Delphi complete works of.., p.23
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 23
“Why,” answered my strange acquaintance, “it died out of itself. Machinery killed it. If I remember rightly, you had a certain amount of machinery even in your time. You had done very well with steam, made a good beginning with electricity, though I think radial energy had hardly as yet been put to use.”
I nodded assent.
“But you found it did you no good. The better your machines, the harder you worked. The more things you had the more you wanted. The pace of life grew swifter and swifter. You cried out, but it would not stop. You were all caught in the cogs of your own machine. None of you could see the end.”
“That is quite true,” I said. “How do you know it all?”
“Oh,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “that part of my education was very well operated — I see you do not know what I mean. Never mind, I can tell you that later. Well, then, there came, probably almost two hundred years after your time, the Era of the Great Conquest of Nature, the final victory of Man and Machinery.”
“They did conquer it?” I asked quickly, with a thrill of the old hope in my veins again.
“Conquered it,” he said, “beat it out! Fought it to a standstill! Things came one by one, then faster and faster, in a hundred years it was all done. In fact, just as soon as mankind turned its energy to decreasing its needs instead of increasing its desires, the whole thing was easy. Chemical Food came first. Heavens! the simplicity of it. And in your time thousands of millions of people tilled and grubbed at the soil from morning till night. I’ve seen specimens of them — farmers, they called them. There’s one in the museum. After the invention of Chemical Food we piled up enough in the emporiums in a year to last for centuries. Agriculture went overboard. Eating and all that goes with it, domestic labour, housework — all ended. Nowadays one takes a concentrated pill every year or so, that’s all. The whole digestive apparatus, as you knew it, was a clumsy thing that had been bloated up like a set of bagpipes through the evolution of its use!”
I could not forbear to interrupt. “Have you and these people,” I said, “no stomachs — no apparatus?”
“Of course we have,” he answered, “but we use it to some purpose. Mine is largely filled with my education — but there! I am anticipating again. Better let me go on as I was. Chemical Food came first: that cut off almost one-third of the work, and then came Asbestos Clothes. That was wonderful! In one year humanity made enough suits to last for ever and ever. That, of course, could never have been if it hadn’t been connected with the revolt of women and the fall of Fashion.”
“Have the Fashions gone,” I asked, “that insane, extravagant idea of — —” I was about to launch into one of my old-time harangues about the sheer vanity of decorative dress, when my eye rested on the moving figures in asbestos, and I stopped.
“All gone,” said the Man in Asbestos. “Then next to that we killed, or practically killed, the changes of climate. I don’t think that in your day you properly understood how much of your work was due to the shifts of what you called the weather. It meant the need of all kinds of special clothes and houses and shelters, a wilderness of work. How dreadful it must have been in your day — wind and storms, great wet masses — what did you call them? — clouds — flying through the air, the ocean full of salt, was it not? — tossed and torn by the wind, snow thrown all over everything, hail, rain — how awful!”
“Sometimes,” I said, “it was very beautiful. But how did you alter it?”
“Killed the weather!” answered the Man in Asbestos. “Simple as anything — turned its forces loose one against the other, altered the composition of the sea so that the top became all more or less gelatinous. I really can’t explain it, as it is an operation that I never took at school, but it made the sky grey, as you see it, and the sea gum-coloured, the weather all the same. It cut out fuel and houses and an infinity of work with them!”
He paused a moment. I began to realise something of the course of evolution that had happened.
“So,” I said, “the conquest of nature meant that presently there was no more work to do?”
“Exactly,” he said, “nothing left.”
“Food enough for all?”
“Too much,” he answered.
“Houses and clothes?”
“All you like,” said the Man in Asbestos, waving his hand. “There they are. Go out and take them. Of course, they’re falling down — slowly, very slowly. But they’ll last for centuries yet, nobody need bother.”
Then I realised, I think for the first time, just what work had meant in the old life, and how much of the texture of life itself had been bound up in the keen effort of it.
Presently my eyes looked upward: dangling at the top of a moss-grown building I saw what seemed to be the remains of telephone wires.
“What became of all that,” I said, “the telegraph and the telephone and all the system of communication?”
“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, “that was what a telephone meant, was it? I knew that it had been suppressed centuries ago. Just what was it for?”
“Why,” I said with enthusiasm, “by means of the telephone we could talk to anybody, call up anybody, and talk at any distance.”
“And anybody could call you up at any time and talk?” said the Man in Asbestos, with something like horror. “How awful! What a dreadful age yours was, to be sure. No, the telephone and all the rest of it, all the transportation and intercommunication was cut out and forbidden. There was no sense in it. You see,” he added, “what you don’t realise is that people after your day became gradually more and more reasonable. Take the railroad, what good was that? It brought into every town a lot of people from every other town. Who wanted them? Nobody. When work stopped and commerce ended, and food was needless, and the weather killed, it was foolish to move about. So it was all terminated. Anyway,” he said, with a quick look of apprehension and a change in his voice, “it was dangerous!”
“So!” I said. “Dangerous! You still have danger?”
“Why, yes,” he said, “there’s always the danger of getting broken.”
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Why,” said the Man in Asbestos, “I suppose it’s what you would call being dead. Of course, in one sense there’s been no death for centuries past; we cut that out. Disease and death were simply a matter of germs. We found them one by one. I think that even in your day you had found one or two of the easier, the bigger ones?”
I nodded.
“Yes, you had found diphtheria and typhoid and, if I am right, there were some outstanding, like scarlet fever and smallpox, that you called ultra-microscopic, and which you were still hunting for, and others that you didn’t even suspect. Well, we hunted them down one by one and destroyed them. Strange that it never occurred to any of you that Old Age was only a germ! It turned out to be quite a simple one, but it was so distributed in its action that you never even thought of it.”
“And you mean to say,” I ejaculated in amazement, looking at the Man in Asbestos, “that nowadays you live for ever?”
“I wish,” he said, “that you hadn’t that peculiar, excitable way of talking; you speak as if everything mattered so tremendously. Yes,” he continued, “we live for ever, unless, of course, we get broken. That happens sometimes. I mean that we may fall over a high place or bump on something, and snap ourselves. You see, we’re just a little brittle still — some remnant, I suppose, of the Old Age germ — and we have to be careful. In fact,” he continued, “I don’t mind saying that accidents of this sort were the most distressing feature of our civilisation till we took steps to cut out all accidents. We forbid all street cars, street traffic, aeroplanes, and so on. The risks of your time,” he said, with a shiver of his asbestos clothes, “must have been awful.”
“They were,” I answered, with a new kind of pride in my generation that I had never felt before, “but we thought it part of the duty of brave people to — —”
“Yes, yes,” said the Man in Asbestos impatiently, “please don’t get excited. I know what you mean. It was quite irrational.”
We sat silent for a long time. I looked about me at the crumbling buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street. Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard struggle, the downfall of change and death — nay, the very millennium of happiness. And yet, somehow, there seemed something wrong with it all. I pondered, then I put two or three rapid questions, hardly waiting to reflect upon the answers.
“Is there any war now?”
“Done with centuries ago. They took to settling international disputes with a slot machine. After that all foreign dealings were given up. Why have them? Everybody thinks foreigners awful.”
“Are there any newspapers now?”
“Newspapers! What on earth would we want them for? If we should need them at any time there are thousands of old ones piled up. But what is in them, anyway; only things that happen, wars and accidents and work and death. When these went newspapers went too. Listen,” continued the Man in Asbestos, “you seem to have been something of a social reformer, and yet you don’t understand the new life at all. You don’t understand how completely all our burdens have disappeared. Look at it this way. How used your people to spend all the early part of their lives?”
“Why,” I said, “our first fifteen years or so were spent in getting education.”
“Exactly,” he answered; “now notice how we improved on all that. Education in our day is done by surgery. Strange that in your time nobody realised that education was simply a surgical operation. You hadn’t the sense to see that what you really did was to slowly remodel, curve and convolute the inside of the brain by a long and painful mental operation. Everything learned was reproduced in a physical difference to the brain. You knew that, but you didn’t see the full consequences. Then came the invention of surgical education — the simple system of opening the side of the skull and engrafting into it a piece of prepared brain. At first, of course, they had to use, I suppose, the brains of dead people, and that was ghastly” — here the Man in Asbestos shuddered like a leaf— “but very soon they found how to make moulds that did just as well. After that it was a mere nothing; an operation of a few minutes would suffice to let in poetry or foreign languages or history or anything else that one cared to have. Here, for instance,” he added, pushing back the hair at the side of his head and showing a scar beneath it, “is the mark where I had my spherical trigonometry let in. That was, I admit, rather painful, but other things, such as English poetry or history, can be inserted absolutely without the least suffering. When I think of your painful, barbarous methods of education through the ear, I shudder at it. Oddly enough, we have found lately that for a great many things there is no need to use the head. We lodge them — things like philosophy and metaphysics, and so on — in what used to be the digestive apparatus. They fill it admirably.”
He paused a moment. Then went on:
“Well, then, to continue, what used to occupy your time and effort after your education?”
“Why,” I said, “one had, of course, to work, and then, to tell the truth, a great part of one’s time and feeling was devoted toward the other sex, towards falling in love and finding some woman to share one’s life.”
“Ah,” said the Man in Asbestos, with real interest. “I’ve heard about your arrangements with the women, but never quite understood them. Tell me; you say you selected some woman?”
“Yes.”
“And she became what you called your wife?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you worked for her?” asked the Man in Asbestos in astonishment.
“Yes.”
“And she did not work?”
“No,” I answered, “of course not.”
“And half of what you had was hers?”
“Yes.”
“And she had the right to live in your house and use your things?”
“Of course,” I answered.
“How dreadful!” said the Man in Asbestos. “I hadn’t realised the horrors of your age till now.”
He sat shivering slightly, with the same timid look in his face as before.
Then it suddenly struck me that of the figures on the street, all had looked alike.
“Tell me,” I said, “are there no women now? Are they gone too?”
“Oh, no,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “they’re here just the same. Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like the men. Had that begun in your time?”
“Only a little.” I answered; “they were beginning to ask for votes and equality.”
“That’s it,” said my acquaintance, “I couldn’t think of the word. Your women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!”
He shuddered.
“Asbestos,” I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on him in wrath, “Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created, hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?”
Then, suddenly, another thought flashed into my mind —
“The children,” I said, “where are the children? Are there any?”
“Children,” he said, “no! I have never heard of there being any such things for at least a century. Horrible little hobgoblins they must have been! Great big faces, and cried constantly! And grew, did they not? Like funguses! I believe they were longer each year than they had been the last, and — —”
I rose.
“Asbestos!” I said, “this, then, is your coming Civilisation, your millennium. This dull, dead thing, with the work and the burden gone out of life, and with them all the joy and sweetness of it. For the old struggle — mere stagnation, and in place of danger and death, the dull monotony of security and the horror of an unending decay! Give me back,” I cried, and I flung wide my arms to the dull air, “the old life of danger and stress, with its hard toil and its bitter chances, and its heartbreaks. I see its value! I know its worth! Give me no rest,” I cried aloud ——
* * * * *
“Yes, but give a rest to the rest of the corridor!” cried an angered voice that broke in upon my exultation.
Suddenly my sleep had gone.
I was back again in the room of my hotel, with the hum of the wicked, busy old world all about me, and loud in my ears the voice of the indignant man across the corridor.
“Quit your blatting, you infernal blatherskite,” he was calling. “Come down to earth.”
I came.
THE END
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
This collection of short stories was first published in 1912 and is generally regarded as one of the most enduring classics of Canadian humorous literature. The fictional setting for the stories is Mariposa, a small town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti. Although drawn from his experiences in Orillia, Ontario, Leacock notes: “Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels.”
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has remained popular due to its universal appeal. Many of the characters, though modelled on townspeople of Orillia, offer small town archetypes relevant in any country. Their shortcomings and weaknesses are presented in a humorous, though affectionate way. Often, the narrator amusingly exaggerates the importance of the events in Mariposa compared to the rest of the world. The story of the steamboat Mariposa Belle sinking in Lake Wissanotti is one of the most famous of the collection. The apparent magnitude of this accident is lessened somewhat when it is revealed that the depth of the water is less than six feet. Men from the town come to the rescue in an un-seaworthy lifeboat, which sinks beneath them just as they are pulled on to the steamer, and the narrator earnestly remarks that this was “one of the smartest pieces of rescue work ever seen on the lake.”
The first edition
CONTENTS
The Hostelry of Mr. Smith
The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe
The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias
The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa
The Beacon on the Hill
The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin
The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin
The Mariposa Bank Mystery
The Great Election in Missinaba County
The Candidacy of Mr. Smith
L’Envoi. The Train to Mariposa
The original frontispiece
Preface
I KNOW NO way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life.
I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year’s crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.
