siwash Jo, ‘Turn on the radio, Jo and let’s hear what’s doin’!’ and Siwash Jo would say, ‘Me thinkum King Farouk of Egypt he marry one nicey piece-Squaw.’
From such a setting you will easily understand that our reading of sixty years ago was based on the ‘bigness’ and mystery of the world, of adventure in ‘distant lands’ and ‘overseas,’ of people disappearing on long voyages to return as heroes or millionaires — back from the ‘diggings’ or the ‘Cannibal Isles,’ or places like that. Notice the queer, fascinating names of our world. You’d call the ‘diggings’ the ‘Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company,’ and the ‘Cannibal Isles’ the ‘Municipality of Honolulu.’
But of course we were strongest of all on ‘desert islands.’ The height of every boy’s imagination was to share the fate of that lucky man Robinson Crusoe and be shipwrecked on a desert island, with one or two ‘other fellers’ — no girls and no grown-up people. Desert islands always contained in abundance everything needed for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, such as bread-fruit, yams, mangoes, coconuts — the stuff we never got at home except at Christmas. Of course, the world’s best desert island story was Robinson Crusoe, and no doubt you still read it. But it’s really upside down. Defoe, who wrote it in 1719, meant it as a picture of loneliness and hardship, but the story, as stories do, turned into something else. Hence all boys envy Robinson his island and his goats and his parrot, and above all his man Friday. What they like is the fun of being there. When the Spaniards come into the story and the ‘adventures’ begin, it is all off.
The second best-known desert story, written a hundred years ago, was the Swiss Family Robinson. Its author was a Swiss professor of philosophy so that shows how much he knew about desert islands. His story was no good after you were ten years old — too namby-pamby: the Island too easy. And then how silly to have Mr. and Mrs. Robinson there! If you’re lucky enough to hit on a desert island, you don’t want your father and mother around.
But the best island story of the lot was Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. Verne was a Frenchman, but the boys of England and America adopted him so completely that his books that ran from about 1870 to 1900 were put into English as soon as written. Everybody has heard of his ‘prophecy’ stories. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Clipper of the Clouds, both come true, and his Journey to the Moon, still waiting. But best of all was the wonderful island on which there lands a group of castaways carried in a great storm in a balloon — days and days in dark and wind and clouds, and blow to land — heaven knows where, over such great spaces as we knew and you can’t ever know. They all landed empty-handed. They begin as children of civilization, from nothing, make and contrive everything, melting iron for tools and mixing gunpowder — but read it. It’s still good.
Of course, our adventures turned mainly on the sea. Say what you like, the sea can never be the same again since steam and wireless and radio.
Where are now
... The Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the mystery and beauty of the ships
And the magic of the sea?
Never again can be reproduced the wonder and beauty of the great sailing ships outward bound in the sunset a hundred years ago. Kipling has tried, in his MacAndrew’s Hymn, to lift the huge floating machine called a steamship to a par of mystery and wonder. But it can’t be done. The things are different. The one is man, the other is machine.
Never again can literature have such a romantic basis as in those great days of the sea. You can read it now but it’s all altered by your knowledge of radio and wireless. To you all great sea stories suggest the idea, what a pity they didn’t have wireless! But as for us, we just plunged from shipwreck to shipwreck, buffeted, tossed about, battered by a rush of nautical terms that we didn’t understand! We saw the Grosvenor strike on the breakers and founder off the coast of South Africa — infinite desolation! — foundering with all hands — well, perhaps a few did reach shore to wander among the savages. We saw the Indiaman Kent burned to the water’s edge, and the Dunbar beaten to pieces off Sydney Heads in the dark, and Masterman Ready in the wreck of the Pacific. Such writers as Captain Marryat, Fenimore Cooper and Clark Russell went literally round the world.
You can’t read them now, my young friends, I am sure. But don’t call them slow: the reason is not in them but in you. You are not, I say it very politely, fit to read them. You see, you are a child of machinery and electricity and so you want machinery at every turn. In my day, for example, in a sea story we used ‘to sweep the pirates off the deck with our cutlasses’ — just a loud ‘Hurrah!’ and over they went still gnashing their teeth and biting their nails. But you would want to defeat them with ‘heat ray’ or a ‘detonating bomb’ or some such deviltry as that. Poor creatures! We just swept them off the deck — surely that doesn’t hurt anybody.
But above all we loved the technical language of the sea — the hundred ropes with every one a name, and all the parts of the ship that we knew so well by name but only vaguely by location. The ‘bitts,’ the ‘main chains,’ the ‘scuppers’ — were they parts of the ‘binnacle’ or of the ‘taffrail’? The ‘tops,’ the ‘cross trees,’ the ‘main-royal-yard’ — how high up are we? Don’t look down!
When your teachers teach you Shakespeare they explain to you what a wonderful knowledge of the sea Shakespeare had, just because of a little biff of sea language, or an attempt at it, in a play called The Tempest.
Master: Good, speak to the mariners: fall to’t yarely, or we run ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.
Boatswain: Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail; tend to the master’s whistle. Down with the topsail, yare!
Tut! That’s poor stuff, as Mark Twain once showed (I am quoting his example) — just elementary. Compare it with the language of a real sailor like R. H. Dana, who wrote for us Two Years before the Mast.
Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at a word the whole canvas on the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under headway.
But of course for you to-day there is no more ‘cat-heading’ and ‘sheeting.’ Here is the kind of passage that you would expect in one of your books:
Ned brought the radio message to the captain. ‘A radio message, Sir,’ he said, ‘in code.’ ‘Decode it,’ cried Captain Carburettor. Ned, who was a skilled decoder, decoded the coded radio.
‘What does it say, Ned?’ asked the Captain.
‘It’s from an aeroplane, Sir,’ said Ned, ‘warning us that they can see an enemy submarine approaching us at a narrow angle.’
‘How narrow?’ asked Captain Carburettor.
‘One degree, two minutes, log 5 1/2,’ answered Ned.
‘How long have we got?’ asked the Captain.
‘Forty-six seconds, Sir,’ said Ned.
‘Plenty!’ said the Captain. ‘Pass me a depth bomb. Or here, boy,’ he added, putting his hand, not unkindly, on the youngster’s shoulder, ‘you jump over with it yourself.’
But don’t think for a moment that our adventure books were all and only on the sea. Not at all. We were just as much at home on land — in the heart of the forest or out on the prairie, with just enough savages ‘lurking’ round to make things creepy. What they did was always called ‘lurking’: they never came straight at you, in an open manly way, they ‘lurked.’ The only notice you got of their approach was of the snapping of a dry twig: if you heard that, watch out! — there was ‘a pesky red-skin’ somewhere around. Not that you yourself could hear it, but it was heard by the quick trained ear of your guide and companion, Old Pigskin or Deerskin or whatever he was. I am thinking here, as you guess, perhaps, of Fenimore Cooper, whose books went all over the world in all the languages. Sixty years ago our continent was still young enough and open enough to keep Cooper’s books near and intelligible; the prairie was still there and Sitting Bull’s massacre of Custer’s force recent enough to thrill us with its horror. It is strange to think of the marvellous vogue and influence of writers like Cooper, Scott and Dickens, writing for all the world. What they did can never be done again. The times forbid it. A writer nowadays may make a huge hit with a ‘best seller,’ Gone with the Tide or Off with the Wind — half a million copies in a year, and in five years as dead and forgotten as dry grass.
Compare that with the world significance of The Last of the Mohicans. For the sake of that book, little boys in France and Germany dressed themselves up in what they meant for ‘leggings,’ with feathers and scalp-locks, and crawled round in the bushes of suburban gardens, avoiding the snapping of a dry twig. Remember the name if you don’t know it already — The Last of the Mohicans, and don’t pronounce it, as we always did in England, as if Mohican rhymed with ‘Joey can’: it’s ‘Moheegan — with a sort of Irish sound to it.
Later on, of course, we moved from pure adventure to adventure-romance — Walter Scott for all time the master of it. I am afraid that many young people, perhaps most, can’t read Walter Scott to-day. They find him too ‘long-winded.’ That seems a queer accusation from a generation that makes its novels longer and longer, and thinks nothing of 600 pages. I admit that our books were ‘long-winded,’ but so are the books of to-day. Only they are long-winded in a different way. We took our ‘long-wind’ in the beginning, in the way of an ‘introduction’; nowadays you get the ‘long-wind’ all through: the book just goes on and on, like sawing wood. There’s no need for it to stop: the end could be the beginning: just like films in the cinema, where we come in late and take the story backwards. We see the final death scene and then learn who it is that died and what killed him. In fact the ‘pictures’ have shown us that a story is a circle. You begin anywhere.
But in our good old books you began at the beginning. Very much so. In fact, away before the beginning. If the story was laid in the Highlands you had to have first the history and description of the Highlands and how they got high. Then as the hero of the story is going to be Hoosh McQuoosh, you have to learn quietly and slowly all about the ancestry of the Hoosh McQuoosh family, one of whom fell at Bannockburn, one at Flodden — in fact they fell all over the place. But the reward was that by the time you got, slowly and gradually, into the story, you were right at home in it; it felt like part of you.
In one department I am willing to confess our books of sixty years ago were weak. That was in the matter of the heroines. I am afraid, as I look back at them, that our heroines were ‘simps.’ True, they were given large ‘lustrous eyes’ like a startled fawn, mouths like ‘rosebuds’ and a complexion that shot over with blushes as rapidly as a neon sign. But they were ‘simps.’ There was no sport in them. They wouldn’t go out at night. If you dared to touch them they cried out, ‘Unhand me, foul villain!’ In fact their rhetoric — talk like that, only longer — was their strong point, their chief defence. Alone with a foul villain in a ruined castle they could blast him with it. Even in the forest they could knock out an Indian at ten yards. ‘Despicable man,’ cried Ethelinda, as the fierce Mohawk raised his tomahawk, ‘alone and defenceless, beyond human help, a prey at once to treachery and menace, with nothing on which to rely save only the promptings of my own innocence, I command you to restrain your hand!’ The Mohawk lowered his tomahawk with a groan: a blush as of shame (it really wasn’t) mantled his dusky countenance, and with a couple more groans, he vanished into the brush!
When I compare those heroines with the kind of girls I see in the films to-day, skipping around on beaches and eating midnight supper under rubber trees, I feel sorry to think what we missed.
But you must excuse my writing further — there’s a film I must go to see — racketeers, gangsters, murders, trials, jails, all our bright new world spinning at its best.
FEEDING TIME
Feeding time at the Zoo is said to be most interesting to watch. But it’s pretty good too in any first-class hotel. You notice that man, at the little table by himself, who has just called the waiter to him. You observe the suffering look on his face, the peculiar whine in his voice. What is it he’s saying?
