Delphi complete works of.., p.300
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 300
“Get out!” roars A. “You beat him and me! You miserable little undersized hound! Why — —”
“Stop!” says B, warningly. “Quit your scrapping and vanish. Here comes the teacher and the pupils. Leave those sums on the board just as they were, C. I guess the old-fashioned stuff is better as it is than anything we could put over now.”
BREAKFAST AT THE SMITHS’. A LITTLE STUDY IN THE BEAUTY OF CHEERFULNESS
SPEAKING AT A scientific convention last month, one of the leading medical men on this continent made the statement that cheerfulness at meal-time was the best health tonic in the world. One good laugh at breakfast, declared the eminent doctor, is worth half a dozen bottles of medicine.
There is no doubt that when this advice was given to the world it was kindly meant. No doubt the medical man thought it true. But little could he suspect the revolution that it was bound to work in the families of those who took it seriously — as notably in the home of the Henry Edward Smiths of Shadyside Street.
Till this news came out in the Press, breakfast at the Smiths’ had always been a silent meal. Mr. Smith sat down behind his newspaper with Mrs. Smith opposite him and with little Wilhelmina Smith, aged 10, on one side and John Algebra Smith, aged 13, on the other. After five minutes, Mr. Smith said: “Milk!” and they passed it to him. Then he went back to his newspaper, trying to estimate yesterday’s loss on fifty shares of Hip Hoorah mining stock at three-eighths of a cent per share. A little later he said: “Toast.” After that he murmured: “Marmalade.” And just at the end: “Coffee.” During this time Wilhelmina had said “Milk” three times, and muttered to herself parts of a French verb for her morning school. John Algebra had said: “Milk! — toast! — marmalade! — sugar,” each three or four times. He, too, was busy thinking — estimating how long it took to buy a white rabbit at six cents a week.
Mrs. Smith herself never spoke except to the hired girl when she rang the bell. Even then she only said: “Coffee.” But she too was thinking all the time, estimating how many yards of celanese it would take to make a circular-flounced afternoon dress.
The whole meal put no strain on the dictionary, and the Smiths had got so used to it that they didn’t know that there was anything wrong with it.
Then came to them the fatal truth that they needed laughter at their meals, and their life changed with a complete revolution.
“Well, children,” said Mr. Smith as he sat down to breakfast with a roar of laughter, “here’s a funny riddle for you. Why is Chicago like a hen?”
“Chicago like a hen?” laughed Mrs. Smith. “It sounds terribly odd.”
“Because there’s a ‘b’ in both,” roared Mr. Smith, “or at least I should have said: Why is Boston like a bird? But it’s all the same.”
The laughter had hardly died away when Mrs. Smith, who was shaking so much with fun that she could hardly pour the coffee, recovered herself enough to say:
“I heard a terribly funny story the other day about a man who told a Pullman porter to put him off the car at Buffalo at three o’clock in the morning and the porter made a mistake and put off the wrong man!”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed the rest of the family— “he put off the wrong man! Ha! Ha!”
“Father,” said little Algebra Smith, “did you ever hear the story about the Scotchman?”
“About a Scotchman!” exclaimed Mr. Smith, beaming with anticipation. “No, I’m sure I never did. Do tell it.”
“Well, this Scotchman was a farmer and he had a cow that had two calves and so he decided that he’d give one to the minister, only he couldn’t make up his mind which one to give. The calves were both in the pasture together and there came a storm and one got struck by lightning, and when the Scotchman came down to the pasture and found it had been killed, he said: ‘My! My! the minister’s calf has been killed.’ ”
For a little time the uproarious laughter that followed the story almost precluded all attempt at eating until at length, when something like order was restored, little Wilhelmina spoke:
“I know a funny story about a lawyer,” she said, “only I don’t know if I can tell it right.”
“Go on! Go on!” cried all the rest of the family.
“Well, this lawyer,” said Wilhelmina, “had by accident swallowed a twenty-five-cent piece and it stuck in his windpipe, and so they rushed him to a doctor’s office and the doctor had him turned upside down to shake it out of him. But all they could shake out was eighteen cents.”
Renewed roars of laughter went around the breakfast table.
“There’s a story about an Irishman — —” began Mr. Smith.
“Oh, do tell us that one,” said the rest.
“I was reminded of it,” Smith went on, “when you spoke of doctors. This was an Irish county gentleman whose wife was sick and so he wrote a note for a doctor and gave it to a manservant to ride on horseback and take the note to the doctor. But by the time this man was ready and the note was written, the Irishman’s wife was better. So he just scribbled in pencil at the bottom of the letter: ‘Since I wrote this my wife has got better, so you won’t need to come.’ ”
Convulsed with merriment, the Smith family struggled in vain to eat their toast.
“How would you like me to imitate Harry Lauder for you?” asked Smith presently.
“Oh, yes, do, do please,” cried the exultant table, clapping their hands.
Whereupon Mr. Smith gave them the uproarious imitation of Harry Lauder that had made such a hit every time he did it at the Thistle Club, and at the Elks and after the Rotary meeting. After which Smith was just starting in to do Al Jolson for them when Mrs. Smith suddenly said:
“Good gracious, John, it’s nearly a quarter to nine!”
And the family, still laughing and chuckling, made a rush from the table to get ready for school and the office.
But that morning at eleven John Smith collapsed in his office and had to go home in a cab, Wilhelmina and Algebra were brought home from school with nervous exhaustion, and Mrs. Smith was found on the sitting-room sofa in a state verging on coma and didn’t speak for two days.
And when medical service was called in, the doctor — such is the perversity of the profession — had the nerve to recommend complete quiet for all of them, and no mental excitement whatever.
So, as a result, on their recovery the Smiths have gone back to breakfast as it used to be. Smith reads about the Hip Hoorah mine and murmurs: “Milk.” The children work out French and algebra in their heads and Mrs. Smith’s mind is on the eternal dress problem.
In other words, human nature being what it is, you’d better leave it to its own way of doing things.
THE PERFECT OPTIMIST. OR DAY-DREAMS IN A DENTAL CHAIR
WELL, HERE WE are again seated in the big red plush chair in for one of our jolly little mornings with our dentist. My! It certainly is cosy to settle back into this comfortable chair with a whole quiet morning in front of us — no work to do, no business to think of, just to lie in one of our comfortable day-dreams.
How pleasant it is in this chair, anyway, with the sunshine streaming in through the window upon us and illuminating every corner of the neat and immaculate little room in which we sit.
For immaculate neatness and cleanliness, I repeat, give me a little up-to-date dental room every time. Talk of your cosy libraries or your dens, they won’t compare with this little nook. Here we are with everything we need around us, all within easy arm’s-length reach. Here on this revolving tray are our pleasant little nippers, pincers and forceps, some so small and cute and others so big and strong that we feel a real confidence in them. They’d never let go of anything! Here is our dainty little electric buzzer with our revolving gimlets at the end; our little hammer on the left; our bradawl on the right — everything!
For the moment our dental friend is out of the room — telephoning, we imagine. The merry fellow is so popular with all his friends that they seem to ring him up every few minutes.
Little scraps of his conversation reach our ears as we lie half-buried in our white towel, in a sweet reverie of expectancy.
“Pretty bad in the night, was it, eh? Well, perhaps you’d better come along down and we’ll make a boring through that bicuspid and see what’s there!”
Full of ideas, he is, always like that — never discouraged, something new to suggest all the time. And then we hear him say: “Well, let me see. I’m busy now for about a couple of hours — —” Hurrah! That means us! We were so afraid he was going to say, “I’ll be through here in about five minutes.” But no, it’s all right; we’ve got two long, dreamy hours in front of us.
He comes back into the room and his cheery presence, as he searches among his instruments and gives a preliminary buzz to the buzzer, seems to make the sunshine even brighter. How pleasant life seems — the dear old life; that is, the life we quitted ten minutes ago and to which, please Providence, we hope to return in two hours. We never felt till we sat here how full and pleasant life is. Think of it, the simple joy of being alive. That’s all we ask — of going to work each day (without a toothache) and coming home each night to eat our dinner. If only people realized it — just to live in our world without a toothache. . . .
So runs our pleasant reverie. But, meanwhile, our dental friend has taken up a little hammer and has tapped us, in his playful way, on the back teeth.
“Feel that?” he asks.
And he’s right, the merry dog! We do feel it. He guessed it right away. We are hoping so much that he will hit us again.
Come on, let’s have a little more fun like that. But no. He’s laid aside his hammer and as nearly as we can see has rolled up his cuffs to the elbow and has started his good old electric buzzer into a roar.
Ah, ha! Now we are going to get something — this is going to be the big fun, the real thing. That’s the greatest thing about our little dental mornings, there’s always something new. Always as we sit we have a pleasant expectancy that our dental friend is planning a new one.
Now, then, let us sit back tight, while he drives at our jaw with the buzzer. Of all the exhilarating feelings of hand-to-hand conflict, of man against man, of mind matched against mind, and intelligence pitted against intelligence, I know of none more stimulating than when we brace ourselves for this conflict of man and machinery. He has on his side the power of electricity and the force of machinery.
But we are not without resource. We brace ourselves, laughingly, in our chair while he starts to bore. We need, in fact, our full strength; but, on the other hand, if he tries to keep up at this pace his hands will get tired. We realize, with a sense of amusement, that if his machine slips, he may get a nasty thump on the hand against our jawbone.
He slacks off for just a second — half withdraws his machine and says, “Were you at the football match yesterday?” and then starts his instrument again at full roar.
“Were we at the football match yesterday?” How strange it sounds! “Why, yes, of course we were!” In that far-away long-ago world where they play football and where there is no toothache — we were there only yesterday afternoon.
Yes, we remember, it was just towards the end of that game that we felt those twinges in one of the — what does he call it, the lower molars? Anyway, one of those twinges which started the exultant idea racing through our minds, “To-morrow we’ll have to go to the dentist.”
A female voice speaking into the room has called him to the telephone, and again we are alone. What if he never comes back!
The awful thought leaps to our minds, what if he comes in and says, “I’m sorry to say I have to take a train out of town at once.” How terrible!
Perhaps he’ll come in and say, “Excuse me, I have to leave instantly for Canada!” or, “I’ll have to let your work go; they’ve sent for me to go to China!”
But no, how lucky! Back he comes again. We’ve not lost him. And now what is he at? Stuffing cotton-wool up into our head, wool saturated with some kind of drugs, and pounding it in with a little hammer.
And then — all of a sudden, so it seems — he steps back and says, “There, that will do nicely till Monday!” And we rise half-dazed from our chair to realize in our disappointment that it is over already. Somehow we had thought that our pleasant drowsy morning of pounding and boring and dreaming in the sunlight, while our dental friend mixed up something new, would last for ever. And now, all of a sudden, it is over.
Never mind! After all, he said Monday! It won’t seem so long till then! And meantime we can think about it all day and look forward to it and imagine how it is going to feel. Oh! It won’t be long.
And so we step out into the street — full of cotton-wool and drugs and electricity and reverie — like a person returning to a forgotten world and dazed to find it there.
CHILDREN’S POETRY REVISED
With One Eye on the Eighteenth Amendment
IT HAS OCCURRED to me that many of the beautiful old poems on which the present and preceding generations were brought up are in danger of passing into oblivion. The circumstances of this hurried, rapid age, filled with movement and crowded with mechanical devices, are rendering the older poetry quite unintelligible to the children of to-day.
For example, when “young Lochinvar had come out of the West” — we need to know at the start that this doesn’t mean the Middle West. We learn also that he came on a “steed.” What is a “steed”? Few children of to-day realize that the huge, clumsy animals that they see hauling the garbage wagons are “steeds.” They would much more likely think that if young Lochinvar had “a Steed,” it meant something the same as if he had a Chrysler or a Buick; in other words, he had a this year’s Steed.
Similarly when the poem says, “He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone” — the meaning is taken to be that he left in such a hurry that he didn’t go into the garage and get his brakes tightened up. And when the poem says, “He swam the Esk river where Ford there was none,” — well, the meaning seems obvious.
Or let us say that “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” Who cares? Certainly not a generation that thinks nothing of reading in its paper, “Boy Falls in Burning Aeroplane.”
It seems reasonable, therefore, that if the older poetry, the heritage of our race, is to remain, some one has got to revise it. I wish I could offer to do it myself. I fear that I can lay so little claim to being a professional poet that I must leave the task to more competent hands. But I might perhaps indicate by a few samples the ways in which the necessary changes might be made.
Sometimes a mere alteration of the title would do a lot. Thus the “Charge of the Light Brigade” might be the Light Brigade C.O.D. or perhaps The Cash and Carry of the Light Brigade. Then there is that melodious masterpiece of Edgar Allan Poe, which should read henceforth “Quoth the Radio, Nevermore.”
But in other cases the poem has got to be overhauled throughout. There is something in the environment it represents that does not correspond to the life that the children see to-day. I’ll give an example. There was, when I was young, a poem that everybody knew and loved, that ran:
I remember, I remember
The house where I was born
And the little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn.
Etc., etc., etc. . . .
I needn’t quote the rest of it. The essential thought is in the lines above. But alas! The poem is dropping out; it no longer fits. Here, however, is a revised version that may keep it going for years.
I wish I could remember
The house where I was born
And the little window where perhaps
The sun peeped in at morn.
But father can’t remember
And mother can’t recall
Where they lived in that December —
If it was a house at all.
It may have been a boarding-house
Or family hotel,
A flat or else a tenement.
It’s very hard to tell.
There is only one thing certain from my questioning as yet,
Wherever I was born, it was a matter of regret.
That, I think, reproduces more or less the spirit of the age. If some one would just put it into really good up-do-date poetry — without any rhyme in it, and with no marks of feet in it, and without putting it into lines — it might go into any present-day anthology.
But it is, finally and chiefly, in the matter of the Eighteenth Amendment that the children’s poetry has got to be revised. There used to be a poem, also put to music as a ballad, about a little girl begging her father to “come home.” The opening stanza ran:
Father, dear father, come home with me now;
The clock in the steeple strikes one.
You promised, dear father, that you would come home
As soon as your day’s work was done.
The scene, of course, was laid on the other side of the Eighteenth Amendment. The picture that went with the song showed, from the outside, a little tavern, or saloon, with curtained windows and a warm red light behind them. Out in the snow was the girl, singing. And father was in behind the red curtains. And he wouldn’t come out! That was the plot. Father’s idea was that he would stay right where he was — that it had home beaten four ways.
Now all of that is changed. The little lighted tavern is gone. Father stays at home, and the children of to-day have got to have the poem recast, so as to keep as much of the pathos as may be, but with the scene reversed. Here it is, incomplete, perhaps, but suggestive.
father, dear father, go out
Oh, father, dear father, why won’t you go out?
Why sit here and spoil all the fun?
We took it for granted you’d beat it down town
As soon as your dinner was done.
With you in the parlour the boys are so glum,
