Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 356
I had gone into the bar of the old Prince of Wales Hotel to get a drink before dinner, and stood reading the evening paper while I drank it.
My eye suddenly caught a news item and I looked up — forgetting in my surprise just who I was talking to — and said to the bartender:
“Billy, you don’t mean to tell me that Émile Zola’s dead?”
Billy shook his head sadly and went on wiping the bar with his cloth as he said:
“I think he must be. I ain’t seen him round anyway for a week or more.”
NO PLACE FOR GENTLEMEN
EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW hard it is in English to use the word “gentleman” in any fixed meaning. I have heard it defined by a Sunday School boy as meaning “a man with a gold watch who loves Jesus.” But the test seems a little too exacting. On the other hand, I remember a bygone citizen of my home town, an industrious man with a large family, who used to say, “My motto is, no gentleman in this family.”
But the most definite beam of light I ever got on it reached me forty years ago when I lived in Chicago as a student, and had the honor of meeting a friend of my brother Jim, a Mr. Donnegan, who had just finished three months in one of the state prisons in Illinois, for failing to grasp the idea of the new pure food law.
Jim and I went into a bar to get a beer and Mr. Donnegan was standing in the centre of a group of admirers.
He beckoned to Jim and we joined them and Jim said proudly, “Stephen, meet Mr. Donnegan. He’s just come back from three months in Joliet.”
Mr. Donnegan shook hands, but he said: “Not in Joliet, though, Jimmy. No thank you; I was in Elgin.”
“All right,” Jim said, “but I don’t see that it makes much difference.”
“All the difference in the world, Jimmy,” said Mr. Donnegan. “I don’t want to knock any place or any crowd; but I’ll just tell you the fellows in Elgin, Jimmy, are a set of gentlemen. I won’t say that for Joliet.”
The lapse of forty years has prevented me from being sure as to which is this. But the warning stands that one of these two is no place for a gentleman.
WE HAVE WITH US TONIGHT
PUBLIC SPEAKING IS more or less of an ordeal even for those who have to undertake it constantly. Worse than all is speaking at a dinner, because you have to wait your turn and feel it coming for hours. Next time you are at a public dinner notice the men at the head table who sit and eat celery by the bunch and never stop. Those are the men who are going to speak.
I don’t say that trained speakers are nervous. No. They wish the chairman would announce that the rest of the meeting is cancelled because of smallpox, or that the hotel would catch fire, or that there would be an earthquake. But they’re not nervous.
But if speaking is an ordeal to them, what it is to those who have never spoken. Some men go through life and never have to speak; they rise to wealth and standing with the fear of it in the background — fear, with an element of temptation.
Such a one was my senior acquaintance of long ago, Mr. Gritterly — no harm to name him — general manager of one of the Toronto banks. He had just retired, without ever speaking in public, when a Bankers’ Three Days Convention came to town and they invited Mr. Gritterly to speak at the dinner.
He accepted, hung in the wind, flew round the flame — and finally, on the opening day, sent a note that he was called out of town for the evening.
I saw him round the hotel next morning. He was telling me how sorry he was to have missed the opportunity. He told me a lot of things he could have said about branch banking. He said, too, that he would like to have had a sly joke, very good-natured of course, about the American Treasury system. It was too bad, he said, he’d been called out of town. He had even intended, just in an offhand way, to get off one or two quotations from Shakespeare (he had them in his pocket). One read— “I know a bank whereon a wild thyme grows—” Gritterly thought that would get a laugh, eh? Too bad, he said, that he couldn’t get that off.
“But, Mr. Gritterly,” I said, “you’re making a mistake. They didn’t have the dinner last night. The trains were so late they only had the inaugural address. The dinner’s tonight. You’ll probably get an invitation—”
And as I spoke a boy brought it to him on a tray.
“So you see you’ll be able to tell them about branch banking.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Gritterly, “yes.”
“And the jokes about the U. S. Treasury.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Gritterly, “quite so.”
All day Gritterly was round the hotel pulling the little bits of Shakespeare out of his pocket.
But the thing beat him.
In due course at the dinner the chairman announced: “I regret very much that Mr. Gritterly will not be able to speak. His speech, of which he gave me an outline, would have been a great treat. Unfortunately he had to leave tonight” — the chairman consulted his notes— “for Japan. With your permission I will take on myself to cable our representatives and I am sure they’ll be glad to get up a dinner for Mr. Gritterly at Tokio.”
Gritterly got the invitation on board ship and went right on to Hong Kong. The bankers there received a cable and organized a lunch. Gritterly had gone on to Singapore but the bankers followed him up, and he left for Calcutta. They lost him somewhere in Thibet. He may have entered the monastery there. For many people that would be preferable to speaking.
A HUMBLE LOVER
HAVE YOU EVER noticed how much attracted we all are by humility? From vainglorious people, conscious of talent, of power, we turn aside. Let them have success if they will. It’s theirs for the asking. But appeal they cannot have; that is for the meek, for the failures, for the people who might have been but never were.
This is especially true of love. The humble lover, aware of his own nothingness, goes to our hearts. The pathos of unrequited love, devotion without return, is among the oldest of human stories.
One such humble lover I knew and here chronicle. I set him down as he was. Judge him for yourself.
He had reached the age when he felt that it was time to get married. Other fellers did. Joe — that was his name — was close to thirty.
He said to me one night, “I think I’d like to get married.” Then he said nothing for quite a time and presently: “There’s a girl on the next street—”
That was as far as he could get for a while, but no doubt it meant a lot. It has, to many of us— “a girl on the next street.”
So I asked:
“Do you know her, Joe?”
“Mother does,” he answered. “She belongs to mother’s morning musical club and mother often invites some of the girls to play music at the house.”
“And you haven’t met her?”
“Yes, I have in a way. The other afternoon she left her guitar here by accident and mother asked me to take it home to her; so I took it round to her house and a maid came to the door and I said ‘This is Miss Carson’s guitar,’ and she said ‘Thank you. Do you want to see Miss Carson?’ and I said ‘No.’”
“And that’s all you’ve seen of her?”
“No,” Joe said, “the other day when she came to the house I was just outside and she said to me: ‘How do you do? It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘It sure is!’ — just like that— ‘It sure is.’ And she went in and I went on out.”
From then on my friend gave me details of his humble courtship.
Miss Carson, it seems, left her rubbers at the house and Joe fetched them home and gave them to her father. Her father said, “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?” So that would seem to mean that he looked on things pretty favourably, eh?
I asked Joe, a little later in his courtship, if he had spoken yet to Miss Carson about marriage. He said no, but he had discussed it with his mother. His mother was all for it. He was going to wait awhile and then talk to his father. If his father was for it and his mother and if I was for it, that made three. He told me that the other morning he had ridden down town in the same street car as Miss Carson and she said, “Isn’t it a lovely morning?” and he said, “It sure is” — just as easy as that. Too bad, he had to get off the next street after she got on.
Soon after that Joe read me a letter of proposal that he had prepared. It began: “It is no longer possible for me to restrain the expression of the sentiments with which our intercourse has inspired me—” “Fine, isn’t it,” he said. “I got it out of a book. I’ll start it again. It’s good....”
I was not surprised when Joe sent me word a day or two later that he wanted to see me.
“Did you get an answer from Miss Carson?” I asked him.
“Fine!” he said. “A dandy letter. Everything’s O.K. It seems that she isn’t thinking of getting married, so it’s all right; and she thanked me for writing to her and said my letter was swell.”
My heart began to sink with sympathy.
“Too bad, Joe,” I said.
“I’m not so sure,” he answered. “I find there’s another girl on the same street, two houses nearer, that perhaps I can get. I’ve talked with mother about it; she’s all for it.”
After Joe’s case, I have never felt quite so sure about the humble and the meek. Perhaps they’re just slow, eh? —
THE MAGIC OF FINANCE
I HAVE AN artist friend who is the best portrait painter in Canada. This will at once identify him to himself. But as it will also identify about a dozen others to themselves, I will simply call him Jares and let it go at that.
Jares told me this story about the beginning of his making his fortune.
The time came in his upward rise when he got several hundred dollars for each portrait, then passed into the thousands and presently he got his first real order — a commission to paint the portrait of a New York millionaire stock-broker for five thousand dollars.
The “sittings” in New York went along very pleasantly and satisfactorily. The millionaire stock-broker evidently took a fancy to the rising young genius.
When the last sitting came he said to the artist:
“Mr. Jares, I must see about having your cheque made out. But, tell me first, what are you going to do now for the next two or three months?”
Jares said that he was going to take a holiday in Brittany.
“Good,” said the broker. “I have a proposal to make. Suppose you leave this money with us and see what we can do with it while you’re away. Mind,” he added as a caution, “I don’t say we’re wizards you know; people get exaggerated ideas. But suppose you just leave it and see?”
Jares assented with delight.
He went away to Brittany, had a three months’ holiday and returned to New York.
He went round to the broker’s office and sent in his card. The millionaire, after a moment’s hesitation, received him most cordially.
“Mr. Jares!” he said. “Why, yes, of course! You left five thousand in an open account with us — of course, of course!”
He pushed a bell button and gave a few words of instructions to a lady secretary. “Just ask them,” he said, “to send a memorandum.”
In a few minutes the lady secretary returned and gave a paper to the broker with a few words in a low voice.
“Well, well,” said the millionaire, “is that so! Mr. Jares, this is very interesting. We lost that five thousand — it seems. That’s the way things go, you know. It’s lost — very interesting. Well, well — I mustn’t keep you. Drop in some time when you’re in New York again.”
Jares left — he had seen what they could do with it.
HE GUESSED RIGHT
THERE IS A certain line of anecdote which often goes under the name of “grim humour.” This means humour that turns on actual injury or death. Personally I’ve always felt doubtful about it.
To explain what is meant, here is a story, actually true, of a happening in Toronto at the old Rossin House, long ago. The baggage man who was putting trunks into the elevator (from the service chute) was called away from his job and didn’t realize in the poor light that the elevator had gone up a couple of stories and was above him. He swung the door open, called in a cheery voice, “All right, Bill, down she does,” jumped in — and broke his leg two stories below.
In this kind of “grim humour,” as I say, I find little attraction. Yet the Scotch seem to like it — they love the familiar stories of Scotchmen at their wives’ funerals, or the story of the Scotch judge who sentenced to death a man he used to play chess with, and said— “And that’s checkmate for you, Andrew.”
But one such story I can quote from memory, not actually of my own but of my brother George. It concerns the death of a man in the power-house of a western Ontario town (I’ll name it no closer than that) where George was working, installing electrical equipment. In those days electricity was new and consequently dangerous.
One morning the assistant man of the power-house came running to the workers on the line to say that his boss had been killed.
They went down with the chief of police to the power-house and there was the unhappy man, dead, laid out flat on the cement floor, his arms extended.
They looked at him in horror.
“How do you suppose it happened, Joe?” asked the chief of police.
“Why, I can’t see how it could,” said the assistant— “the only possible way it seems to me is that he may have picked up this terminal with one hand” — as he said it, Joe picked up the terminal— “and then put his other out in contact with—”
Bing! And the second man was laid out beside the first. Joe had guessed right.
Now as a matter of fact I am glad to record that the second man, though knocked unconscious, was not really killed.
But when my brother George, who is a real story-teller, tells this story, he not only kills the second man but the chief of police — who undertook to explain it to the mayor of the town, and then the mayor and half of the town council.
Nothing like Art for Art’s sake.
ELECTRIC SERVICE
I WAS TALKING the other day about “grim humour,” and told the story of the man who was killed in the Ontario power-house.
I afterwards remembered another example of grim humour that is recalled from the days when I used to go on lecture trips in the United States.
I was to lecture in an Ohio city and a local lawyer kindly met me at the train and drove me to my hotel. On the day he indicated points of interest.
“That’s our jail,” he said, stopping the car for a minute beside a grim building that walled one side of the street and he added, “I had a queer experience with a man in there a month or two back.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “this feller was in there under sentence of electrocution, and our firm got a letter from a law firm in Chicago which read:
“‘We understand that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of yours, in which case please inform him that if he does not pay the account for $18.50 on which we have been suing him, we must proceed to more drastic measures.’
“We wrote back in answer,” continued the lawyer—”’You are correct in supposing that Mr. Joseph Smith is a client of ours. He is at present in the jail here awaiting electrocution, but if you can think of anything more drastic, please proceed to it right away.’”
The lawyer, having told his story, proceeded, after the American fashion, to hang another piece onto it.
“Yes, sir,” he continued, “that feller was up in that corner cell, and I went to see him — when we knew he’d no chance — and asked him if there was anything we could do for him.”
“‘Yes,’ says he, ‘there is; I don’t exactly like that electric sign I see across the street every time I go to the window.’”
The lawyer stopped speaking and began to start his car.
“And what was the sign?” I asked.
“It’s still there,” he said. “You can read it.”
He pointed, and I looked up and saw a sign that read, Something in Electricity for Everybody.
OUR VANISHED INDUSTRIES
MOST OF US, I think, admit that in their way the Maritime Provinces are the finest part of Canada. I don’t mean by reason of their resources, but on account of the inhabitants themselves. You get there that fine, sturdy type of people from the British Isles — a type that was rather than is — honorable, courageous, content with little, and valuing intellectual and moral life rather than material. Indeed the making of men and the “export of brains” has always seemed a leading industry of the Maritimes.
I had a very special opportunity to learn this when I was invited there for a week’s lecture tour after I had been appointed to my chair at McGill. I not only had occasion to appreciate the type of men bred in that environment, but to form some idea of the process and method of making them.
At my first lecture I was the guest of a bank manager in Moncton, and at the close of the evening we sat together over a pipe in his comfortable study, and we fell to talking of his earlier days.
“... And how did you get your bank training?” I asked him.
“I learned it,” he answered, “as a boy on a Nova Scotia schooner of the old days. Every time I was told to do anything I had to do it right off and without any question or I got a swift kick in the backside. That’s the training that fitted me later for a bank.”
The next day when I had moved on to another town, I was talking with the mayor of the town about his life and career. “Yes,” he said, “I’m a self-made man and I’m not ashamed of it: or rather I won’t say I’m a self-made man — I’ll say that the beginning of my success was made for me as a boy working on a Nova Scotia schooner.”
