Delphi complete works of.., p.188
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 188
Strangely enough I was one of the very first people to know what was going to happen. It is my custom every now and then to visit our University Observatory, the astronomer in charge of which is a friend of mine. About three weeks ago on a clear, still night, I found him peeping and peering into his telescope with evident excitement.
“This is most gratifying,” he said, rubbing his hands, “most gratifying.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A comet,” he said, “is coming straight towards us. We learned yesterday that it had been seen from the observatory at Bungwelo in Java; there seems to be no doubt that its path is directed exactly towards us.”
“Will it hit us?” I asked.
“Undoubtedly. But astronomical interest will not centre so much in the mere moment of collision as in the antecedent period, possibly extending over thirty-six hours, during which time we shall have unparalleled opportunities of observation never enjoyed before. In fact, I may say that the thirty-six hours before the comet intersects our path will be quite unique.”
“So I should think,” I answered, “and no doubt the collision itself will be not half bad.”
The astronomer shook his head. “The mere collision itself,” he said, “or, more properly, the intersection of two orbits, will be commonplace. A collossal collision occurred in Sagittarius last year involving probably the destruction of a star of the first magnitude. We can hardly hope for any phenomena of such prime interest in connection with our own globe. Attention will be focussed chiefly upon the opportunities for testing the new theory of light during the hours just preceding the precipitation of the comet against the earth. There will undoubtedly be keen controversy in the astronomical world during that period: unfortunately it will be all too brief for adequate discussion.”
“And what,” I said, “will become of us after the comet has hit us?”
“That is the most interesting question of all. But unfortunately there is no agreement on the subject. According to one school the generation of heat in the impact will resolve us into a burning nebula.”
“That’s nice,” I said, “and what do the other schools say?”
“According to them we shall not be dissolved into a nebula at all, but broken into a group of say half a million burning asteroids composed of a nucleus of molten matter, and a corona of incandescent hydrogen gas, but still revolving in our orbit with scarcely any displacement.”
“Great!” I said, “I don’t wonder that you are interested. But now tell me. How long will it take for the comet to reach us?”
“It is a matter of rather nice calculation,” replied the astronomer. “I could hardly calculate it off-hand; one would be compelled to use a series of logarithms.”
“Use them,” I said, “use them.”
The astronomer began to calculate, then paused and looked up quickly from his work. “I am assuming a constant density of the ether,” he said. “That’s all right,” I answered. He worked again in silence for a while, and then again spoke.
“I am disregarding all perturbation of the outer planets,” he said.
“Certainly,” I said, “to Hades with them.”
Presently the astronomer stopped figuring.
“Well,” I asked, “what is it?”
“Speaking approximately, and assuming an elliptical path with a more or less hypothetical focus—”
“Forget it,” I said, “when does the comet hit us? Stick to that.”
“On the tenth of next June.”
He spoke quite calmly; for the moment it gave me a shock.
“And who,” I said, “gets it in the neck first? I mean, when the comet hits the earth, which side of the earth, which country, gets hit? Does it hit us, or does it hit the Japanese, or does it bump into Soviet Russia, or where?”
The astronomer shook his head. “I can’t say,” he said, “and meantime will you excuse me if I return to my telescope. There is a very interesting disturbance going on to-night among the planetary asteroids. I don’t like to miss it.”
“Yes,” I answered, “and they expect the same kind of thing at the big hockey match, so I’ll say good-night.”
I spoke cheerfully, but after I left him I felt troubled. On the street I noticed the people going to and fro, and surging in and out of the moving-picture houses, and hanging on to the tail end of the street cars: talking and chattering as if nothing was going to happen.
“Alas!” I thought, “what will they do when they hear that a comet is going to strike us on the tenth of June?”
For about two weeks I carried round this terrible knowledge alone. I say “alone” because naturally the astronomical world doesn’t count. They knew, of course, but they saw no particular reason for talking about it: the January disturbance among the planetary asteroids was too absorbing.
During these two weeks I bore the fate of the world all alone. It seemed dreadful to think that on the tenth of June it would all be over and that the world that I had known would end in a collision and that some of my friends would be dissolved into a nebula and others turned into molten asteroids enveloped in a corona of incandescent hydrogen. The situation had, I admit, a few advantages, I raised a note at my bank payable on the eleventh of June with a peculiar sense of gratification: and at my club at meal times it was pleasant to look round the room at certain members (I must not name them) and reflect that they would soon be enveloped in a corona of hydrogen.
But take it all in all it was a depressing period.
And then, strangely enough, the entire outlook altered. The astronomers having finished their calculations — announced to the public that the comet was coming straight at us and was due to hit us: and to my surprise I heard a man only last night telling another about it as they hung on the straps of a street car. “I see,” he said, “that a comet is due to hit us in the month of June. You didn’t notice it? It was in the paper this afternoon. It seems it is coming straight at us and it is to collide with us on the tenth, I think it said, anyway sometime early in June.” And at this they both laughed.
I find the same attitude everywhere. I heard a little boy last Sunday, on his way into church, say to his mother, “Mother, is it true that a comet is going to hit the world?” And she said, “Yes, dear, the newspapers say so.” “And where shall we be after it hits us?” “I suppose, darling,” she answered, with a touch of reverence, I admit, in her voice, “that we shall be dissolved into a nebular nucleus with an enveloping corona of incandescent hydrogen.” After that they passed into church, and I heard no more.
The situation puzzles me. Here we are about to crash into a comet in a few months time, and nobody seems to worry at all. The world goes on its way as if nothing were going to happen. In my own town we are going on building a new hotel to accommodate a thousand guests. Why? Where will those guests be after the comet hits them? Asteroids. In Washington they are starting preparations now for the Fourth of July. What will be left of the Fourth of July when it comes? Gas, and nothing else.
If I were a psychologist I should start up theories about the impossibility of frightening all the people all the time: I would explain that as long as everybody is going to be destroyed all together nobody minds it: it’s only the invidiousness of being destroyed alone that is distressing. In fact, I find that now that the others don’t mind, I don’t care either. I have raised a second note at the bank payable on the eleventh of June, and as a matter of fact if the world is not destroyed on the tenth I shall be, personally, a rather worse kind of asteroid than if it is.
Perhaps right there is the explanation of what is happening. We have got this unhappy world into such a miserable condition that in our hearts we don’t care if it is destroyed or not. We’ve got war debts to pay that run up to 300,000,000,000 dollars: we’ve got the Housing Question, and the Irish Question, and the Navy Question, and Bolshevism and Socialism and Atavism: the Treaty of Sèvres is broken, the German mark is falling, the League of Nations is creaking — in short, if the comet does hit us, who cares?
When I had written all that I took the manuscript over to a friend at the observatory to see if I had got the astronomical part of it right. And he says that it is wrong. He says that I have misunderstood things. It seems that we don’t hit the comet in the sense that ordinary plain people understand it, at all. He says that the intersection of our orbits will be confined to a conjunction of our path with the corona of the comet’s tail, or words to that effect. I asked him if we shall know it when it happens, and he said that by going up to the top of a high building and looking through a piece of smoked glass towards the constellation of Virgo the comet will be visible, presenting the appearance of a speck of dust with its tail comparable to the wing of a mosquito.
That’s pretty small business for a world catastrophe, isn’t it? As for me, having got used to the idea of destruction, I am worried now about the eleventh of June.
Personal Experiments with the Black Bass
IT WAS MY good fortune to spend a large part of the summer just past in fishing for bass. The season may be regarded as now definitely closed, and the time is appropriate for a scientific summarizing of the results achieved and the information gained.
My experiments are entitled to all the greater weight in as much as a large part of them were conducted in the immediate presence of so well known a man as Mr. John Counsell of Hamilton, Ontario, who acted as my assistant. Mr. Counsell very kindly permits me to say that all statements, measurements, and estimates of weight contained in the following discussion are personally vouched for by him. He has even offered to lend his oath, or any number of his oaths, to the accuracy of my statements. But it has been thought wiser not to use Mr. Counsell’s oath in print.
I take this opportunity in turn to express my high appreciation of the hardihood, the endurance and the quiet courage manifested by my assistant throughout our experiments. If Mr. Counsell was ever afraid of a bass I never knew it. I have seen him immersed in mud on the banks of the river where we fished. I have observed him submerged under rapids; I have seen Mr. Counsell fall from the top of rocks into water so deep and remain under so long that I was just cranking up our car to go home, and yet I never knew him to hesitate for a moment to attack a black bass at sight and kill it.
I can guarantee to anybody who is hesitating whether or not to invite Mr. Counsell to go fishing, that he is a man who may safely be taken anywhere where the bass are, and is an adornment to any party of sportsmen.
I turn therefore with added confidence to the tabulated results drawn by myself and Mr. Counsell from our experiments.
In the first place, we are able to throw much light on the vexed question as to the circumstances under which the bass bite. There has been a persistent belief that during the glare of the middle part of the day the bass do not bite. This belief is correct. They do not. It is also true that in the sunnier part of the morning itself the black bass do not, or does not, bite. Nor do they, or rather does it, bite during the more drowsy part of the afternoon.
Let the angler, therefore, on a day when the sun is bright in a cloudless sky, lay aside his rod from eight in the morning till six in the afternoon. On such a day as this the fish do not bite. The experienced angler knows this. He selects a suitable tree, lies down beneath it and waits. Nor do the bass, oddly enough, bite, on a cloudy day. The bass dislike clouds. Very often the appearance of a single cloud on the horizon is a sign for the experienced angler to retire to a quiet spot upon the bank and wait till the cloud goes by. It has been said that the bass bite well in the rain. This is an error. They don’t.
Another popular error that ought, in the interest of the young angler to be dispelled is that the bass bite in the evening; that is not so. The bass loves the day, and at the first sign of darkness it sinks to the bottom of the water from which it obstinately refuses to move.
I am well aware that the young angler might find himself seriously discouraged at what has just been said. “What then!” he might ask, “do the bass never bite at all? Is it never possible to get a bite from them?” To this I answer very positively that they both do and it is.
The results, in fine, of the experiments carried on by Mr. Counsell and myself lead us to the conclusion that the bass bites at midnight. We offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis, for which perhaps a more ample verification will be found in the ensuing season. We ourselves have never fished till midnight. And we observed that even the most persistent angler, as the darkness gathers around him, becomes discouraged, and at some time before midnight, quits. Here he is in error. Our advice to the angler in all such cases is to keep on until midnight. The black bass which is chary of biting in the glare of the day and which dislikes the cool of the evening, must, we argue, be just in the mood needed at midnight.
Nor let the young angler run away with the idea that the black bass never bites in the daytime. If he (the young angler) does this he must be hauled in again on the reel of actual experience. They do and they have. I recall in particular one case in point in the experiments of Mr. Counsell and myself. At the time of which I speak we were fishing from a rocky ledge at the edge of the river that was the scene of our operations. The circumstances were most propitious. The hour was just before daylight, so that there was still an agreeable sense of chilliness in the air. It was raining heavily as we took our places on the rock. Much of this rain, though not all of it, had gone down our shirts. There had been a certain amount of lightning, two cracks of which had hit Mr. Counsell in the neck. In short, the surroundings were all that the most ardent fisherman could desire.
For a moment the rain cleared, a first beam of sunlight appeared through the woods on the bank, and at that very moment Mr. Counsell called to me that he had a bite. I immediately dropped my rod into the river, and urged Mr. Counsell to avoid all excitement; to keep as calm as possible, and to maintain his hold upon his line. Mr. Counsell in turn exhorted me to be cool, and assured me of his absolute readiness should the fish bite again to take whatever action the circumstances might seem to us to warrant. I asked him in the meantime whether he was prepared to give me an idea of the dimensions of the fish which had bitten him. He assured me that he could, and to my great delight informed me that the fish was at least three feet long. The reader may imagine, then, with what suppressed excitement Mr. Counsell and I waited for this monster to return and bite again. Nor had we long to wait. Not more than two or three minutes had elapsed when I suddenly saw my assistant’s line in violent commotion, Mr. Counsell exerting his whole strength in a magnificent combat with the fish. I called to Mr. Counsell to be cautious and adjured him to the utmost calmness, running up and down on the bank and waving my arms to emphasize what I said. But there was no need for such an exhortation. Mr. Counsell had settled down to one of those steady fights with the black bass which are the proudest moments in the angler’s life. The line was now drawn absolutely taut and motionless. Mr. Counsell was exerting his full strength at one end and the fish, apparently lying at a point of vantage at the very bottom of the river, was exerting its full strength at the other. But here intervened one of those disappointments which the angler must learn to bear as best he may. The bass is nothing if not cunning. And an older, larger fish of the extraordinary size and mass of the one in question shows often an almost incredible strategy in escaping from the hook. After a few minutes of hard strain my assistant suddenly became aware that the fish had left his hook, and at the very moment of escaping had contrived to fasten the hook deep into a log at the bottom of the river. Investigation with a pike pole showed this to be the case. This trick on the part of the bass is, of course, familiar to all experienced anglers. It was fortunate in this case that Mr. Counsell had contrived to get such an accurate estimate of the size of the fish before it escaped.
The young angler may well ask how it is that we are able to know the size of a fish as soon as it bites, without even the slightest glimpse of it. To this I can merely answer that we do know. It is, I suppose, an instinct. The young angler will get it himself if he goes on fishing long enough.
Nor need it be supposed that there is anything unusual or out of the way in the means of escape adopted by the particular bass in question. Indeed, I have on various occasions known the bass not merely to contrive to pass the hook into a log, but even, after it has been firmly hooked, to substitute a smaller fish than itself. I recall in particular one occasion when Mr. Counsell called to me that he had a fish. I ran to his side at once, encouraging and exhorting him as I did so. In this instance the fish came towards the top of the water with a rush: we were both able to distinguish it clearly as it moved below the surface. It was a magnificent black bass measuring seventeen inches from its face to its tail, and weighing four and a half pounds. The gleam of its scales as it shot through the foaming water is a sight that I shall not readily forget. The fish dived low. Meantime, Mr. Counsell had braced himself so as to exert his full strength and I placed myself behind him with my arms around his body to prevent the fish from dragging him into the stream. By this strategy the fish was thrown clear up on the rock, where Mr. Counsell attacked it at once and beat the breath out of it with a boat hook. But judge of our surprise when we found that the fish landed was not the fish originally caught on the hook. The bass had contrived in its downward plunge to free itself from the hook and to replace itself by a yellow perch six inches long.
From what has been said above, it is only too clear that the life of the black bass fisherman has its disappointments and its hardships. The black bass is wary and elusive, more crafty, for example, than the lobster, and a gamer fighter than the sardine. The angler must face danger and discomfort. He gets rained upon: he falls into the river: he gets struck by lightning. But, for myself, when the ice of the winter has cleared away and the new season opens up, I ask no better fate than to be out again at daybreak with Mr. Counsell sitting on a rock beside the river, with the rain soaking into our shirts, waiting for a bite.
