Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 386
There was a lot of applause, and I must say I realized the party had hit it this time — here you had all the old slogans, “freedom to work” and “freedom of work” subsumed — that was the word the speaker used — into one lucid thought.
It was a great hit for the Canon — no wonder he’s popular. You see he’s not a bit like what you’d expect from a religious man — he’s always cheerful, takes a drink any time, in fact he was quite tight at Peggy Sherar’s wedding the other day — smokes a cigar, indeed as someone said at the meeting, he just seems the ideal of an early Christian, you know, the kind they used to burn at Rome. All the same, some of them are a little afraid of it. They say if people get the idea that a party stands for religion, it’s all over with it. So Mills and Hoggitt both talk of easing Canon Sip out of the party. They would, except that having him may help to bring in the liquor interest. It seems you can’t possibly hope to get anything out of the liquor interest unless you have with you some sort of showing of clergymen and professors. Lawyers don’t help much for that.
Mentioning that reminds me of the main thing of the evening, the really crucial stuff, when they all sat and listened — the discussion of ways and means, how to get money to carry on.
The chairman of the interim finance committee read a report which he prefaced with a repetition of last week’s general resolution in favor of fair and open means of raising funds, without secrecy or subservience to moneyed interest. He said the committee had been at work. But he said, gentlemen, before you can get to fair and open means you’ve got to do a good lot of spade work underground in the dark. The committee, he said, had been hard at this. The time, he said, was not ripe to say what they had been doing. But they had not been idle. They had approached already three of our largest banks for financial support, with gratifying results. The first had invited them to come back in a month; the second, to come back in three months; the third had invited them never to come back. This, on the whole, was gratifying. They had got in touch with several manufacturing interests; one of the members of this committee knew personally very well the head of one of these interests — or rather, knew a lot about him — and had already obtained in this way his pledge to give as much as he has to.
They had done their best in the direction of both the liquor interests and the churches. But as members present would realize, it is very hard to attract the interest of these unless you get them together. They go, as we all know, hand in hand. Any large, really large, contribution from a liquor source will bring the clergy round us at once.
Meanwhile any members who would care before they passed out to leave a small party donation would find Mr. Sibley the treasurer at the table here. He added that Mr. Sibley had ink and a blank cheque book. But it was too bad. A lot of them were moving out already and I don’t think they heard about Mr. Sibley having the cheque book.
I was driven home after the meeting by one of the younger members who had a car — a college boy, keen as anything on politics, enthusiastic and, I could see by his talk, straight as a string. He said he thought there were too many older men in the thing; he was trying to engineer an inside group of young men to get them out. That was queer, wasn’t it? Because Hoggitt had told me they’d have to get rid of a lot of the younger men . . .
Anyway, there’s no doubt what the party means.
THE LIFE OF LEA AND PERRINS
(“THERE IS NO greater stimulus to our National Spirit than the contemplation of the lives of the great men who have made our country what it is . . .”)
The coming together of Lea and Perrins, about a century and a half ago, which was later on to have such momentous consequences, seems to have been entirely fortuitous. They met first as schoolboys at the old Winchester school. Harry Perrins, a vigorous young fellow in the Senior Fourth, came upon young Charles Lea, a new boy, standing alone in a corner of the Quad. He felt drawn to this shy, unknown lad. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Just dreaming,” answered Charles. “I say,” said Harry, “dreaming? That’s a queer idea — dreaming of what?”
“Of a sauce,” answered Charles.
“What sort of sauce?” asked Harry.
“Ah, that I don’t know as yet,” replied the little fellow.
That began the friendship of the two boys henceforth inseparable . . .
The boys went early to Oxford, to Worcester College, their parents being anxious to get them through it before the French Revolution broke out.
It was at Oxford that Harry Perrins learned glass blowing. “If you’re still thinking of that sauce,” he said to Charles Lea, “I think I could make a jolly good bottle for it.”
Charles looked dreamily at his friend, “The vinegar,” he said: “I’m studying chemistry.”
It was on a bright morning after the Declaration of Independence that Charles Lea came early across the Quad to wake up Harry. “I can make it,” he said.
A few days later in a cellar of the old Mitre Tavern Charles and Harry stood looking into a broad vat full of dark liquid. Charles threw into it a last spoonful of powder. “That’s got it,” he said.
“What was in that powder, Charlie?” asked Harry.
“Hush, hush,” Charles said, “there are people above.”
“Whisper it,” said Harry.
“No, no,” answered Charles, “not now.”
“What do we do next?” asked Harry presently.
“We have to wait twenty-five years,” said Charlie. “You can’t hurry vinegar. Everybody knows that.”
“What do we do in the twenty-five years?”
“We have to think out a label,” said Charles. “We’ll need all the time.”
The twenty-five years, thus busily occupied, seemed to pass like a drop in a vat. One year Charles got the idea of a bird on the label, and within a few years more Harry seized the notion of the picture of a rabbit. A few hurried years were devoted to selecting the color, and — it seemed in no time — the thing was done.
They were ready to bottle up, still both under sixty, hale and hearty, having never touched sauce in their lives.
Then came an unforeseen delay.
“Charles,” said Harry, “how do we sell it?”
“What do you mean?” asked Charles, still as impractical as ever.
“Sell it, sell it. Put it on the market and push it.”
“It’s a good sauce,” protested Charles.
“Good? Of course it is — but that won’t advertise it. Didn’t you learn anything from the French Revolution?”
Charles was impractical, but he had a rapid mind.
“That’s it,” he said; “you’ve said it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Harry.
“The French Revolution. Aristocracy? Don’t you see, we’ll say the sauce was made from a recipe given us by a nobleman . . .”
“Hold on,” said Harry, puzzled, “a nobleman couldn’t make up a recipe.”
“Of course not,” said Charles. “Don’t you see, we’ll say he did.”
A few days later Harry turned up at Charles’s rooms with a tall aristocratic man, stamped with all the stamps that mark nobility.
“This is Lord Nit of Worcester,” he said. “Show him where to sign.”
“You don’t need to,” said Harry, “just write, ‘from the recipe of a nobleman of that county’.”
Lord Nit took the pen.
“I say,” he said, “rather good that, eh?”
With that the sauce was on.
The busy years spun past, expanding the British Empire as the need for the sauce kept bulging it outwards.
There was still much to do. Eager years passed in the quest of a glass stopper and a cork, involving the expulsion of the Portuguese Royal Family.
Charles and Harry, still hale and hearty, confidently expected to live on into the reign of Queen Victoria.
But it was not to be.
There came a day when a breathless manservant broke into Harry’s study . . .
“Could you come over, sir, at once?” he managed to say. “It’s Mr. Charles. He’s real bad.”
“What’s he been taking?” asked Harry.
“Some of the sauce, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Good Lord!” gasped Harry.
Harry leant over Charles’s bed. It seemed as if they were back again, boys together, in the old Winchester Quad, with Charlie still dreaming.
“Charlie,” murmured Harry, “Charlie, can you still hear me? What was in the spoon?”
But there came no answer.
A MORNING OFF
(“IT IS THE duty of each and every one of us to maintain in war-time not only an unflinching courage but even a cheerful optimism that defies misfortune.” — Winston Churchill, Mrs. Roosevelt, and other speakers.)
I read that motto, hanging on my wall just before starting out this morning. But for once I didn’t need it, because I’m in for a cheery morning anyway.
I’m going down to my dentist, and what do you think? He said he could give me the whole morning if need be! Think of that, eh?
So here I sit snug and cosy in the big chair, the great plate glass window in front of me, the sun pouring in and the birds singing outside. My dentist friend walks round in his white coat — now I see him, now I don’t see him. You see I have my head in a V-shaped affair — for Victory. I never thought of it before! — and so I can’t move it sideways. He needs my head that way when we’re using the large augur, the two-inch, going at high speed.
For the moment my dental friend is out of the room, telephoning, I imagine. The merry fellow is so popular with all his friends that they seem to ring him up every few minutes.
Little scraps of his conversation reach my ears as I lie half-buried in my white towel, in a sweet reverie of expectancy . . .
“Pretty bad in the night, was it, eh? Well, perhaps you’d better come along down and we’ll make a boring through that biscuspid and see what’s there!”
Full of ideas, he is, always like that — never discouraged, something new to suggest all the time. And then I hear him say; “Well, let me see. I’m busy now for about a couple of hours” — hurrah! That means me! I was so afraid he was going to say “I’ll be through here in about five minutes.” But no, it’s all right; I’ve got two long, dreamy hours in front of me.
He comes back into the room and his cheery presence, as he searches among his instruments and gives a preliminary buzz to the buzzer, seems to make the sunshine even brighter. How pleasant life seems — the dear old life; that is, the life I quitted ten minutes ago and to which, please Providence, I hope to return in two hours. I never felt, till I sat here, how full and pleasant life is.
So runs my pleasant reverie. But, meanwhile, my dental friend has taken up a little hammer and has tapped me in his playful way, on the back teeth.
“Feel that?” he says.
And he’s right, the merry dog! I do feel it. He guessed it right away. I am hoping so much that he will hit me again.
Come on, let’s have a little more fun like that. But no. He’s laid aside his hammer and as nearly as we can see has rolled up his cuffs to the elbow and has started his good old electric buzzer into a roar.
Ah, ha! Now we are going to get something — this is going to be the big fun, the real thing. That’s the greatest thing about our little dental mornings, there’s always something new. Always as I sit I have a pleasant expectancy that my dental friend is planning a new one.
Now, then, let us sit back tight, while he drives at our jaw with the buzzer. Of all the exhilarating feelings of hand-to-hand conflict of man against man, of mind matched against mind, and intelligence pitted against intelligence, I know of none more stimulating than when we brace ourselves for this conflict of man and machinery.
He has on his side the power of electricity and the force of machinery. But I am not without resource. I brace myself, laughingly, in my chair while he starts to bore. We need, in fact, our full strength; but, on the other hand, if he tries to keep up at this pace his hands will get tired. I realize, with a sense of amusement, that if his machine slips, he may get a nasty thump on the hand against my jawbone.
A female voice speaking into the room has called him to the telephone, and again I am alone. What if he never comes back!
The awful thought leaps to my mind, what if he comes in and says, “I’m sorry to say I have to take a train out of town at once.” How terrible!
Perhaps he’ll come in and say, “Excuse me, I have to leave instantly for Ungava!” or, “I’ll have to let your work go; they’ve sent for me to go to China!”
But no, how lucky! Back he comes again. I’ve not lost him. And now what is he at? Stuffing cotton-wool up into my head, wool saturated with some kind of drugs, and pounding it in with a little hammer.
And then — all of a sudden, so it seems — he steps back and says, “There, that will do nicely till Monday.”
Never mind! After all, he said Monday! It won’t seem so long till then!
MR. PLUMTER, B.A., REVISITS THE OLD SHOP
(REMEMBER NOW THY college in the days of thy graduation. — Ecclesiastes — Improved).
Mr. Archie Plumter, college graduate, lives in one of those towns that lie fast asleep in the garden part of Western Ontario. You know the little places — all trees and grass and hedges and flowers, with the houses well back from the street and all boulevarded together. In Woodsdale you can’t tell where the McLeans’ lawn ends and Dr. Selby’s begins. Somewhere concealed in the middle of the town is the main street with the shops on it, and away off at the side, down hill, is the railway station, which is really more of a lawn and a flower garden than a station. All the big through trains stop at Woodsdale (for water) and the passengers ask the porter what place this is and he looks out of the window and shakes his head.
But it’s just the place for a college graduate. You see, a college graduate, as Plumter himself says, could hardly stand it in the country. His mind is too active. But here — again as Archie himself explains — you have everything, just as in the city. If you want to do any shopping you get anything you want right here on the main street; say you want a pair of boots — they have them; say you want a necktie, they’ll have it, or they’ll send for it. And, anyway, if you have any big shopping, any serious buying to do, you’ve only to hop on the train and even the slow train runs you into the City in three hours, and the flyer does it in two and three quarters. There’s a picture house in town or if you want to go to the theatres you’ve only to step on the train and there you are, in Detroit. How long? About four hours. Or if you want music, well, what’s the matter with taking a steamer across Lake Erie to Cleveland? That’s what Archie Plumter does, or at least that’s not what he does but it’s what he could do if he did it. Or suppose you want a drink? Well, you can’t get a drink in Woodsdale because it’s local option and so they have no choice. But all you have to do is jump in the car, drive twelve miles and get all you want.
Mr. Plumter is in the milling business (flour and feed). That’s his mill — as it was his father’s — that huge stone grist mill, sunk down so deep in Woodsdale Creek that, big as it is, the trees have overgrown and overtopped it. A stone grist mill is one of the few of man’s contrivances which, with a touch of time’s hand, can even improve on nature. There it stands, with the water pounding over the dam beside it, and churning up white foam among the stones below; a roar of water outside, and inside a never ending trembling and vibration of the floors, as the great mill stones hum as drowsily and steadily as the earth upon its axis . . . The floors all a-tremble, and on them the millers, moving bags of flour on little hand trucks and talking with the incoming farmers with one hand to their ear. After work the millers go home, dusted all over with fine white — looking better men — right out of the Bible.
Thus roars and thunders Plumter’s mill and it seems now that it is to start to grind grist for Mr. Plumter’s old college. . . .
It has been my fortune at intervals to pass through Woodsdale on the through trains, and I often stop over between the flyer and the slow train, or contrariwise, and spend a few hours with Archie Plumter. He and I were at college together twenty years or more ago and so when we meet Archie’s talk is all college — all about the “old shop” as he loves to call it. How is it getting on? Have I been round it at all lately?
Oddly enough, in the twenty years since our graduation Archie has never once been “back;” and this, despite the fact that he’s in and out of the city, as he himself says, practically all the time, certainly every two years or so. He means to go to the college! . . . always means to . . . every time he takes a trip to the city he tells Nell (that’s his wife) that he means to have a look around the old joint. But he never does. You see he always has some business in the morning, and generally he takes “some feller” out to lunch, and is apt to meet “one or two fellers” on the street — when a man as genial and comfortable as Archie Plumter comes to the city, the whole street seems filled with accidental “good fellers” as genial as himself.
So he doesn’t go. That’s nothing. Most graduates are like that, even right in the city. They never go near the old college, unless it’s in a bee line between their house and their office. Often they don’t see it for ten years. That’s nothing to do with their enthusiasm.
Plumter is keen on college. He tells me that they often talk, Dr. Selby and himself, of getting up a college dinner right there in Woodsdale. It seems they’ve quite a group of graduates. As Archie says, counting himself and Dr. Selby — and Dr. Selby and himself — and not counting the Methodist minister because you would hardly expect him to take anything, there’d be ten of the boys altogether, or eleven if you count the druggist. They often talk of a dinner. But there are difficulties. At a college dinner the boys would naturally like to wear dinner jackets. But there are two of the boys who haven’t got dinner jackets. So that has held the thing up — just as it has for many college dinners from Halifax to Pasadena.
