Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 383
Still, that’s just the start. The main effort is directed at the mind.
Most of the improvement of Alcorn’s mind is done out of little manuals, all short and snappy. They have to be quick — Swedish in Ten Lessons, Spanish in Ten Minutes — things like that. Anything called a Digest hits him where he lives, or it used to till he found that you could get Digest of the Best Digests. “You get it all,” he said.
He seems always absorbed in that sort of stuff, — not exactly deeply, but like Fabre’s bees, busily. The World’s Great Poetry in Five Pages . . . The World’s Great Two-Cent Dramas . . . Religion (Five Cents) . . . Outline of the Outlines of Wells’ Outline.
But these rapid studies are intermingled with the real stuff, the solid serious study of the world’s greatest and hardest literature. That is what takes Alcorn to the Public Library, with his last book under his arm, waiting for his new one. You will see him handing in Newton’s Principia to get out Descartes’ Discourse on Method. “Great stuff!” he would say for each of them. He told me that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was about the biggest stuff he’s struck. It took him all Sunday afternoon to read it. He had out Rawlinson’s History of Babylon on Thursday and was back with it on Friday. “The real thing!” he said.
One peculiarity is that Alcorn’s activities keep varying. You can never know what particular line of self-improvement he is at; you have to fit conversation to it as best you could.
Thus I noticed one day that as soon as he sat down in the street car beside me he began asking most solicitously about my health.
“How’ve you been keeping?” he said, looking up sideways into my face, with artificial interest. “All right,” I said.
“No difficulty with sleep? No insomnia? And I suppose you digest things all right?”
Then I remembered that there was a new book out called How to Win Friends, and I remembered that it said, “Always express a solicitous interest in your friends’ health.” That came, I think, in Lesson One.
Another section of Alcorn’s self-improvement is done in picture galleries and art exhibitions. He never misses one.
“You see,” he likes to explain, in accounting for his presence in such places, “I don’t enjoy pictures, that is I do, but I don’t naturally. But I enjoy trying to enjoy them. That’s why I like this exhibition; it seems to me the best we’ve had for years. There’s nothing, or practically nothing, here that I can understand. But I’m working on them. That’s why I like this new kind of Catalogue, with little notes about the pictures.
“You know there are lots here that a man likes to study. They don’t mean anything to me; I can’t get them; now take this one — Man with Bucket — of course I get the bucket but the man looks just a blotch — to me, that is. I imagine that the merit of it is in the composition. Aha!” he continued, turning over the leaves of his catalogue, “No. 171. Man with Bucket; The artist here attempts a daring composition to convey the sensation of a bucket. I’m getting it all right; I knew that was a composition.”
Music he tries also, but sparingly. “Were you at the Symphony Orchestra last night?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” Alcorn answered, “I never miss; I just like to sit there and close my eyes and drink it in.” But on the whole music beats him. But he loves a street piano and that hurts his feelings.
That’s the way I have known Alcorn, like that, ever so long, year in, year out . . . no better, no worse.
Yet here is a strange thing. The kind of odd acquaintance, something between habit and friendship, such as I have had for years from my chance meetings with Alcorn, is a thing one gets unconsciously to value — and you never know it till you lose it. So it was with me when recently I all but lost — all but, not quite — my intercourse with Alcorn.
It was no fault of mine. Somebody gave him as a present my latest book (never mind the title; I’m not advertising), and there he was in the street car tapping the book wrapped up in his pocket.
“I’m looking forward to a great laugh,” he said. “Oh, boy!” And then he dipped back behind his spectacles into his Key to Babylonian Chronology . . .
“Yes, sir,” he said, next day. “I’m looking forward to that book of yours; I couldn’t get at it last night, but the first night I have I’m going to get right down to it.”
A week later, he said he was keeping the book to take to the Laurentians and have a real laugh, “Eh what?”
After that he nearly took the book to Three Rivers, you know how dull it is there — just the spot, eh, to get right into a book, deliberately, and just sit and chuckle. Three Rivers didn’t work — it’s a hard place to chuckle in. . . . Then he talked of keeping the book for the holidays. Of course, I didn’t mind; I’m used to it; if people buy a book they read it, rather than feel stung. But if you give it to them, they don’t . . .
Then one afternoon I saw Alcorn slipping into Car No. 65 when I got into Car No. 14. I knew that he was trying to avoid me and that I must do something.
So one day a little later I took care to meet him and I said, “Alcorn, here’s a little book for you. Send me that one of mine that you were reading as I’m out of copies, and you take this instead.”
“What is it?” he asked.
I showed him the cover. He read out the title. “The Witticisms of . . . of . . . I don’t quite see it — these spectacles—”
“The Witticisms of Hierocles,” I said, completing the title for him. “It’s Greek humor, the oldest there is. You see it’s in Greek on the page, but there are little notes that explain each joke. See this page—”
“Oh, boy!” said Alcorn, his spectacles glittering . . .
Our friendship was all set again.
CLOUDS THAT ROLLED BY: MR. ALLDONE’S AWFUL DAY
(“I FEEL ASHAMED now to think of the things we used to worry over . . .” Soliloquy of Any Old Man, followed by “What the devil’s wrong with this coffee?”)
Mr. Alldone always spoke of it afterwards as “Black Friday.” But even in old age he hardly cared to talk about it, except for an hour at a time. Some of us can remember him still; a man of character, Mr. Alldone — you could see it in the sweep of square firm head, suggesting something inside it, or near it, and the firm jaw, always shut unless open.
The scene is in Toronto — not the Toronto that you know but the Toronto of the ‘seventies that some of us can still remember; the Toronto of the jingling horse cars, of the young chestnut trees, of Carlton Street as the end of the town with the farms beginning on Bloor St.
Mr. Alldone sat reading his morning paper, his breakfast just done, and one eye out of the bow window to watch for the approach of the horse car. Its appearance was always the sign for getting his hat and cane, kissing his wife good-bye and going out and stopping it.
“It’s six minutes late again,” he murmured. (Pretty hard on a man, morning after morning to wait anything from three to six minutes.) Then as he looked back at his newspaper a sudden spasm appeared on Mr. Alldone’s face.
“What is it, Edward?” asked his wife. “Is it the war news?”
He shook his head. “That’s bad enough,” he said, “but listen to this:
“World to End in Five Thousand Years!”
“In five thousand years!” gasped Mrs. Alldone. Ella Alldone was a courageous woman, but the brutal suddenness of the thing for the moment struck her down . . . What about the children’s education?
Alldone, controlling his voice as best he could, read on:
“Speaking last night in Glasgow, at the Royal Geological Association, Lord Kelvin said that the maximum possible duration of the earth was five thousand years!”
The same unspoken thought overwhelmed them both. If that was the maximum what about the minimum?
“But why should he know?” asked Mrs. Alldone, her woman’s instinct fighting even the inevitable.
“He’s in the peerage,” said her husband.
“The one that makes the soap?”
“No, Scotch Whiskey” — and Mr. Alldone added musingly, “They have to look ahead in that business.”
Then he looked at the paper again and corrected himself. “Wait a minute though. It says about him down below, ‘Lord Kelvin, formerly Sir William Thompson, is senior professor of Physics at the University of Glasgow’.”
“Physic?” said Mrs. Alldone.
“Physics,” said her husband. “It includes surgery.”
Mrs. Alldone did her best to speak calmly. She was glad the children were already off to school. “How does he think it will end?” she asked.
“Frozen — the temperature will fall to absolute cold, 468 degrees below zero.” Mrs. Alldone shivered.
“Or possibly” — Mr. Alldone read on— “burned in a terrific heat of 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit . . .” Mrs. Alldone gasped. . . . “or, on the kinetic theory of gases, blown into fragments in a sudden explosion.”
Mrs. Alldone jumped.
When she could speak more calmly she asked. “Does he say how he knows it?”
“He does. He argues that the present conjunction of Mercury and Saturn . . .”
“Yes, yes?”
. . . “means a continued acceleration of the precession of the equinoxes — in other words an aberration of the whole solar system.”
Mr. Alldone threw down the paper.
“The damn solar system!” he exclaimed.
“Hush! hush!” his wife protested. She knew that he had always complained of the solar system, and never really trusted it. He had always felt there was a catch in it. In fact, it was a standing complaint of his. “One day,” he often said, “we’ll see.” And now they were going to.
“The car!” cried Mrs. Alldone.
Alldone laid aside his paper, put on his coat and gathered up his things. For once he forgot to kiss his wife good-bye, then remembered it at the door and turned back to her. “Forgive me, Ella,” he said, “it’s a little hard to get used to it.”
Then he stepped firmly out on the street in front of the car and waved his hat in the horse’s face. The driver, with a rapid turn of the arm of the new powerful circular handbrake, brought the car to a stop, rivetting it to the track, and bouncing up its six passengers.
“You’re late,” said Mr. Alldone.
“A little, Mr. Alldone; it’s a mean morning. We had to stop and rub down the horse a few times . . . and we’re short-handed; there’s only me and Bill on the car this morning.”
Mr. Alldone went around to the back and got into the car. “Is your wife not coming?” asked Bill the conductor. “No? All right, Aleck,” he called, “you can start.”
The half-dozen passengers moved their feet in the straw and nodded.
“War news looks bad, Alldone,” one of them said. The man evidently had not seen the worst.
“Fare, please, Mr. Alldone,” said the conductor.
Mr. Alldone handed him two cents.
“Three cents, sir, if you don’t mind.”
“Three cents!”
“It’s gone up, sir . . . they gave six months’ notice, you know.”
“Good Lord!” said Mr. Alldone, as he paid the extra cent. “What on earth is the world coming to? Three cents!” How long could a man go on like this, three cents here and three cents there! Keep that up a few years and where would you be? An extra cent every morning and every afternoon for 300 days or years — add that up, eh?
At the King Street corner Mr. Alldone and a fellow passenger got out to cross the street. A tattered man with a broom of twigs was sweeping round the mud, this way and that. He touched his hat.
“They’re getting awful, aren’t they?” said Mr. Alldone. “Something should be done about those fellows, standing there and expecting a cent. Do you know, I heard they investigated one of those fellows at the police court and found that he had made forty cents in a single day!”
“No wonder we pay taxes!” growled the other.
Mr. Alldone went up to his office. He was a broker. In the office was Phillips, his clerk — an ageing man in threadbare black, frail and worn, but able to write a hand like copperplate, for he had once been a clerk in London. There were no machines then.
“The war news is bad, Phillips,” said Mr. Alldone.
“Bad sir, very bad,” said Phillips, and when he spoke it was with the accent of London and the British army. He’d left his clerkship for the Queen’s shilling. Twenty years he’d had. Thin old veterans like Phillips in those days often got fine jobs like what Phillips had, at thirty dollars a month and a holiday every holiday.
“I’m glad they’ve got Lord Chugsford, sir,” continued Phillips. “He knows that hill country.”
“This is terrible news, too,” said Mr. Alldone, pointing at the item about Lord Kelvin.
“Bad indeed, sir,” said Phillips, “I hope I never live to see it.”
Mr. Alldone sat down to read the news in detail. Bad, bad it was. As the cable headings put it: Darkest Day of War. All England Anxious. Courage high. News from the NEPAUL CAMPAIGN. Funds fall a penny-halfpenny. Then followed the details, plainly and courageously written, as for a people measuring the cost (in pounds, shilling and pence):
Lord Chugsford’s entire Force, 300 of all ranks with 20 marines and a rocket gun, have advanced up the Brahmapootra into the Garghai Hills where they have suffered a severe reverse. Sir Dumdum Bullit, who led the advance, reported three men hit, with something or other, and a Highland piper shot through the bagpipes, courageously continuing to play. The forces have fallen back, backwards and forwards.
It was ominous enough. But more ominous still, to the trained intelligence of a broker, was the brief announcement that the Funds had fallen three cents! For the moment all thought of the end of the world was banished from Mr. Alldone’s mind. This thing was nearer. If London had fallen three cents, what was happening in New York? Wall Street must be in a ferment.
“The ticker! The ticker!” he called to Phillips. “How’s New York?”
There were no telephones then. But the circular telegraph tape called the ticker carried the stock news — as long as it stayed in order.
“It broke yesterday afternoon, sir,” Phillips said. “But I’ve sent Billy over to the telegraph office for the bulletins. He won’t be—”
In fact, Billy, the office boy, arrived at that moment.
Bad news, brief but bad. New York Central down two cents, Boston and Albany a cent and a half, the Erie Canal up one point but the Baltimore Canal down two.
But bad news never comes singly. A messenger appeared with an envelope. Alldone recognized the handwriting of the chairman of the Stock Exchange and tore the note open.
It read: —
Dear Alldone: Early morning telegrams have brought a flood of offers and orders — at least a dozen, certainly ten — showing a total collapse of values, Grand Trunk two cents, Great Western one cent, Goderich Ditch Canal a cent and a half, with Manitoulin Fish thrown on the market. Under the circumstances I write to you and to the other seven members of the exchange to say that on my own authority I am closing the Exchange. I am leaving the key with Peter, the bartender at Clancy’s.
Alldone got through the morning in the office as best he could; later on he could scarcely remember how. Once or twice he sent Phillips along the street and got back the report that the Exchange rooms were closed but that people were selling shares outside on the sidewalk at, literally, whatever they could get. Phillips had seen Grand Trunk sold five cents down, and Manitoulin Fish refused at any price. There was great gloom, he said, on the street. News of the disaster in Nepaul was by this time all over town. Work had practically stopped. People stood silent in little groups, or walked away and talked to themselves.
At half past twelve Alldone said, “I shall go out now and get a bite of lunch, Phillips — not that I can eat it — I’ll be right back, probably within an hour.”
Lunch, in the Bodega Grill on Leader Lane, had always been one of the pleasant spots in Alldone’s day — the bright cosy grill, open glowing coal fires all down one side, chefs in white, waiters in black, sherry in great casks end-on, chops frizzling, everybody talking, blue smoke rising.
All changed today. The patrons of the Bodega Grill sat silent, staring at the newspaper with little more than a nod and a word to a newcomer. Appetite was evidently gone. A man would order a porterhouse steak, sit and look at it, then eat it and get up and go out; or order a chop, toy with it, then read the paper, toy with it again and then finish it.
Even the genial face of the proprietor had exchanged something of its pleasant aspect for the marks of anxiety.
“Three mutton chops, as usual Mr. Alldone?” he asked.
Alldone shook his head. “Two and a half,” he said.
“This is the noon paper, sir,” said the waiter, as Alldone sat down. “Sherry, sir?”
Alldone nodded. It didn’t seem worth while to speak. He’d get it without.
As he drank his sherry, mechanically, and hardly realizing what he was drinking except that it was sherry, Alldone read the latest London dispatches . . .
“The disaster to British Arms in the Nepaul Campaign,” says the Times, “has had a reverberating effect throughout Europe. It is recognized that England has received a blow in her prestige, the one place where she can’t stand it. But we are assured that England will not turn her back.” Then followed the leading account. “Further cable dispatches from London only deepened the gloom of what someone has fittingly called England’s Darkest Hour. The fall of the Funds by three cents (as before) has led to a general fall of security values averaging anything from one farthing to a penny half-penny. The Bank of England directors have at once raised the discount rate to ten per cent, gone into the bank and nailed up the door. Lord Gloop, the great financial expert, has said that England is within twelve hours of barter. He said this ten hours ago. Greatest anxiety prevails as to what happens next.”
