Delphi complete works of.., p.247
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 247
It thrilled him as he stood. She was a brunette, and she was lonesome. And what she wanted was correspondence; and that was the best thing he did.
His hand for once trembled on the pen as he wrote back:
“Young man, writing good hand, certificates in penmanship from three correspondence schools, begs accept offer lonesome brunette extent 2 ounces a week.”
The course of love for once ran smooth. How Smith thrilled when he realized that she made a letter D exactly as he did, and that she could spell pneumonia without lifting the pen! One day, greatly daring, Smith gave the girl a kiss — on the corner of the letter — and the return post brought no rebuke.
The fateful day came when Smith, dressed in his best clothes, neatly shaved, and with his hair well oiled, sat down and wrote firmly and clearly a letter of proposal of marriage. The happy answer reached him even before his oil was dry.
There followed a blissful period of engagement, with a letter by every post, and then marriage. Circumstances and distance made it impossible for Smith to be present at his marriage, which was confirmed by proxy, two notaries public exchanging certificates. Nor was it possible for Smith and his wife to live together, as their homes were in different parts of the country. But as husband and wife they settled down, by correspondence, to the routine of domestic life.
During all this period of courtship and marriage, the plain stern business of earning a livelihood had been carried on by J. Smith with unremitting industry. And here he had met with well-merited success. An appointment as Local Correspondent of the Meteorological Weather Bureau at Washington gave him an assured if humble income, and brought him in contact with various winds, storms, and cyclones, which he might otherwise not have appreciated.
It was his duty also to report all temperatures and changes of temperatures on his own isothermal line, a business that kept him in constant telegraphic communication with at least six meridians of longitude. At the same time his work brought him membership in a number of corresponding scientific meteorological societies, while, as a hobby, he acted as horticultural correspondent for a garden magazine, reporting from time to time the growth of oak trees, everlasting thorn, and century plants. This crowded life left him but little time for diversion, yet he managed to carry on a game or two of chess with correspondents, selecting one in Alaska and one in Chee-Foo, China, to avoid over-rapidity in the play.
There came into Smith’s life in due course the Great War, changing it and convulsing it from top to bottom, so that, as he himself said, the world scarcely seemed the same. Postage rates rose to four cents for half an ounce. Foreign correspondence was placed under censorship; at least ten of Smith’s letters — as he himself used afterwards to relate — were sunk by submarines. His weather reports were reduced to two words a day for fear that the knowledge of how cold it was in his district might be of use to the enemy. In his chess game it was only possible to make one move in two years. In other words, as J. Smith himself admitted, the war was a hard, cruel time during which he carried on as best he could.
Since the armistice, life on the whole has gone well with Correspondence Smith. His weather reports are again in full operation, and his correspondence is now wider than ever. The award by mail of two honorary degrees from correspondence schools has shown how the learned world has appreciated his success. In his domestic life Smith and his wife, though still unfortunately kept apart, have had their union blessed by a child (a little girl) adopted by correspondence with a Maternity Bureau for Homeless Children. The little one has been duly placed out at a Country Home for Selected Children, from which she writes every week (an ounce and a half) to each of her parents.
And yet in despite of it all, from what I have known of J. Correspondence Smith and from what I have heard about him, the man is not altogether happy. He gets a feeling — have you ever had it yourself, my dear reader? — as if he had been too much a spectator in life and too little an actor. Sometimes it seems to him as if life had all drifted past him like a moving procession, from which his own timidity debarred his entrance. Perhaps you have felt that, yes? J. Smith often wishes that at some time he had broken loose and done something — just what, he doesn’t know, but something.
If he had it all to do again, he says, he would plunge right boldly into everything that life offers, hit or miss, win or die, and use it to the very last gasp of it. Therefore, if there turns out to be such a thing as metempsychosis, or the transfer of souls, and if Smith comes back, just watch out for him. He’ll do big things — at least that is what he says in his correspondence.
Eddie the Bartender
A GHOST OF the Bygone Past
There he stands — or rather, there he used to stand — in his wicker sleeves, behind the tall mahogany, his hand on the lever of the beer pump — Eddie the Bartender.
Neat, grave, and courteous in the morning, was Eddie. “What’s yours, sir?”
Slightly subdued in the drowsier hours of the afternoon, but courteous still. “What are you having, gentlemen?”
Cheerful, hospitable, and almost convivial in the evening. “What is it this time, boys?”
All things to all men, was Eddie, quiet with the quiet, affable with the affable, cheerful with the exhilarated and the gay; in himself nothing, a perfect reflection of his customer’s own mind.
“Have one yourself, Ed,” said the customer. “Thanks, I’ll take a cigar.”
Eddie’s waistcoat pockets, as day drew slowly on to evening, bristled with cigars like a fortress with cannon.
“Here, don’t take a smoke, have a drink!” said the customer. “Thanks, I’ll take a lemon sour. Here’s luck.” Lemon sours, sarsaparillas, and sickly beverages taken in little glassfuls, till the glassfuls ran into gallons — these were the price that Eddie paid for his abstemiousness.
“Don’t you ever take anything, Ed?” asked the uninitiated. “I never use it,” he answered.
But Eddie’s principal office was that of a receptive listener, and, as such, always in agreement.
“Cold, ain’t it?” said the customer.
“It sure is!” answered Eddie with a shiver.
“By Gosh it’s warm!” said another ten minutes later.
“Certainly a hot day,” Ed murmured, quite faint with the heat.
Out of such gentle agreement is fabricated the structure of companionship.
“I’ll bet you that John L. will lick Jim Corbett in one round!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Eddie.
“I’ll bet you that this young Jim Corbett will trim John L. in five minutes!”
“Yes, I guess he might easily enough,” says Eddie.
Out of this followed directly and naturally Eddie’s function as arbitrator, umpire, and world’s court.
“I’ll leave it to Ed,” calls the customer. “See here, Ed, didn’t Maud S. hold the record at 2.35 before ever Jay Eye See ran at all? Ain’t that so? I bet him a dollar and I says, ‘I’ll leave it to Ed,’ says I.”
That was the kind of question that Eddie had to arbitrate — technical, recondite, controversial. The chief editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica couldn’t have touched it. And he had to do it with peace and good will on both sides, and make it end somehow with the interrogation, “What are you having, gentlemen?”
But Eddie was not only by profession a conversationalist, a companion, and a convivialist, he was also in his degree a medical man, prescribing for his patients.
This was chiefly in the busy early morning, when the bar first opened up for the day.
Eddie’s “patients” lined up before him, asking for eye-openers, brain-clearers, head-removers.
Behind Eddie, on little shelves, was a regular pharmacopœia; a phalanx of bottles — ticketed, labeled — some with marbles in the top stopper, some with little squirting tubes in the mouth. Out of these came bitters, sweets, flavors, peppers — things that would open the eyes, lift the hair, and renovate the whole man.
Eddie, shaking and mixing furiously, proceeded to open their eyes, clear up their brains, and remove their heads.
“I’ve got a head this morning, Ed. Fix me up something to take it away.” “Sure,” said Eddie in return, “I’ll fix it for you.”
By eight a.m. Eddie had them all straightened up and fixed. Some were even able to take a drink and start over.
This was in the early morning. But at other times, as for example, quite late at night, Ed appeared in another rôle — that of the champion strong man. Who would suspect the muscles of steel concealed behind Eddie’s wicker cuffs and his soft white shirt-sleeves? Who could expect anger from a countenance so undisturbed, a nature so unruffled, a mind so little given to argument?
But wait! Listen to that fierce quarrel punctuated with unpunctuatable language between two “bums” out on the barroom floor. Lo! at the height of it Eddie clears the mahogany counter in a single leap, seizes the two “bums” each by the collar, and with a short rush and a flying throw hurls them both out of the swinging doors bang on the sidewalk!
Anger? No, not that; inspired indignation is the proper phrase. Ed represented the insulted majesty of a peaceful public anxious only to be let alone.
“Don’t make no trouble in here,” was Eddie’s phrase. There must be “no trouble” within the sacred precincts. Trouble was for the outside, for the sidewalk, for the open street, where “trouble” could lie breathing heavily in the gutter till a “cop” took it where it belonged.
Thus did Eddie, and his like, hurl “trouble” out into the street, and with it, had they only known it, hurled away their profession and their livelihood.
This was their downfall.
Thus on the sunshine of Eddie’s tranquil life descended, shadow by shadow, the eclipse of prohibition.
Eddie watched its approach, nearer and nearer.
“What are you going to go at, Ed?” they asked.
“I’ve been thinking of going into chicken farming,” Eddie used to answer, as he swabbed off the bar. “They say there’s good money in chickens.”
Next week it was turkeys.
“A fellow was in here telling me about it,” Ed said. “They says there’s big money in turkeys.”
After that it was a farm in Vermont, and then it was a ranch out in Kansas. But it was always something agricultural, bucolic, quiet.
Meanwhile Eddie stayed right there, pumping up the flooding beer and swabbing off the foam from the mahogany, till the days, the hours, and the minutes ticked out his livelihood.
Like the boy on the burning deck, he never left.
Where is he now? Eddie and all the other Eddies, the thousands of them? I don’t know. There are different theories about them. Some people say they turned into divinity students and that they are out as canvassers selling Bibles to the farmers. You may still recognize them, it is claimed, by the gentle way in which they say, “What’s yours this morning?”
There is no doubt their tranquil existence, sheltered behind the tall mahogany, unfitted them for the rough and tumble of ordinary life.
Perhaps, under prohibition, they took to drink. In the cities, even their habitat has gone. The corner saloon is now a soda fountain, where golden-headed blondes ladle out red and white sundaes and mushy chocolates and smash eggs into orange phosphates.
But out in the solitude of the country you may still see, here and there, boarded up in oblivion and obliquity, the frame building that was once the “tavern.” No doubt at night, if it’s late enough and dark enough, ghostly voices still whisper in the empty barroom, haunted by the specters of the Eddies — — “What’s yours, gentlemen?”
Janus and the Janitor
DANIEL J. EDWARDS — the janitor of our apartment — had practically no opportunities in life, no schooling to speak of, and no start. Yet here he is the janitor of a six-story apartment house, with twenty-four different apartments under his control. And the man is only fifty-three at that. As a matter of fact, he was full janitor of an apartment building when he had just turned forty-seven.
You may see him at any time in the quiet of a summer evening, sitting in his shirt sleeves half-way down the area steps that lead to the basement, smoking his pipe and taking things easy. After nine-thirty, as he himself says, there is scarcely a darned thing to do — unless some one calls him to go up to one of the apartments or something of that sort.
Few men — he himself feels it — have got along quite so steadily, have climbed to the top of the tree quite so successfully as Dan has. They call him “Dan” mostly around the apartments, though some of the children say “Mr. Edwards.” As he himself says, everybody knows him all around — the delivery men, the milkmen, the postmen, the boys with the telegrams, in short, every one. Indeed, to put it in his own words, he doesn’t know anybody that he doesn’t know.
The job that Dan has is, admittedly, a pretty soft thing. You could call it a cinch. Of course he comes on (that’s his phrase, “comes on”) pretty early in the morning, especially in the summer time, when he’s up and about freshening up the front steps before six o’clock. But then he likes to be up early in summer. In this world, it doesn’t so much matter when and where you “come on,” as it does how you feel when you do “come on.”
Anyway, all winter Dan takes things easy. Often he doesn’t budge from his bed till seven o’clock.
There’s a lot to do in the building and yet in a sense, as Dan has often explained it to me, there’s nothing to do. You can’t call running an elevator “work.” And if you go up with a monkey wrench to fix up a tap that’s leaking, or take a hammer and nails and tighten a window sash, you would scarcely consider that working.
Now, it would be different in an apartment house where the janitor does all the furnaces. But in a place of this size there’s a regular furnace man who comes on duty. Dan has nothing to do with the furnaces except to give them a little touch up now and then if they need it, or if it’s really cold weather, just slip into the furnace room once or twice in the night and coax them on a little. If a furnace man wants a lift with his ashes, Dan might give him that. But that’s all there is to it.
Dan tells a good story of how a man two blocks around the corner with a new — a pretty high-class — apartment house wanted him to come over there, at higher pay, big pay, but Dan asked him, “What about the furnace?” “Oh! I’d look to you to do that,” said the man. “Well, then,” Dan answered, “I guess it’s a case of no thanks.” It’s a good story and Dan likes to tell it and he tells it well. At the end he always repeats two or three times. “ ’Yes, sir,’ says I, ‘I guess it’s a case of no thanks.’ ”
Telling stories like that makes an evening pass pretty agreeably.
But for the most part the main thing is that if you get into a job like Dan’s where people trust you, you are pretty well your own boss. If Dan wants any time to stick on his hat and slip across the street for anything, it’s all right.
In point of politics, Dan practically hasn’t got any. In his position you can’t. If you take sides either one way or the other, it gets known. It is much better to be friendly with both sides and hold quietly in between. Dan tells a good story of how one of his tenants wanted him to vote for him one time — he was a lawyer in Apartment C on the Sixth. “I hope you’re going to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday,” he said to Dan. “I’d like to, Mr. Thomas,” Dan answered, “but I don’t see how I can.”
I’ve heard Dan tell that story again and again. “ ’Dan,’ he says, says he, ‘I hope you’re going to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday.’ ‘Well, Mr. Thomas,’ says I, ‘I don’t see how I can.’ He was elected all right. They had Apartment C on the Sixth.” It’s a good story, and Dan likes to tell it. He tells it well too. He has a lot of stories, all as good as that — in fact, all more or less like that — and he likes to tell them to you, sitting in the area steps when things have quieted down for the evening.
As far as money goes, Dan is now, as he himself has often told me, pretty well on Easy Street. He generally keeps well ahead of the game with ten or fifteen dollars up even at the very end of the month. And he has money saved up as well. There’s the hundred dollars that he saved up that he lent to his brother who got into trouble in Vancouver. He has that. That is to say, it’s there. And there’s a hundred and fifty dollars that he sent to his wife’s brother in Seattle, when they got burned out; he has that. In fact, quite a number of items like that, all of which are there still.
Anyway, Dan carries a pretty big life insurance; he has nine hundred dollars on a forty-year endowment. That’s coming along all the time.
Now all this I only mention in connection with a rather strange thing that happened about a fortnight ago, a queer trick of fortune, so to speak. Didn’t the ancient Romans call fortune Janus? If so it ought to connect up with a janitor, oughtn’t it?
Well, anyway, you may have noticed this in the papers yourself. But you would probably have passed it over. It is only when you know the person concerned that it has a different sort of importance.
At any rate, there was a news item that came from Seattle and was copied all around the press. It was headed, “Janitor Falls Heir to Fortune,” and it was worded like this:
“Under the will of John Henry Walters, almost the entire estate, about three-quarters of a million dollars, will go to his brother-in-law, Daniel Edwards. Walters, it will be remembered, who was working as a river driver, made a sudden fortune in the opening of the Summit Lake mining district. Edwards, for whom the Walters’ lawyers are now looking, is said to be the janitor of an apartment building in an eastern city.”
And those who did notice that particular news item probably saw also the one that followed it up a few days afterwards. It was headed, “Will Stick at Job,” and it explained that, “Daniel James Edwards, identified as the heir of the Walters’ fortune in Seattle, amounting to some three quarters of a million dollars, says that he means to stick right where he is and go on with his job.”
