Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 357
“How was that?” I asked.
“Well,” said the mayor, “if I was told to do something I had to hop to it and do it or I got a swift kick in the backside.”
As I went on through the Maritime Provinces I began to realize that this early start in life had been shared by most of the leading men. One of the judges had, according to his own statement, got his first grasp on the principles of law by getting a swift kick in the backside. The same treatment had started men in medicine, education, and public life, and for business it was universal.
I struck only one doubtful case. I had met a most cultivated man, well up in years, a professor of divinity in a church university. He talked to me modestly of his early struggles.
“Life was for me,” he said, “a very arduous path. I doubt if I could have walked it if I had not had — I hope you won’t think my reasoning absurd—”
“I know,” I interrupted, “you had a swift kick in the backside on a Nova Scotia schooner.”
The old man looked at me calmly.
“No,” he said quietly, “I was going to say, a belief in the efficacy of prayer...”
I felt that I had got in wrong and was humiliated. But it was all right. The old man was silent for a moment and then he said:
“The other may have helped, too.”
You see they can’t tell a lie in the Maritimes even if they try to.
So I’ve been thinking about this treatment; perhaps there’s something in it. So many of our public men are accused of inefficiency and indifference. Couldn’t we try the idea — eh?
COULDN’T SLEEP A WINK
I OFTEN THINK that all this “insomnia” business is about ninety per cent nonsense; I mean — the people who come down in the morning and tell you they “couldn’t sleep a wink,” “never closed an eye,” and all that. They may think so but as a matter of fact they probably had their eyes closed up for hours at a stretch.
Years ago when I was a young man in a boarding-house in Toronto, my brother George came down to stay the night. There was no spare room in the boarding-house, and, what was worse, only one bed — although it was a double one — in mine. But the trouble was that we both hated “sleeping double” and knew that there was mighty little chance of getting a decent night’s rest that way.
However, we took it in good part, went to bed, and decided just to lie there, sleepless, and let it go at that.
In the morning, after it got to be real daylight, I spoke and said to George, “Did you get much sleep?” “Not a damn minute,” he said. “Neither could I,” I answered, “so I just lay here; I could hear every sound all night.” “So could I,” George said.
Then we put our heads up from the bed-clothes and noticed for the first time that the bed was covered about two inches deep with plaster. The ceiling had fallen on us in the night.
But we hadn’t noticed it. We had “insomnia.”
GO TO MOTHER
MANY YEARS AGO, when I was teaching at Upper Canada College and was still young enough to go to the races and that sort of thing, I struck a holiday and started off for the Woodbine Races.
When I got to the place just north of Toronto where the cars branched in different ways, whom should I meet but my old friend Canon Drone, waiting for a car.
He stopped me with a pleasant inquiry of where I was heading for.
“Why, Canon Drone,” I said, “I was just going to make up my mind whether I’d go out to the Woodbine Races or take the Radial Railway and go up to Sutton and spend the day with mother.”
I hadn’t had the least intention of going up to see mother. But it sounded a good thing to work off on a clergyman — like handing him something.
But the old Canon took it up too seriously.
“Stephen,” he said, lifting his hand in the air and speaking in his best pulpit voice, “Go-to-mother!”
You know what a quiver a really good clergyman can put into the word “mother!”
“Resist temptation,” said the Canon; “get on that car — that’s the one — and go to mother.”
He had me beaten. I saw no way round it. He wasn’t going to move, so I ended by getting on the car and going up to Sutton to spend the day with mother. That is — I spent it in painting the garden fence. Mother never wasted a visitor.
That evening when I got back to the city I met a friend of mine at the car junction.
“You weren’t at the races?” he said.
“No, I spent the day up at Sutton with mother.”
“Too bad,” he said; “you missed a big day. By the way, I saw your old friend Canon Drone out there having a whale of a time. He’s a great old sport. He told me he’d made twenty dollars.”
FIVE DOLLARS, RIGHT NOW
SOME TIME AGO, quite a few years back, we had an “old home week” in my town of Orillia. Among those who came back was Eddie Foote who had been away at Napanee, or somewhere, for about twenty years.
Like all people who come back for home week, he was just brim-full of interest in all old acquaintances.
He stopped me on the street and shook hands enthusiastically, and began asking about my brothers and where they all were. I happen to have a lot of brothers — we were six at the start — and, like all large families, we scattered all over. Some of my brothers went west and some to the States; I was the only one who didn’t go far.
So Eddie began, “Where’s your brother Charlie, now?”
I said, “Oh, Charlie went out to B. C. about four years ago and—”
“Is that so?” Eddie cut in. “Good old Charlie. Say! I’d give five dollars to see Charlie right now. And where’s Teddy?”
“Teddy lives in Calgary.”
“You don’t say! Good old Ted! I’d give five dollars to see Teddy right now.”
I realized that Eddie Foote had only one formula for the language of delight; for all earthly joys of reunion he’d pay five dollars right now. He went right on and put another five dollars on my brother Jim in Chicago. Then he said:
“And where’s your brother George? I’d give five dollars right now to see old George again.”
“This is George,” I answered, “coming up the street; and that’s Jim with Teddy coming up behind him. That’s fifteen dollars for the three, Eddie, and Charlie’s coming in on the afternoon train; that’ll be twenty. They’re all back for the home week.”
Eddie didn’t pay up. He laughed it off; but he took the story back with him to Napanee, or wherever it is, and tells it as one on himself. I understand that he adds that he’d give five dollars to see Steve right now! He’d better watch out.
ARE PROFESSORS ABSENT-MINDED?
YEARS AGO WHEN I lived on the Côte des Neiges Road, in Montreal, I used often to have a little group of my fellow professors up to dinner. Sometimes their conversation in the study upstairs after dinner was really good.
I recall one evening when we fell to discussing the old question, are professors really absent-minded. All the men present, alert, intelligent men of today, utterly ridiculed the idea. They admitted that the professors of a generation back — the old fellows under whom they had studied — were ludicrously absent-minded, but claimed that the professor of today is another kind of man. One of them told an amusing story of his old professor at Edinburgh, an old man who never, never went out in the evening but had been persuaded to break the rule and go to a big evening reception.
He arrived at the house about eight-thirty — the first guest, nearly half an hour ahead of fashionable time — and was shown up into a bedroom. He didn’t come down for so long that the hostess sent up to look for him. He’d gone to bed and was asleep.
Another professor told of an old Oxford don who was out for the evening and was given a bundle of letters — about a dozen of them — to post on his way home. He forgot them, went away to Iceland on a geological trip for six months, then found the letters and posted them. Inside the letters were invitations to dinner “the day after tomorrow.”
The professors laughed at the stories but said that the idea was nonsense.
Yet next morning my telephone was kept busy for half an hour. Two of the professors had got the wrong overshoes, one had two walking-sticks and my little terrier had eaten a lecture on Cicero.
WANTED: A GOLD-FISH
I TOLD A story in this series about absent-minded professors. But here’s a true one that I can vouch for out of my own experience at McGill.
One of our professors of physiology was out visiting one winter night, and the people at the house showed him a gold-fish that had died because the water that it was in had got frozen. The professor looked at the fish and said, “Let me take it home and I think that tomorrow I can treat it in the laboratory and revive it.”
So when he started for home they wrapped the goldfish in a bit of tissue paper and Professor Floyd put it in his overcoat pocket. It was a cold night, very late and with lots of deep snow along the street. On the way home Floyd put his hand into his coat pocket and accidently flipped out the gold-fish and it fell into the snow.
Floyd knelt down to pick it up, but he couldn’t find it and stayed there on his knees groping for it. Just then a policeman came along on his beat and stopped and said, “What are you doing there?”
Professors hate to be questioned. Floyd just looked over his shoulder and said, “I am trying to find a goldfish.”
The policeman then understood that he was dealing with a mental case, and he said, coaxingly, “Now you just come along with me and I’ll take you to a place where we’ve a whole lot of gold-fish — all you want.”
“All right,” Floyd said, “only just help me to get this one first.”
To humour him the policeman knelt down and began groping in the snow and, first thing he knew, out came a gold-fish! He was absolutely flabbergasted.
“Great heavens!” he said. “Are there any more?”
“Maybe a whole lot,” Floyd said. As the professor started off for home again, the policeman was still on his knees looking for gold-fish.
MUSHROOMS
I AM VERY fond of mushrooms. Often I go out from my home town to where there are some big open pastures on the third concession and gather up a whole basketful, carry them part of the way home, and then — throw them away.
Sometimes I carry them only as far as the pasture fence and throw them away there; at other times I take them part of the way home and throw them away beside the road or in a culvert. Sometimes I go alone, or sometimes with another man — someone also keen on mushrooms — and then we perhaps carry them further and don’t throw them away until we are nearly back to town.
Your trouble is, you see, are the darned things mushrooms? You feel all right about it when you pick them, and then later, perhaps quite suddenly, the doubt comes — are they really mushrooms, or are they that deadly thing, what’s it called, the culex americanus? or the codex siniaticus? — anyhow the kind that poisons you in less than five minutes.
Yet it seems such a shame to throw away beautiful mushrooms, without at least trying them out, that at times I carry my mushrooms right into town and give them away to any friends I meet.
And that reminds me of the day I gave the mushrooms to Arthur Hart, or rather, to use the name that he gave himself, Art ‘Art. Art was a little Cockney Englishman. He was a friendly little fellow as all Cockneys are, and liked to be called by his Christian name, Art, rather than by his surname ‘Art.
As soon as he felt that he had made an acquaintance he would say, “I sy, don’t call me ‘Art; just call me Art; that’s good enough, ain’t it?”
Then he would explain himself in more detail. “I down’t like formality. When people start, ‘Art this and ‘Art that, I always sy, ‘Look ’ere, ole chap, never mind that ‘Art business, just call me Art.’”
Well, I was coming back one day from getting mushrooms and had just thrown my basketful into a culvert outside the town when I met my friend Webber on the street, and he gave me another basketful. I couldn’t throw them away while Webber was in sight, and I was still carrying them when I met Art.
“My ‘at,” he said, “those are fine mushrooms!”
I realized that there are a lot of Englishmen who know all about mushrooms. So I said, “Take them, Art, I have some at home already.”
“I certainly will,” Art said readily and away he went with the mushrooms.
And the next day, first thing I knew, somebody said to me on the street:
“Did you hear about Arthur Hart? They don’t think he’ll live.”
“Great Caesar!” I said. “What’s the matter?” — though I felt I knew.
“Poisoned, so the doctors say; something he must have eaten, only Arthur says he didn’t eat anything in particular at all.”
It occurred to me that if Art was going to say nothing about the mushrooms, I wouldn’t mention them either, not even later on. Life has to carry these buried recollections.
However, Art got better. I saw him on the street a few days later and I said, “Art, I’m terribly sorry about giving you those mushrooms that poisoned you, and it was fine of you to say nothing about it.”
“Ho, no!” Art said, “I didn’t eat the mushrooms. I threw them away as soon as you were out of sight. I always do.”
“But what poisoned you, Art?” I asked.
Art looked all around and put his hand to the side of his mouth and said in a low voice:
“‘Ootch!”
Funny, isn’t it? We all throw away mushrooms, because a chance of one in a hundred, and take a chance (or used to in the days of which I speak) on “hootch,” with the odds a hundred to one against us. There seems a sort of moral to this, but it might work the wrong way. I won’t try to draw it: I’ll leave the cork in it.
HELP WANTED
VERY MANY WOMEN can’t listen. And least of all, pretty women. In a way they don’t need to. They can get along without.
I am not thinking here of women who talk all the time. There are lots of those. They don’t listen because they never stop talking. But I refer to the class of charming women, in society, who don’t listen, especially when they are hostesses, partly because they would find it a little hard to follow, and partly because their minds are on other things.
Your delightful hostess beside you, while you tell her about your trip to Czechoslovakia, is looking you in the face with every appearance of interest. In reality she is wondering why the maid hasn’t started to pass the second vegetable, or whether you know that the olives are beside you within easy reach.
No harm is done as a rule by these charming lapses of attention. Just now and again something happens. As in the following case.
I was at a supper party in Toronto — it’s a good while ago — and our young hostess was so pretty that she didn’t need to be anything else, and so modest that she thought everybody wonderful, and seemed to be listening when she wasn’t.
The guest of the evening was a large-scale Englishman just back from West Africa. He sat on his hostess’s right and presently began telling of what must have been, I am sure, a terrific adventure in the great forest of the Congo.
When he had suggested telling of his experience, our hostess had said, “Oh, do, Mr. Rawlinson!” and as he told it she had sat gazing into his face with every sign of rapt attention. She seemed to be hanging on every word.
So she was — in a way. In her right hand she had a spoon ready to help a silver dish of trifle, and she wanted to be quite sure when Rawlinson had done, so as to give him a spoonful. The little flashes of animation that he saw pass across her features were merely false starts that meant that once or twice she had thought he was through and he wasn’t.
With such encouragement Rawlinson carried his story toward its climax with increasing dramatic effect, so much so that the rest of us at the supper table were all listening to him. He was telling how he himself and a single companion were hopelessly lost, at midnight, in the great woods of the Congo, shuddering under the dripping forest, when — so related Rawlinson— “All of a sudden, as we sat there, we heard the most piercing shriek for ‘help’ echoing through the woods.”
Rawlinson paused, and sat back to enjoy the dramatic effect.
Our pretty hostess reached out and helped him to a spoonful of trifle, and said very quietly and comfortably, as if carrying on the topic still further:
“Of course when we go to the woods we always take our own help.”
At which, whether it was good manners or not, we all burst out laughing, so much so that our hostess looked across to her husband in charming perplexity and asked:
“Now, what have I said?”
There was something childishly appealing in the confession, but as her husband just went on laughing, I explained to her:
“You said nothing. Rawlinson’s lost in the woods on the Congo, but let him stay there. Go on with the trifle.”
ATMOSPHERE
HOTEL KEEPING, I can assure you, is a highly specialized art. Not every man can do it. You have, in a way, to be born to it. It is a matter of character, and atmosphere. You either have it, or you don’t.
Many Montrealers of the older generation will recall the memory of the genial Mr. Klick, the manager of one of our most select hotels. It was Mr. Klick’s standing illusion that the “guests” were his guests, in the personal sense. “We had your brother George with us again last week,” he would say to me. “It was a great pleasure to have him.” To Mr. Klick, George’s visit was directed personally toward himself, and the illusion — since life is built up on such — created a certain atmosphere of reality.
Another such I knew for whom a similar illusion was extended even to the creature comforts that he dispensed. The old-fashioned bar of the Somerset House in Toronto, where he presided — a bar glistening with mahogany and redolent of lemon and spices — was for him not a hired place of commercial entertainment but a sort of sanctuary where the connoisseur was met and matched by an art equal to the measure of his appreciation.
