Delphi complete works of.., p.185
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 185
But observe that I am not saying a word, here and now, against prohibition. I am only talking of the obvious insanity, under prohibition of keeping up the peculiar institution called a BANQUET. Even the most ardent prohibitionist will admit that the original meaning of a Banquet was a gathering for the sake of eating and drinking. It may have been wrong. But that was the idea. And what is more, they didn’t drink water.
At Belshazzar’s Feast, when Belshazzar arose and said “Gentlemen, I want you to rise and fill your glasses and drink to the health of a man whom this city of Babylon delights to honour, a man whom we have the privilege of entertaining to-night, Mr. Nebuchadnezzar,” — when he said that, the Babylonians did not fill up their glasses with water, or lift up their coffee cups and make a pretense of drinking from the cold dregs of a demi tasse.
If you remove the drinking of toasts from a banquet, you are acting the play of Hamlet without Hamlet. For the eating part of it is at best only Ophelia.
If there is anything more conspicuously silly than a group of two or three hundred men being invited to “fill up their glasses” and drink pint after pint of water to the health of their fellow-sufferer, I want to see it. If you add to this the fact that heavy eating has already brought them to the verge of somnolence, that their native spirits are buried under four pounds of beefsteak, some idea may be formed of the ironic misery of a dry “banquet.”
Speaking in a personal sense, I do not want to seem ungrateful for the hospitality that I have received. But I have attended four dry banquets in the last four weeks, and am suffering still. At the latest of them I drank a pint of water to the health of the President of the United States. I drank, as a loyal British subject, nearly a quart for King George. I drank half a pint to the Supreme Court of the United States; one pint to our Great Universities; two each to our larger railroads, and one gill to the League of Nations. It is, speaking frankly, just a little too much.
Even more dreadful to contemplate is the awful quantity of food devoured, in sheer ennui, at the dry banquet. With the absence of wine, the lightness of the thing is lost. There is nothing to do but eat. I have seen a man sit and eat celery, at the opening of a dry banquet, for twenty minutes from sheer misery of soul. I have watched another eat forty-two olives one after the other. I have even noticed men pick the table decorations off the cloth and eat them; and last week I saw a man eat a flag without observing what it was. When the different meats are brought, the guests go on eating automatically and undiscerningly; they only stop when there is no more.
Last month at one single sitting we each ate:
10 olives
2 yards of celery
1 half a bucket of soup
12 sq. inches Filet de Sole Momay
16 ozs. avoirdup. Virginia Ham
16 “ “ Beef au J.
108 Cubic Centimetres Soufflé
and after that we lost track, and sat among a welter of French pastry, cheese, and fruit, scarcely conscious. And right at the end I saw my left hand neighbour reach out and eat a radish. Some of us would have eaten nuts, but we had no strength to crack them.
And then, it is at this moment of the dry banquet that the toastmaster, merry fellow, rises with his glass of water and starts up the oratory of the evening.
In the wicked old days, now amended constitutionally, the speeches were supposed to be gay. Laughter was the order of the evening. I am quite sure that, at Belshazzar’s Feast, Mr. Nebuchadnezzar had no sooner got upon his feet than the whole room was filled with a pleasant expectancy. “Well, gentlemen,” he would say, “I want to tell you that I am glad to be here!” That was all that was needed. The company burst into a roar of merriment. There was, or was supposed to be, something so droll in the way in which Mr. Nebuchadnezzar got up, something so inimitable in the way in which he looked about him round the room, that the impulse to laughter was irresistible. And when Mr. Nebuchadnezzar went on to say: “I want to tell you, gentlemen, a little story about a commercial traveller who was going from Babylon to Damascus,” the room became a mere uproar of laughter and applause.
But now! O Tempora, O Mores! The after-dinner speeches have changed into after-dinner lectures. Nebuchadnezzar rises in his place, serious, lantern-jawed and dull. Who ever could have thought the fellow amusing! He faces an audience, heavy, somnolent, bored to death already, hating everything and everybody, and only wanting to be gone.
Then he makes a speech on the Babylonian Canal System. There are reporters sitting all around him writing it down on tablets of mud. He gives all the statistics of the mileage of the Babylonian canals, he goes into the technique of the siltage of the mud, he touches lightly on the new mud shovel, he assures the auditors that we can now lift fifty tons of mud per hour. You can almost feel him lifting it as he talks. And the next day the Babylonian papers record the gay gathering with a great capital heading. FIFTY TONS OF MUD PER HOUR — enjoyable gathering at the Belshazzar Banquet.
This is what is going on about us every evening. And for some reason or other there has arisen a sort of conspiracy of silence in regard to it. There is such a decent tradition abroad among us about the acceptance of hospitality that no invited guest cares to refuse his invitation. He accepts. He goes. He stands, mournful and resigned, among the little group of the reception committee waiting for the banquet to begin. He walks like a dumb sheep into the banquet hall to the music of “Hail, Columbia!” He eats with due submission his four pounds of beefsteak. He endures the full mud-shovel of statistics that is dumped over him; and, still suffering, reaches, at last the happy moment when he may wrap his fur-lined coat about him and step out into the night. Not even the immortal words of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” can present, to our minds, a deeper picture of the welcome of everlasting sleep.
If we must be prohibitionists, why not do the thing properly. If the wine is out, away with the Banquet. Let us do all things in order. Let us gather without food or drink and bring our knitting and our crochet work instead. Then, to the cheerful clicking of the busy needles, let us hear with pleased attentiveness the proud statistics of our transportation system.
I have reason to know that there are others, thousands of others who suffer as I do. Some of them are so highly placed that to mention their names might crack the Constitution. One is an Ambassador, several are Governors of States, many, a great many, are Generals, and one a Prince. I can only hope that when the definite announcement of my New Movement is made they will get their knitting needles together and join in.
My Lost Dollar
MY FRIEND TODD owes me a dollar. He has owed it to me for twelve months, and I fear there is little prospect of his ever returning it. I can realize whenever I meet him that he has forgotten that he owes me a dollar. He meets me in the same frank friendly way as always. My dollar has clean gone out of his mind. I see that I shall never get it back.
On the other hand I know that I shall remember all my life that Todd owes me a dollar. It will make no difference, I trust, to our friendship, but I shall never be able to forget it. I don’t know how it is with other people; but if any man borrows a dollar from me I carry the recollection of it to the grave.
Let me relate what happened. Todd borrowed this dollar last year on the 8th of April, (I mention the date in case this should ever meet Todd’s eye) just as he was about to leave for Bermuda. He needed a dollar in change to pay his taxi; and I lent it to him. It happened quite simply and naturally, I hardly realized it till it was all over. He merely said “Let me have a dollar, will you!!” And I said, “Certainly. Is a dollar enough?” I believe, in fact I know, that when Todd took that dollar he meant to pay for it.
He sent me a note from Hamilton, Bermuda. I thought when I opened it that the dollar would be in it. But it wasn’t. He merely said that the temperature was up to nearly 100. The figure misled me for a moment.
Todd came back in three weeks. I met him at the train, — not because of the dollar, but because I really esteem him. I felt it would be nice for him to see someone waiting for him on the platform after being away for three weeks. I said, “Let’s take a taxi up to the Club.” But he answered, “No, let’s walk.”
We spent the evening together, talking about Bermuda. I was thinking of the dollar but of course I didn’t refer to it. One simply can’t. I asked him what currency is used in Bermuda, and whether the American Dollar goes at par. (I put a slight emphasis on the American Dollar), but found again that I could not bring myself to make any reference to it.
It took me some time (I see Todd practically every day at my Club) to realize that he had completely forgotten the dollar. I asked him one day what his trip cost him and he said that he kept no accounts. A little later I asked him if he felt settled down after his trip, and he said that he had practically forgotten about it. So I knew it was all over.
In all this I bear Todd no grudge. I have simply added him to the list of men who owe me a dollar and who have forgotten it. There are quite a few of them now. I make no difference in my demeanour to them, but I only wish that I could forget.
I meet Todd very frequently. Only two nights ago I met him out at dinner and he was talking, apparently without self-consciousness, about Poland. He said that Poland would never pay her debts. You’d think a thing like that would have reminded him, wouldn’t you? But it didn’t seem to.
But meantime a thought, — a rather painful thought, — has begun to come in to my mind at intervals. It is this. If Todd owes me a dollar and has forgotten it, it is possible — indeed it is theoretically probable — that there must be men to whom I owe a dollar which I have forgotten. There may be a list of them. The more I think of it the less I like it, because I am quite sure that if I had once forgotten a dollar, I should never pay it, on this side of the grave.
If there are such men I want them to speak out. Not all at once: but in reasonable numbers, and as far as may be in alphabetical order, and I will immediately, write their names down on paper. I don’t count here men who may have lent me an odd dollar over a bridge table: and I am not thinking (indeed I am taking care not to think) of the man who lent me thirty cents to pay for a bottle of plain soda in the Detroit Athletic Club last month. I always find that there’s nothing like plain soda after a tiring ride across the Canadian frontier, and that man who advanced that thirty cents knows exactly why I felt that I had done enough for him. But if any man ever lent me a dollar to pay for a taxi when I was starting for Bermuda, I want to pay it.
More than that: I want to start a general movement, a Back to Honesty movement, for paying all these odd dollars that are borrowed in moments of expansion. Let us remember that the greatest nations were built up on the rock basis of absolute honesty.
In conclusion may I say that I do particularly ask that no reader of this book will be careless enough to leave this copy round where it might be seen by Major Todd, of the University Club of Montreal.
Radio A New Form of Trouble
WHAT IS RADIO? I shall be only too glad if any reader of this book will write and tell me, simply and in words that I can understand, what Radio is.
Let him understand at the outset that it is no use telling me that by means of Radio, I would be able, seated comfortably in my own armchair to hear the Pittsburgh orchestra. I know it. I don’t want to. Nor need he inform me that, seated comfortably in my own armchair, I can hear a speech by W. J. Bryan. I don’t need to. I heard one.
Nor do I wish for information involving the use of such words as “receiving circuit,” “rheostal,” and “variometer.” These words are no help to me. I have tried them out and I don’t get them. I have already read a little book called “Radio for the Beginner” and it has beaten me. I have sent away for another that is called “Radio for Infants,” but I have very little hope from it. I know already that it will tell me that, any infant nowadays, seated comfortably in his high chair, can hear the Pittsburgh orchestra. And of course it will contain what are called “directions” telling me to “insert my antennæ in my ears.” But I refuse to. It sounds like insults, that we use to use when I was young.
And, most particularly, I don’t want surprising statements about the rapidity of ether waves. It is no use telling me that the Hertzian waves represents 3,000,000,000,000,000 oscillations per second. I believe that that figure is correct but it doesn’t strike me as so terribly fast anyway. After reading for months the statistical figures on the bill of Reparations against Germany and the fall of the Russian Ruble, it leaves me cold.
All that I clearly perceive about Radio is, that a new form of trouble has broken out in the world. One more item has been added to the growing list of Things I Don’t Understand. I know now just how they felt in Ancient Babylon when they hanged the man who invented the first wheelbarrow. Radio, in short, just adds one length to the distance by which I am being left behind.
Indeed the whole Radio business as I read it in the newspapers, seems to be largely in the hands of children. Only last week I noticed that a little boy in the Schenectady Technical High School had made a Radio machine out of an empty sardine can and a piece of stove pipe wire. He must be a bright little fellow. I’d like to choke him. And I see where another bright little fellow (they are called “bright little fellows” in Radio literature) has fixed up a Radio set in his bedroom: it said that his “ærial” was 75 feet long and that he had a “flat top lead-in.” Poor Boy! I forget what he uses his Radio set for. Perhaps he listens to the Pittsburgh orchestra. They mostly do.
Meantime the thing has assumed the proportions of a vast movement. There are Radio shops, Radio fans and a whole growth of Radio literature, magazines, journals, advertisements, and prize competitions. In fact it’s a “world movement”; it takes its place right alongside of prohibition and psychoanalysis and the subconscious mind. In a very short time it will get into the moving pictures and on the stage and into our current novels and eat the heart out of our literature. I was reading the other night, — or was I dreaming, — a “Radio novel” which began something like this, —
“Angelina sat in her cloistered room, her antennæ in her ears and her eyes idly resting on her direction finder, hearing and yet half not hearing the Pittsburgh orchestra while the Hertzian waves moved drowsily past her at the rate of three million billion miles a second. Suddenly the girl noted among the waves one which sent a throb to her heart. It was his, — Eduardo’s. That familiar and beloved call, “K double Z O double Z.” She would recognize it anywhere. There was a romance about it which thrilled the young girl,— “K ZZ, O. ZZ.”
Hastily she adjusted her amplifier, moved her spark to a better audio-frequency, and opened her condenser till its capacity increased one millionth of a farad. “Eduardo,” she clicked. “It is I. Where are you?” “I am here,” came the answer, “seated comfortably in my armchair, I am listening to a broadcast by one of our greatest national preachers. Tune your wave length, darling” (he said the word, in Radio), “QQ is the sign for it, and cut in and we will listen to it together.” “I will sweetheart,” she answered (HKW).
Rapidly this bright young girl, — she was in the highest grade of the Schenectady Technical High School: the last one that they will allow them to be in, — adjusted her Radio set. In a few moments she had cut in on the same broadcast that Eduardo, far away in the ether, was also absorbing into his vacuum tube. It was wonderful to the girl to think that her antennæ were joined to his by the same wave and that his amplitude and hers, with a proportional deduction for the square of the distance, were now in the circuit. “Thus together they listened to the broadcast their antennæ close locked—”
And would you believe it by the time I had got to this point in the narration of the new Radio novel all of a sudden, it began to seem strangely like, and yet unlike, something that I had read long ago in a forgotten story dealing with New England life in the older days.
Something like this it went. “Together they sat and listened to the voice of the preacher in the pulpit, and as they sat thus, his hand found hers, and their hands remained as they listened, close locked together,—”
Queer isn’t it? The similarity. This new world is not quite so new as might appear. And on the whole I must say I prefer the hand to the antennæ.
Not but what there are great advantages about the new Radio method as thus applied. Before John Strongface (I think that was his name in the New England Novel either that or John Ironheart) could get Priscilla to that pew in the church where he held her hand he had to walk eight miles through the forest on his snow shoes with bears after him and after the service was over he had to help her put on her wraps and tie her muffler round her neck and take her home four miles and eat pumpkin pie with her mother.
Whereas Eduardo with his Radio set! a cinch! No trouble about taking her home, no expense, nothing. All he has to do is to “cut her out.” It is done like this.
“Somehow he felt that the vibration of the girl’s battery was growing fainter. “Tired, love,” he whispered (ZZZZ) (a whisper is indicated by four loud blue sparks). “A little,” she amplified. “Then let us cut out,” signalled Eduardo, “and to-morrow night at eight, seated comfortably in our armchairs we will listen to the Pittsburgh orchestra.” “That will be lovely dearest,” she answered, (QQQ) —
Then this pure girl — she was taking pure mathematics and pure physics at the Schenectady Technical High School, — clicked out her simple prayers on her Radio, and sank to rest.”
There! Out of all which there seems to grow a moral. I could feel it growing while I was writing this, but it seemed to slip away from me at the end. Something about all the rush and bustle of our modern life, full of inventions and machinery and wonders, leaving us no further on after all, eh, what?
