Delphi complete works of.., p.297
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 297
But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn: don’t need to: never did need to. That is their salvation.
ONCE TO EVERYMAN
PEOPLE OFTEN SAY to me, “What is the sensation of flying? How does it feel to be up in the air? I would like to go up,” they say, “but I am nervous as to how I should feel if I do.”
To which I always reply — and I have answered the question a hundred times— “The first sensation, the first lift off the ground as you find yourself rising above the tree-tops is perhaps one of the most delicious sensations ever experienced. I shall always recall that wonderful feeling — the first time I ever went up.” I add in a quiet, modest tone, “It is a good many years ago, of course, but I shall never forget that sense of soaring above the tops of the trees.”
What I take care not to say is that the first time I went up is also the last time I went up. That is my own private business. I went up in an aeroplane just once — about ten years ago. I was up in the sky for quite a time, I am not sure just how long, but say a week. Then I came down. And I found that when I came down I had passed into a new class. I was a man who had the right to talk of flying. Once is all you need.
Notice how easy it is: I speak modestly of “the first time I ever went up, many years ago of course.” The fair inference from that is that in the intervening years that have since passed, I have been pretty well up in the air all the time — just down for meals, so to speak. If people say to me, “Is flying really dangerous?” I can truly answer, “Well, it’s ten years since I first went up in a machine and I have never had the slightest accident” — then I correct myself— “well, once perhaps a little trouble in landing.” That, you see, is true, because on the only occasion when I landed I was in such a hurry to get out that I broke one of the straps. That made a little trouble, about fifty cents’ worth.
Please observe, anyone who wishes to follow my example, the use of that word “machine.” If you want to qualify as an indoor aviator, don’t call an aeroplane by its own name. Call it a “machine,” or a “bus” or an “old horse,” or better still “a freight car.” Speak of it with contempt. Act as if you weren’t afraid of it: I always say, “I shall never forget the first old box I went up in: nothing would tempt me to go up again in an old banjo like that.” I don’t add that nothing would tempt me either to go up in a new banjo, with Colonel Lindbergh to run it.
The reader must take careful notice that sometimes questions and answers become a little embarrassing. It needs a really good command of English to fit them in. But a little reflection and practice will do a lot. Thus at times people say to me, point-blank:
“Do you fly much?”
The answer to this is— “Not now!” with a very strong and serious emphasis on the now. I don’t fly much now. This implies, you see, that there was a time when I flew like all Hades — a regular dragon-fly. Then you may add, if you like— “I don’t think one ever gets tired of it, though.” In my case I am sure I didn’t get tired of it. I was tired of it before I started.
But I repeat I did actually fly once, and most people won’t do even that. I may not be a Colonel Lindbergh but I have the right to lord it over the ordinary man in conversation.
Somebody once even asked me, “Did you ever fly much?” That seems a hard one, but the answer was after all quite easy. I merely said in a deprecatory way, “Oh, no, I never flew much. I don’t suppose I was even in a plane more than once in any one week.” Quite so, and I might have added— “in any one century.”
What I have described above, however, is only one aspect of the peculiar consequences which follow for anybody who has ventured “once up.” There are other things as well. I find, for instance, that my casual conversations on aerial navigation have acted as an incentive to others. After hearing what I had to say many a quiet listener has gone away with the determination to venture into the air in the hope that he may some day become a veteran aviator like me. Some of these “pupils” of mine have taken to aviation in the full sense of the word and one or two have become distinguished aviators. Looking back on it now over the increasing years I am cultivating a convenient confusion of mind as to just when I began aerial flight and just whom I encouraged and helped in his earlier days. Baron Richtoffen was, perhaps, a pupil of mine. I am not sure. Billy Bishop, the great Canadian flier, I am certain — almost certain — was one of my disciples. At any rate, I am sure I remember buying lunch for him either just before he became celebrated or just after. Indeed, when I get really started talking aviation from my arm-chair at the University Club, Montreal (under the statutory legislation of the Province of Quebec), I am not sure that I didn’t have a good deal to do with the training of Santos Dumont, the Wright Boys (both intimate friends) and Professor Langley of the Smithsonian institute and the Brothers Montgolfiers.
Any one of my readers can enjoy the same increasing reputation and the same glowing retrospect who will merely go “once up” in the air and then come down and talk about it for ten years.
More than that, I recall the case of a young man who actually took my advice, acted on my example, and came down a transformed man. The morning after his flight he walked into his employer’s private office with that resolute compelling look that any man wears who faces the floating clouds three thousand feet above the earth. Afraid! afraid to ask the senior partner for a mere increase of a hundred dollars a month! A man who has seen his plane’s wings bank at an angle of forty-seven degrees to the tangent of the visible horizon, afraid of a smuffy business man in a sack suit who never left the surface of the globe. Nonsense. And the senior partner rose with a pleasant smile and said, “I think I guess what you’ve come in about, Johnson; as a matter of fact, the firm were going to take up that question on their own account.” So the thing was done in a minute.
From the office that afternoon young Johnson went straight to a residence in the costlier and leafier part of the city where there was a certain house into which he had never before entered without a certain trembling of the heart: because there was in it a drawing-room in which he always felt a peculiar palpitation of nervousness: because in the corner of it was a sofa, and on the sofa, in the afternoons, an expensive-looking girl in a flowing dress fortified behind flowers and a silver teapot. But what did he care now? He had “flown over” her darned house — girl, teapot, rubber trees and all. Any man who has “flown over” a girl — well, after that the thing is simple. So Johnson walked in with that exalted look on his face and that quiet friendly steadiness in his blue eyes that one can only get at an altitude of three thousand feet, and nowhere else. And the girl just rose and put out her two hands with a sort of wonder in her face and said— “Oh, Edward.” The rest was over in ten minutes. The girl’s father went down before the aviator like a ninepin. They are married now and live in their own house on which they have paid an instalment — just once — and there has come to them the sweetest little baby — just once — and there you are.
I hope that by this time, my dear reader, you have realized that this article is a direct personal appeal and exhortation to yourself. Are you aware that, just outside your own city, there is a station of the Aircraft Company? If you go out in that direction you will see a large empty field with two or three aeroplanes trundling round on it, and one or two neat, efficiently looking young “air-men,” waiting round. Those boys will take you up any time, ride you round the sky and bring you back for five dollars. You do know this. In fact, you have known it for years, but you try not to know it. And you’ve got the five dollars — you must have, because you spent as much as that yesterday buying Russian cigarettes and French tea-cakes for the same girl that you brought the violets for last Saturday.
Come. Be a man. Drive out to that aviation place — one minute of resolution. Step into the machine — up you go — and when you come down, you’re a hero. And when you go back to the girl, buy her a ten-cent plug of tobacco and a Scotch thistle. She’ll know her place all right enough after this.
That is all; except just to say this. It is just possible that the Aircraft Company of Montreal (back of the Mountain, first turn to the left), seeing this article might be so pleased with it as to offer me a free ride in one of their machines. If so, please don’t let them bother. I have found for some time past that aeroplaning gives me a twinge of rheumatism, just a touch of inflammation in the mesencephalon — in short, I don’t suppose I’ve been up in a “machine” for months and months.
CONFESSIONS OF A SODA FIEND. WRITTEN FROM A CONDEMNED CELL
I BELIEVE THAT I cannot in any better way impress these confessions on the minds of my readers than by the simple opening statement that they are written from a condemned cell. Through the kindness of the authorities I have been supplied with pen and ink and paper, but I have been warned at the same time that my time is short. It has seemed to me, I repeat, that an appeal from a condemned cell ought to attract the attention of even the most careless of readers. People who as a rule read nothing are immediately attracted by anything that has been written in a condemned cell.
It was for that reason that I came here. As soon as I knew that this old municipal building — with the town lock-up in the basement — had been condemned, I went to the mayor and asked, “Could you let me have the use of one of the condemned cells?” He demanded my reason for my request, and I said, “I want it to write confessions in.” He said, “Very good. But remember your time is short. The contractors want to start demolishing the building at ten o’clock this morning.” I asked, “May I have the use of writing materials at the expense of the authorities?” The mayor said, “Yes, provided that you work in a write-up of the town as a factory site. But you don’t get stamps.”
It is for that reason, gentlemen, that I find myself seated in this condemned cell, gentlemen, and writing my memories, gentlemen. And I want to say, gentlemen, before I stop calling you gentlemen, that I would gladly keep it up all through the confession. But as I have always noticed that writers of confessions in condemned cells only call their readers “gentlemen” a few times in the opening pages and then forget about it, I have decided to crowd it all into the first two sentences.
I want to say also at the start that this autobiography of my life and downfall is here presented with apologies to a great many eminent writers who have in the past attempted to do the same thing. I have in mind here such stories as the Dipsomaniac, John Barleycorn, The Ravages of Rum, and other confessions of the sort. Their relative failure arose from the unsatisfactory nature of the material available for the authors. In their day they had no more terrible picture to present than that of the ravages effected by rum, brandy or absinthe. They traced the decay of mind and body under the influence of these baneful spirits. But they could form no idea of the terrible wreck of a body inflated and distended with effervescent soda water and of a mind diluted to the verge of liquefaction. If my sufferings have been greater than theirs, it was because I was far more completely soaked than they were.
But to begin — I feel I ought to. There is nothing in the circumstances of my parentage or upbringing that I can plead in extenuation of my downfall. I was born of a family in comfortable, if not affluent, circumstances, of parents of sincere, if not profound, convictions, in a home that was educated if not cultivated, in a house that was rough cast if not brick, with plumbing that was effective, if not open.
In short, I enjoyed all the ordinary advantages of the average middle class.
My father was essentially a temperate man. If he took a glass of iced soda water now and then it was merely as a matter of conviviality and to suit the gaiety of the occasion. I may have seen him slightly inflated at Christmas or New Year’s, but never unduly distended.
I grew up, then, as a bright boy whose school and college days differed little from those of others. I made friends easily, learned without difficulty and was fortunate enough to know little or nothing of the trials and sorrows of life until I was on the threshold of manhood. Least of all could I have imagined that drink would ever become a danger to my welfare. Eating perhaps, but not drink; frequently at our meals at college one or the other of my friends might say, “My God! how you do eat!” and I can frequently recall, in a restaurant or in a hotel dining-room, hearing some one say, “Look at that boy eat!” As a matter of fact, I took the first prize for pie-eating at college while only in my second year. Our Alma Mater, I remember, was keen on all activities and friendly rivalries and I think I may say that I held my own at most of them, such as pie-eating, the oyster contest, the spaghetti championship and the other big events of college life.
But it was not, as I say, until my college life as an undergraduate was over and I found myself a student of law, that the real trial of my life began. I was preparing for a law examination, working hard, indeed up to the limit, as a keen student is apt to do, without being aware of overstraining the faculties. I often sat at my books till long after nine at night, even till nine-thirty or nine thirty-five, and would be up again and at it by ten o’clock in the morning, working right on till ten fifty-five or even till eleven-two. The truth is that I was overstrained, though I didn’t know it. Often as I played pool my hand would shake till I could hardly pot the ball; and at times in throwing dice I could scarcely throw a double six.
Then came the fatal morning when I was due to appear in the examination room at nine o’clock and found myself not only ill prepared and exhausted, but worse still, hopelessly nervous and in a condition of something like collapse.
As we were about to leave our college room one of my friends said, “Here, Charlie, drink this.” He handed me as he spoke a tall glass of bubbling soda water with a piece of ice tinkling in it. I drained it at a single drink and as I set it down I felt a new life and power. My veins tingled with animation, my brain revived, my ideas became active, my fear vanished. I stepped into the examination room and wrote what I believe was the most brilliant law examination test of that year. One of the examiners, who was himself the senior counsel for a local distillery company, said that even in his experience he had never seen anything like it. Undoubtedly I should have ranked first except for the fact that in my eagerness to write and with my newly acquired sense of power, I had not waited to look at the examination questions, but had answered from my recollection of them without consulting them. It seems that for technical reasons the paper had been changed overnight and my answers were no longer applicable. The point is one of mere college organization, easily understood by those acquainted with the matter and not in any way reflecting upon my capacity or memory. Indeed the senior examiner, who was also chairman of a large brewery company, said that I was just the kind of lad that needed encouragement, and would get it.
I remember that as I came out of the room my friend who had given me the soda slapped me on the back and said, “Well, Jack, you certainly wrote hard enough. Come along and have another soda.” After that I recall nothing except being with a group of my fellow law students and drinking soda after soda and finally some one saying to me, “Brace up, Bill, it’s time to get home.”
I pass over the circumstances of my gradual downfall. I will only say in my own defence that when I began drinking soda it was rather from a false sense of good-fellowship than from any real craving for it. That only came later. What got me at first was the easy careless conviviality. Some one would knock at the door of my room and say, “Come along, Jack, and let’s go and split a soda.” We would often begin after breakfast — or even start the day before breakfast with a long drink of ice water — and keep it up sometimes till night. Frequently I have sat in my law lectures in my final year with perhaps six or eight quarts of soda in me. You ask me, how I could do it? I can only answer that the first, the immediate, effect was one of exhilaration, of expansion.
It was not long before I reached a second stage. Convivial drinking was not enough. I must needs keep a private stock of soda in my cupboard for furtive drinks at any hour of the day or the night. I well remember how I first mustered up my courage and went into a corner grocer’s and said with all the assurance I could command, “I want a case of plain soda water sent over to my room.” The man demurred a little: said he must have twenty-five cents down: but in the end he sent it.
After that I was never without a supply. At the time of which I speak there was of course no legislation in the matter. Students might buy soda water, pop and even lemon sour without interference.
I suppose that my story as I relate it has been that of countless other men. If drink went singly it would be bad enough. But as everybody knows, drink never does come singly: other dissipations, other wastes of time and life go with it; and most often women.
Women are, so it often seems to me, our best and at the same time our worst angels. I am not aware that the thought has ever been expressed before, but I say it now, anyway. To my mind a good woman is one of the greatest things on earth, second only perhaps to a good child or a good man. But it is an old, old adage that for a young man at the susceptible age of life, women, and wine and song — are dangerous things.
So it was that women came into my life and helped to wreck it. The beginning was simple enough. I chanced to meet one Sunday morning in the street a girl whom I had known years before in the country when she was a girl. She greeted me and asked me to come to church with her. I went. It cost me ten cents for the church plate and ten cents for street-car fare to take her home. But it proved only a beginning. The next Sunday found me taking her again to the same church, but this time with her sister — so that the car fare home now cost fifteen cents. The Sunday after she brought not only her sister but her mother, so the car fare had risen within sixteen days to twenty cents.
