Delphi complete works of.., p.302
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 302
There. Pretty dull reading it makes. And yet, I don’t know. There’s something about it, too. In the real stories Mr. Scribman would have been a crook, and Harold would have either murdered Winnie or been accused of it, and the stenographer with the rose would have stolen the money instead of just taking it, and it wouldn’t have happened in bright, clear October weather but in dirty old November — oh, no, let us have romance and happiness, after all. It may not be true, but it’s better.
TENNIS AT THE SMITHS’. A SIMPLE STATEMENT OF THE FACTS
IT WAS AGREED by all the Smith family when they took their Lake Shore bungalow for the summer that it was a great thing to have a tennis court. The fact that the ground was a little bit cramped, and that there wasn’t much room between the end of the court and the cedar trees, didn’t matter. After all, tennis is tennis. You don’t need an absolutely first-class court just for ordinary summer play. You can have all the fun you want on just a plain bit of grass, leaving to the professionals the high-class clay courts and all that sort of thing.
In other words, there is no doubt of the enthusiasm of the Smith family over having a court. The fact that they never played on it during the summer is not to be put down to any lack of enthusiasm.
The court as they found it in May was naturally in rather poor shape. It had a lot of coarse grass in it and there were a good many large stones, almost boulders, in the ground.
But as Mr. Smith — the head of the family — said when he came out for his first week-end, the only way to get rid of the boulders was to take your coat off and get to work at them. He said that in business a man learned the habit of going right at a thing: the more difficult it was, the better it was to get at it without delay.
Mr. Smith took his coat off and got to work with an iron bar to take the stones out. At the end of the afternoon he had scratched around four stones, partly lifted one, and partly dislocated his shoulder.
Next day he said he had no time to go on with it, and so Mrs. Smith said she would get a man to come and do it. As in most families, whenever it was found that Mr. Smith tried and failed to do anything, they sent and fetched a man, a real one, and he did it.
So Mrs. Smith got a man and he took out the stones, and got a man to mow the grass with a sickle and run a lawn-mower over it, and got a man to trim back the cedar trees a little at the end of the court.
By the end of the second week in May the man had the court all ready, except just marking it. But Mrs. Smith told the man that that didn’t matter: her husband or her sons would mark the court.
It turned out that this was the fatal error.
Mr. Smith undertook first to mark the tennis court when he came up in May. Mr. Smith is a methodical man. When he does things, he does them right. He is fond of saying that when you take over a job, either do it well or don’t do it at all. He claims he owes a great deal of his business success to this simple maxim.
Mr. Smith said that to do the court properly he must first cut a set of little pegs, so as to put in one at each intersection of the lines. By this means you knew where you were.
To cut the pegs, Mr. Smith needed to make use of a small hatchet, and he found the hatchet too dull to do the work properly. Get your tools into good shape, he used to say, and your job is half done.
So Mr. Smith undertook first of all to sharpen up the hatchet. That involved fixing up the grindstone so as to make it turn properly without wobbling. If your grindstone doesn’t turn true, you’ll never get a proper edge on your tool. . . . When the day closed Mr. Smith was looking for some turpentine to clean a file, to file a saw, to cut a board, to make a stand for the grindstone. The court was still not marked. Mr. Smith went back to town that Monday. Attack number one had failed.
The next attempt to mark the court was made by Wilfred Smith, eldest son of the family, just after his return from college where he had taken a brilliant course in mathematics.
Wilfred said that there was no difficulty about marking a tennis court if you just applied a little mathematics. There was no need to cut a whole lot of pegs: all you wanted was a couple of straight lines with a right angle between them and then to remember that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two sides. This proposition, Wilfred says, dates back at least to Pythagoras, and was probably known to the ancient Egyptians. The help that it affords in marking a tennis court is quite obvious. If the court is 36 feet wide and 70 feet long, all you have to do is to take the square of 36 and add to it the square of 70 and then take the square root of what you get. This will be the cross distance and will exactly locate the bearings of the court.
It was 11 a.m. when Wilfred Smith began ciphering. At twelve he was still at work. At twelve-thirty he broke off to try and hunt up a book that showed how to take the square root of anything. He couldn’t find it. There were very few books in the bungalow and not even a Life of Pythagoras. Wilfred worked on at the problem that afternoon. Finally he worked out the square root by algebra. He said that it was a complicated process, but that it could be done. When he got the result, it showed that the cross distance from corner to corner on a tennis court is a little over a quarter of a mile. This would have put the tennis court away out in the lake. Wilfred quit. And, anyway, he had to go away next day to attend his college commencement and receive his honour degree in mathematics.
Attack number two had failed.
The next attempt to mark the tennis court was made just at the end of June by Renee and Gene, the two girls of the family. They just got an old broom and a big pot of whitening and water and had the whole thing done in half an hour. Unfortunately they put three courts on each side of the net instead of two. This meant that the court couldn’t be played on, but Mrs. Smith said it didn’t matter as they would only have to wait till the rain washed out the lines.
All July it didn’t rain. It rained everywhere else, but not at the Smiths’ bungalow. There was a cloudburst in Texas, and in British India they had the wettest season in fifty years.
But it didn’t rain at the Smiths’ bungalow.
At the beginning of August, when at last the whitening disappeared, the two little Smith boys marked out the court one evening after tea. Unluckily they used flour by mistake and dogs came in the night and ate the service line.
After that Mr. Smith learned that the simplest way to mark a tennis court is to buy tapes, all ready joined and numbered. You nail these to the ground and there you are. No one, it seems, uses whitening any more, once he has got on to the idea of the tapes. Mr. Smith got the tapes and spent all of one afternoon crawling around the court with a hammer and nails and tapes and a little paper of directions which said: Lay down the point A at a rectangular distance from B, and so on. When Mr. Smith got the first half of the court done, he realized that he had nailed it all down crosswise instead of lengthwise. So he said “Oh, hec,” and pulled up all the tapes and threw them into the garage.
Finally about the end of August Mrs. Smith did what she ought to have done at the start. She got a man to come and mark the court — not her husband, nor her sons, but a man.
The man was a painter — house and sign — not portraits. He came over from the village with some stuff mixed up in a little pot no bigger than a silk hat, one little brush, and a piece of board.
He had the court all marked in an hour and a half. He charged one dollar and twenty cents.
But, as a matter of fact, it had grown so late in the season that the Smiths didn’t use the court. The boys were on the lake all day, and Mr. Smith needed all his time for golf, and the girls wanted the afternoons for bridge.
But the court is there, all ready to play on.
In fact, Mrs. Smith is thinking of getting a man to come and play on it.
A BUTLER OF THE OLD SCHOOL
As Transformed and Enlarged under the Eighteenth Amendment
“PERHAPS YOU MIGHT like, sir,” said the butler, “to have a look through the cellars?”
“That’s very kind of you, Meadows,” I answered.
It was indeed thoughtful of the old man. Here I was accidentally deserted by my host and his household through some stupid error in regard to the hour of my arrival, with a long summer afternoon before me which I had to spend somehow in this vast, but deserted, country mansion waiting for the return of my friends.
True there was the billiard-room. But knocking the balls around by oneself is poor work; and in any case one always doubts the accuracy of the cushions in a country home, even in such a noble old place as the Vineyards.
Then there was the library, of course, and yet somehow one felt disinclined in such glorious summer weather to sit cooped up over a book. On the other hand, one realized that the wine cellars of such old places as the Vineyards, built and stocked heaven knows how long ago, offer a cool retreat on such an afternoon as this.
“It’s very kind of you, Meadows,” I said. “I should enjoy it of all things.”
Meadows himself looked the typical part of the butler and cellarer of the old school. He might have stepped out of the pages of an old romance. His somewhat rosy yet solemn countenance, the neatness of his person and the sobriety of his costume were all in keeping with the character.
“Then will you come this way with me, sir,” he said, “and we will go down.”
We passed through Meadows’s private butler’s pantry and then down a little winding stairway, panelled with dark wood, that led to the floor below. The cellars themselves, dark, cool and silent, with flagstone passage-ways and heavy oaken doors, suggested almost the dignity and solemnity of a crypt.
“How old are these cellars, Meadows?” I inquired.
“Constructed in 1680, sir,” he answered with ready knowledge, “though the house itself is not so old, sir. The original Vineyards house was burnt in 1760. But these, sir, were the original wine-rooms. They’ve never been altered since . . .”
The butler had selected a small key from the bunch he carried and fitted it to the lock of a narrow oaken door which he swung open. “This is one of the best rooms, sir, I always think — the driest. The wood of the bins is the original mahogany of 1680, sir.”
Meadows reached out a hand and turned on a flood of electric light. . . . “We’ve put in the electricity, sir,” he said, in an apologetic sort of way, “though it does seem a little out of place, doesn’t it?”
In a way it did. Yet it served at least to light up the rows and rows of the old wine bins and the tiers of dusty bottles that lay each on its side in orderly array.
“Now, what have you here?” I asked.
“This is the Rain Water Room, sir,” replied Meadows. “Nothing else except rain water and practically all of it from the same date. The year 1924, sir, as you may recall, was a wonderful year for Rain Water — something in the quality, sir. It was a rain, sir, with better body to it, fuller, sweeter, than any rain, I think, since the famous year 1888.”
“Ah, yes,” I replied, “the year of the Johnstown flood.”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” said Meadows. “But the 1924 rain is not far inferior. Of course, it still needs age. You can’t expect good rain water, when it’s only seven or eight years old.”
“Do you still lay down much?” I asked.
“Only in the good years,” said Meadows. “It’s not worth while, sir, not at least for them as knows a good rain water from a bad. But let me draw a bottle for you, sir.”
“No, no,” I protested, somewhat feebly, I admit. It seemed a shame to open a whole bottle of such grand old stuff for a casual sip. “It doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
“I have some pints here at the side,” said the butler, “and I’m sure, sir, the master would wish me to open one for you. It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of offering it to a gentleman who knows real rain water when he sees it.”
I felt my power of resistance weakening. The sight of the glorious old vintage that had lain here brewing its own sunlight in the dark for all these years was too tempting. “Come on then, Meadows,” I said with a laugh, “but you must share the bottle.”
The butler selected a bottle covered with dust, its cork heavily wired. The electric light shot a green glitter into its contents. Meadows took two glasses from a nearby shelf and then with the trained touch of an expert, firm but gentle, without disturbing the repose of the grand old fluid within, unwired the bottle and removed the cork. “It’s a still rain water, sir,” he said, as he poured it into the glasses, holding the bottle so steadily that the liquid flowed gently without the least disturbance. It showed the opalescent tints of green and gold under the light, only seen in the best rain water. . . .
I am not, I trust, addicted to overdrinking, and would not wish to appear a mere useless sybarite, but I must say that as I raised and drained the glass, I felt its full charm. The taste seemed to conjure up pictures of rain puddles in the evening sunshine, of springtime in the cow pasture and raindrops glistening in the April grass. There was in it all the freshness of the morning dew. . . .
I put down the empty glass with a sigh. “Wonderful, Meadows,” I said, “wonderful. Nothing like rain water after all.”
“Perhaps not, sir,” said Meadows respectfully, “though I am not sure that my own fancy isn’t for ditchwater. We have a rare Ditchwater here,” he continued, stepping out into the corridor. “If you’ll take a look into the next room, I’ll be glad to ask you to sample a taste of it. . . .”
With which the good old man, whose rosy face, I noticed, was kindling to an even rosier hue under the influence of the generous beverage, began eagerly fumbling with his keys to unlock a second door.
“I say, Meadows,” I laughed, “I’m afraid I really must call a halt.”
But Meadows would hear nothing of my protest. “You must try the Ditchwater, sir: the master is more proud of this than of anything in the cellar.”
The butler had taken from a bin a bottle even dustier than the last. In place of the radiant green and gold of the rain water it shone with a dusky brown lustre that bore witness to the strength of the generous fluid within.
Meadows held it up to the light. “It is a Ditchwater,” he murmured, with something like reverence in his voice, “that got just the right body in it. You know, sir, if you get one of those cheap commercial Ditchwaters, it’s either got too much mud in it, or it’s so thin it has no strength. Now this, sir, as you see, has got the mud, has got the body. . . .”
I laughed. “Come along, Meadows,” I said, “and don’t tempt me any further with a sermon. Out with it.”
Meadows with even greater care than before decanted the Ditchwater. This time it was a full quart that he opened, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to protest.
How can I describe its taste? Full, rich, with just a tang of dead sticks and just that slight soupçon of slugs that gave it character. Without apology I held out my glass to be refilled, while the old man, after filling it, drained the rest of the bottle. “Wonderful stuff, Meadows!” I said, as I drained the last drop.
“But I’ve got some better than that, sir, better than that,” said the old man. “Come along this way, sir, this way.”
I could not restrain a feeling of amusement as the good old man bustled ahead of me along the corridor, his step slightly unsteady.
“No, no, Meadows,” I protested feebly, “your master will be back soon. I mustn’t really encroach further. . . .”
“Just this one,” said the butler, “just this one.” Meadows led me along the corridors, around the corners, and in and out amongst the intricacies of the famous cellars of the Vineyards. I realized that those noble fellows our ancestors never did things by halves. When they undertook to lay the cellars of a colonial mansion such as this, they made a real job of it. Here and there the butler stopped at an oaken door and threw it open for a moment to give me an idea of what was within. Every possible variation for the taste of every possible connoisseur seemed here to be represented. The most critical hydrophile could have found nothing missing. Here was French Tap Water bottled in Paris, Pump Water from a town pump of the early nineteenth century, Trough Water from an abandoned New England farm, English Pond Water in stone bottles and Dutch Canal Water in tempting square bottles with yellow and green seals. Here and there, I blush to say, in spite of our avowed intentions, we could not resist opening an odd bottle and drinking off a quart or two of the mellow liquid. The Canal Water struck me as especially fine, but undoubtedly heavy. I asked Meadows what he supposed to be the percentage content of sulphuretted hydrogen in it. But the old man shook his head. “I’m not much of a one for what you might call the formula, sir: Master Charles, I don’t doubt, would answer all of that. But to me, sir, good liquor is just good liquor.”
At last Meadows threw open a final door and revealed a majestic cask that occupied the centre of a little room. There was on each side of the cask an ancient seat, the true model of a Jacobean wooden “settee” with oak arms that had grown black with age and darkness. Down we sat, while the old man with pride and expectancy in his look slowly polished a pair of tall liqueur glasses, long, thin, and delicate as Canterbury bells. . . .
“What is it, Meadows?” I asked, indicating the cask.
“West Indian Bilgewater,” the butler answered. “Right from the old days, a hundred years old if it’s a day.”
Meadows turned the spigot and slowly filled the glasses with the dark amber fluid, thick, heavy and redolent with a delicious bouquet of old tar, ship’s ropes and rotten timber.
Facing one another on the settees, we raised our glasses to one another.
“Your health, sir,” said Meadows, and an audible hiccough shook the good old man as he drained the liquor at a quaff and filled the glass again.
Can I ever forget the wonder of that West Indian Bilge? There was in it all the romance of the old pirate days with visions of West Indian Quays, of pirates at their revels drinking great goblets of Bilgewater, round bonfires of odd timber that turned the heavy tropical night to glaring brightness and lit up the strand of the sea beside them as they sat.
