Delphi complete works of.., p.140
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 140
Whereupon the Candidate would say. “That’s all right, John, I don’t expect you to. I can respect a man’s convictions all right, I guess.”
So they would part excellent friends, the Candidate saying as we moved off:
“That man, John Winter, is one of the straightest men in this whole county.”
Then he would add —
“Now we’ll just go into this house for a minute. There’s a dirty pup in here that’s one of our supporters.”
My opinion of our own supporters went lower every day, and my opinion of the Liberal voters higher, till it so happened that I went one day to an old friend of mine who was working on the Liberal side. I asked him how he liked it.
“Oh, well enough!” he said, “as a sort of game. But in this constituency you’ve got all the decent voters; our voters are the lowest bunch of skunks I ever struck.”
Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked sourly at my friend the Liberal worker.
“Hullo, John!” he called, with a manufactured hilarity, “got the little mare out for a turn, eh?”
John grunted.
“There’s one of them,” said my friend, “the lowest pup in this county, John Winter.”
“Come along,” said the Candidate to me one morning, “I want you to meet my committee.”
“You’ll find them,” he said confidingly, as we started down the street towards the committee rooms, “an awful bunch of mutts.”
“Too bad,” I said, “what’s wrong with them?”
“Oh, I don’t know — they’re just a pack of simps. They don’t seem to have any punch in them. The one you’ll meet first is the chairman — he’s about the worst dub of the lot; I never saw a man with so little force in my life. He’s got no magnetism, that’s what’s wrong with him — no magnetism.”
A few minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking free cigars.
“Now I want to introduce you first,” said the Candidate, “to our chairman, Mr. Frog. Mr. Frog is our old battle horse in this constituency. And this is our campaign secretary Mr. Bughouse, and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et cetera.”
Those may not have been their names.
It is merely what the names sounded like when one was looking into their faces.
The Candidate introduced them all as battle horses, battle axes, battle leaders, standard bearers, flag-holders, and so forth. If he had introduced them as hat-racks or cigar holders, it would have been nearer the mark.
Presently the Candidate went out and I was left with the battle-axes.
“What do you think of our chances?” I asked.
The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious looks.
“Pretty raw deal,” said the Chairman, “the Convention wishing him on us.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the departed Candidate.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Mr. Frog shook his head again.
“No punch,” he said.
“None at all,” agreed all the battle horses.
“I’ll tell you,” said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes— “the trouble is he has no magnetism, no personal magnetism.”
“I see,” I said.
“Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have got hold of,” continued Mr. Bughouse, “he’s full of magnetism. He appeals.”
All the other Committee men nodded.
“That’s so,” they murmured, “magnetism. Our man hasn’t a darned ounce of it.”
“I met Shortis the other night in the street,” went on Mr. Bughouse, “and he said, ‘Come on up to my room in the hotel.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I can’t very well.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘You’re on the other side but what does that matter?’ Well, we went up to his room, and there he had whiskey, and gin, and lager, — everything. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘name your drink — what is it?’ There he was, right in his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about it. Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing. It appeals to them.”
“Well,” said another of the Committee men, — I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, “I wouldn’t mind that so much. But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he can’t speak.”
“He can’t?” I exclaimed.
All the Committee shook their heads.
“Not for sour apples!” asserted Mr. Dope positively. “Now, in this riding that won’t do. Our people here are used to first class speaking, they expect it. I suppose there has been better speaking in this Constituency than anywhere else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps; not in the last few elections. But I can remember, and so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went out.”
He looked around at the circle. Several nodded.
“Remember it as well,” assented Mr. Mudd, “as if it were yesterday.”
“Well, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “I’ll never forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, eh?”
The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.
“My! but he was plastered. We had him over at Pete Robinson’s hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was plastered for fair. We all were. I remember I was so pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform. So were you, Mudd, do you remember?”
“I certainly was!” said Mr. Mudd proudly. Committee men who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.
“Yes, sir,” continued Mr. Dope, “you certainly were pickled. I remember just as well as anything, when they opened the doors and let the crowd in: all the boys had been bowling up and were pretty well soused. You never saw such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well spifflocated. Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened to. Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an ash-barrel? And when he made that appeal for a union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal candidate) made him sick? I tell you those were great days. You don’t get speaking like that now; and you don’t get audiences like that now either. Not the same calibre.”
All the Committee shook their heads.
“Well, anyway, boys,” said the Chairman, as he lighted a fresh cigar, “to-morrow will decide, one way or the other. We’ve certainly worked hard enough,” — here he passed the box of cigars round to the others— “I haven’t been in bed before two any night since the work started.”
“Neither have I,” said another of the workers. “I was just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of a card again.”
“Well, I don’t regret the work,” said the Secretary, “so long as we carry the riding. You see,” he added in explanation to me, “we’re up against a pretty hard proposition here. This riding really is Liberal: they’ve got the majority of voters though we have once or twice swung it Conservative. But whether we can carry it with a man like Grouch is hard to say. One thing is certain, boys, if he does carry it, he doesn’t owe it to himself.”
All the battle horses agreed on this.
A little after that we dispersed.
And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the Conservative candidate.
I say, to my surprise. But apparently not to anybody else.
For it appeared this (was in conversations after the election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism. He had, so they said, “punch.” Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked punch absolutely. Even his own supporters admitted that he had no personality whatever. Some wondered how he had the nerve to run.
But my own theory of how the election was carried is quite different.
I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised their candidate so much that they voted Liberal. And all the Liberals voted Conservative.
That carried the riding.
Meantime Grouch left the constituency by the first train next day for Ottawa. Except for paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in the town till they dissolve parliament again.
The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims
IN THE CLUB to which I belong, in a quiet corner where the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years’ standing, Mr. Edward Sims. Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a brass table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs. But they are few. Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further than Martini cocktails and Egyptian cigarettes. Such poor comforts as these, brought by a deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper at five o’clock, suffice for all his wants. Here sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls him home.
And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his college days when he was young. The last thirty years of his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that they have been without adventure. It is the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend as he sits looking from the window of the club at the waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in the winter.
I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen. And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group that exists in his mind under the name of the “old gang.” The same association, or corporate body or whatever it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the “old crowd,” or more simply and affectionately “the boys.” In the recollection of my good friend this “old gang” were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work they wouldn’t. Sleep they despised. While indoors they played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all round them. All night they were out of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in chorus and jeering at the city police.
Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, the “old gang” as recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything previous or subsequent. McGregor of the Class of ‘85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, the football half-back, went straight from the football field after a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the college.
Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the mere material sense, has used him all too kindly. At an early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came into money, — not money in the large and frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as well-established as the Constitution of the United States. In this brewery, even to-day, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends a certain part, though no great part, of his time. He is carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.
There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts Mr. Sims’s leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in isolated luxury.
But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the current of Mr. Sims’s life move of themselves.
Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.
Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now to marry: but this through no lack of veneration or respect for the sex. It arises, apparently, from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions of what might have been. There was, as there always is, one girl in particular. I have not heard my friend speak much of her. But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims’s college. She was not only beautiful. All the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were that. But she was in addition “a good head” and “a good sport,” two of the highest qualities that, in Mr. Sims’s view, can crown the female sex. She had, he said, no “nonsense” about her, by which term Mr. Sims indicated religion. She drank lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole generation in advance of the age.
Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect and a regret.
But the chief peculiarities of the old gang — as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims — is the awful fate that has overwhelmed them. It is not merely that they are scattered to the four corners of the continent. That might have been expected. But, apparently, the most awful moral ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the abiding belief of Mr. Sims.
“Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?” I ask him sometimes.
“No,” he says, shaking his head quietly. “I understand he went all to the devil.”
“How was that?”
“Booze,” says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet finality about the word that ends all discussion.
“Poor old Curly!” says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another of his classmates. “I guess he’s pretty well down and out these days.”
“What’s the trouble?” I say.
Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. It is easier than moving his head.
“Booze,” he says.
Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims’s friends.
“I see,” I said one day, “that they have just made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west.”
“Poor old Artie,” murmured Mr. Sims. “He’ll have a hard time holding it down. I imagine he’s pretty well tanked up all the time these days.”
When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his associates for a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they are down and out. It is a form of writing them off. There is a melancholy satisfaction in it. As the years go by Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as the lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest, brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be “boozed,” “tanked,” “burnt out,” “bust-up,” and otherwise consumed.
After having heard for so many years the reminiscences of my good friend about the old gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of them should step into actual living being before my eyes. Yet so it happened.
I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont. And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy hair, wearing thin.
“Shake hands with Tommy Vidal,” said Mr. Sims proudly.
If he had said, “Shake hands with Aristotle,” he couldn’t have spoken with greater pride.
This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual giant of whom I had heard a hundred times. Tommy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often assured me, the brightest mind known since the age of Pericles. He took the prize in Latin poetry absolutely “without opening a book.” Latin to Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural gift, born in him. In Latin he was “a whale.” Indeed in everything. He had passed his graduation examination with first class honours, “plastered.” He had to be held in his seat, so it was recorded, while he wrote.
Tommy, it seemed, had just “blown in” to town that morning. It was characteristic of Mr. Sims’s idea of the old gang that the only way in which any of them were supposed to enter a town was to “blow in.”
“When did you say you ‘blew in,’ Tommy?” he asked about half a dozen times during our lunch. In reality, the reckless, devil-may-care fellow Vidal had “blown in” to bring his second daughter to a boarding school — a thing no doubt contemplated months ahead. But Mr. Sims insisted in regarding Tommy’s movements as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance. He varied his question by asking “When do you expect to ‘blow out’ Tommy?” Tommy’s answers he forgot at once.
We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and anxious to get away. Mr. Sims offered him cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he refused them. It appeared that he had long since given up smoking. It affected his eyes, he said. The deferential waiter brought brandy and curaçoa in long thin glasses. But Mr. Vidal shook his head. He hadn’t had a drink, he said, for twenty years. He found it affected his hearing. Coffee, too, he refused. It affected, so it seemed, his sense of smell. He sat beside us, ill at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses. Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but has no great powers in conversation, would ask Tommy if he remembered how he acted as Antigone in the college play, and was “plastered” from the second act on. Mr. Vidal had no recollection of it, but wondered if there was any good book-store in town where he could buy his daughter an Algebra. He rose when he decently could and left us. As Mr. Sims saw it, he “blew out.”
Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments. He passed no word of censure on his departed friend. But a week or so later he mentioned to me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had “turned into a kind of stiff.” The vocabulary of Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation than the word “stiff.” To be a “stiff” is the last form of degradation.
