Delphi complete works of.., p.354
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 354
There would be no great harm done if each one student followed only one activity; if he staggered home late from his chess club but was at his books early in the morning; if he blew his whole face into his trombone from four to six but was at his desk in the evening; if he wrote a brilliant article on “The World’s Awakening,” in the Student’s Daily and then fell asleep over his trigonometry.
But it is not so. Even the average student follows half a dozen activities, and all the most efficient and capable are so immersed in them that they turn into executives and committee men, with their day full, no time to turn round. Capable indeed they are — far quicker of comprehension than real business men, with more enthusiasm and more precision in their minds. They need to have enthusiasm and energy, too, for there are so many activities to be kept going that the leaders must do a terrific lot of organizing, initiating, committee work, spade work, to keep the others up to it. All up! for this, and all up! for that, till college life becomes a sort of permanent “resurrection day.” And for such a day, spade work is the first requisite.
One recalls how a famous French general looked on at the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava and said, “It’s magnificent but it isn’t war.” So with these student leaders — it’s wonderful but it isn’t study. It is making of them fine and efficient men and women. But the toll of years taken is too heavy, and the life of the college, as they lead it, would never keep alight the lamp of learning.
But there are those who trim it.
Here and there in this moving and happy world there are among the students the few who leaven the lump, the few who really study. You remember how Edgar Allan Poe said, “And the people, ah, the people, they that live up in the steeple.” Well, there are students up in the steeple of the temple of learning, or higher still, up in the clouds. These are the ones who come to college and never go away, whose lot it is, thrice blessed, to stay at college all their lives — demonstrating first, and then lecturing, and then moved up to be an associate, and later on a professor, a real one. Somewhere in such a professor’s life he has picked up, more or less unnoticed, a wife, as a beaver picks up a mate away off in the woods. Married or single it makes but little difference; life flows on from session to session, smooth and unruffled as seen by the outside eye, but, as seen from within, full of its eager struggles, its triumphs and its landmarks. Such is, for instance, the occasion when the professor reads his first paper (all typed by his wife) before the Palaeontological Society, or has his article on the “Diphthongs in Chaucer” accepted by the Philomathic Journal.
For these people, study is study; its foundation is laid deep and its crown is never set. For their sake I gladly take back everything said in this book, of shorter methods, fewer declensions and less exceptions. They need them all. No “smattering” for them. When they tackle an author they dissect him from the head down and hang up the skin. They follow the tide of human thought from Plato downward till they almost, never quite, reach yesterday. Each carries with him his life work, like that of Professor Dim with the Odyssey described elsewhere in this book. And his life work — on the geography of Ninevah or the place names of Yucatan or the coleoptera of the British Isles — is seldom complete, usually but a fragment and often never begun. They need time, these men; they need eternity. Collectively they get it, and the college goes on, maintained, as far as its soul is concerned, by the men who work in it, and not by the bricks and mortar that house their labours.
I have written elsewhere that, with the right men and a few elm trees and some books, one could have, at a generation’s notice, the most distinguished college in the world. I repeat it here so that the animating idea of this book may not be obscured. This is not a plea for cheaper, shorter education in the mean sense, but for education that does not end with college and for learning that never dies. Rah! Rah! College! Let’s go and see what’s happening in the campus.
KINDRED ESSAYS IN EDUCATION AND HUMOUR
WHEN MEN RETIRE
MY OLD FRIEND Mr. McPherson retired from the flour and feed business — oh, quite a few years ago. He said it was time to get out and give young Charlie a chance — even then “young Charlie” was getting near fifty. Anyway old Mr. McPherson said he wasn’t going to keep his nose to the grindstone for ever.
I don’t mean that he absolutely dropped out of the business; but, as he himself said, he took it easy. The McPhersons had a fine business, two or three big mills and a central office in our home town. Always, before he retired, Mr. McPherson would be down at the office sharp at eight — the flour and feed is an early business. When he retired he gave all that up. He’d loaf in anywhere round ten minutes past, or sometimes even twenty. It was the same way after lunch — or at least I mean after “dinner”; they don’t have “lunch” in the flour and feed business; they have dinner at noon. After dinner if Mr. McPherson didn’t feel like getting up and walking to the office at one o’clock, he’d drive down in a cab. And at five o’clock, when the office closed, if he didn’t feel like going home right away, he’d stay for a while and run over some of the day’s invoices. Or perhaps, if he felt like it, he’d go over to the mill, because the mill didn’t close till six, and just fool around there a while helping the men bag up some of the farmers’ orders.
One thing, though, that Mr. McPherson insists on, now that he’s retired, is that, as he himself says, he never interferes. The business, as he explains, belongs now to the children. That means young Charlie and Lavinia — bless me! Lavinia must be not far from sixty; she keeps the house. To those two and a married daughter in Scotland. The old man has never transferred the business in any legal sense. He says it isn’t necessary as long as he’s alive. But it’s theirs just the same, and he tells them so. And, as I say, he doesn’t interfere; “young Charlie” is the general manager, and all his father does is just to look over the contracts to see what’s doing, and keep an eye on the produce market to advise young Charlie when to buy — but only, mind you, to advise.
What’s more, as Mr. McPherson himself loves to explain, he’s not like a man who can’t cut loose from business and enjoy himself. Oh, my no! Every year there’s the St. Andrews dinner in the Odd Fellows’ Hall, regular as clock-work, and every year Burns’ birthday, when a few of them get together and have a big old time and read Burns out loud. And only four years ago Mr. McPherson took a trip to Scotland and saw his married daughter and Burns’ grave and the big flour mills at Dumbarton, and paid for it all out of a commission on No. 1 wheat. Oh, no, Mr. McPherson says he never regrets his retirement: he can’t think what it would be like to be back in harness.
My friend McAlpin was a banker — assistant general manager of a bank. He retired in the natural, normal course of things in accordance with the bank regulations. He made no plan or preparation for retirement. He said that it was enough for him to be rid of the strain of work. He’d have his mind free. So he would have had, if it hadn’t happened that, on his first morning of retirement, as he walked down town, he felt a sort of wheeziness, a kind of, well, not exactly a pain, but a sort of compression. Anyway, a druggist gave him some bicarbonate of bismuth — he’s told me about it himself ever so many times — or was it bisulphate of something? Anyway it fixed McAlpin up all right but it left him with a sort of feeling of flatulence, or flobbulence (he’s explained it to me) that bothered him all morning till a friend told him to drink Vichy water, two or three quarts at a time. Now as a matter of fact you see, McAlpin had had that wheeziness every morning for years back when he went to the bank. But as soon as he opened the mail and began dictating, the wheeziness vanished, and the flobbulence never started. But the moment he retired, the wheeziness brought on the flobbulence; and Vichy water is all right, but there’s so much chalk in it that if you take it you must follow it with an anticalcide of some sort. I don’t know the names, but McAlpin has told me about them — bigusphate of carbon or any other antiscorbutic.
In fact, as McAlpin tells me, he has come to realize that his diet while he was in the bank was all wrong. He used to take bacon and eggs for breakfast, whereas now that he has looked into things he finds that bacon has no food value at all — contains no postulates. Eggs would be all right if taken with a germicide, but they lack vitamins. So what McAlpin eats now — he tells me this himself — is a proper balance of protein and carbohydrates.
McAlpin spends a good deal of his time in the drug stores. He says those follows know a lot. Do you realize that if you take a drink of mineral water every half hour, with a touch of salt in it, it keeps your sebaceous glands open?
When McAlpin takes a holiday he goes down to Nugget Springs where the thermal baths are. It’s a new place and he says that they say that the doctors say that the water has a lower alkali content than any other. That’s why he goes there, for the low alkali content. You take a bath every hour and in between you drink the water and the rest of the time you sit in it. McAlpin says that when he comes back he feels a hundred per cent more crustaceous than he did before. He attributes this to phosphorus.
My friend Tharpe, who was in Iron and Steel, retired to Paris. He retired at fifty-eight. He said he wanted to retire while he was still fresh enough to enjoy life — feel those muscles. He wanted to have a little fun in life, before he sank into old age. So he went over to Paris to have, as he himself so fervently put it, “a whale of a time.”
I saw him there six months later, in a night-supper restaurant. He had with him something that looked like an odelisk — isn’t that the word? — anyway something Moorish with slanting eyes and a crescent diadem. Tharpe came over and spoke to me. He looked like a boiled lobster, all red and black. He said he felt fine. He said he was just starting out for the evening. He felt, he said, A.1.
I saw him in the hotel next morning. He was in the barber shop. The barber was fixing him up. He looked about four colors, mostly black and yellow. He said he felt great. The barber was steaming him, boiling him and squirting things over him. Then he went up to the drug store and the druggist “fixed him” — washed him right out — and then into the bar and the bartender “fixed him” — toned him right up with a couple of “eye-openers.” Then he started off. He had on a pongee suit and a panama hat and a French silk tie, and he looked pretty slick, but battered. He said he felt fine. He said he was going out to play baccarat with two men he met the night before — Russians — he couldn’t remember their names — Sonovitch or Dombroski or something. Anyway one of them was a cousin of the Czar. He said he felt elegant.
Tharpe is in a home just now, in England — a rest home. He’s taking the rest cure, and then he is to take the gold cure and after that a brain cure. A big English doctor took out part of his skull. He says he feels A.1. He has lost most of his money and he’s coming back to the Iron and Steel business. He says it beats Paris.
A peculiarly interesting case of retirement has been that of my long-time friend the Senior Professor of Greek at the college here. When he retired the Chancellor of the University said at the Convocation that our regret at Professor Dim’s retirement was tempered by the fact that we realized that he would now be able to complete the studies on Homer’s Odyssey which had occupied him for so many years. Notice, to complete. The general supposition was that in all these long years, in all the evenings of his spare time he’d been working on Homer’s Odyssey, and that now all that he needed was a little time and breathing space and the brilliant studies would be consolidated into a book. To complete — and I was the only one who knew that he hadn’t even started. He had begun, ever so many years ago, when we were fellow juniors, talking of Homer’s Odyssey. There was something he wanted to do about it — I forget just what; either to prove that there was never any Homer or that there was never any Odyssey. At any rate it was one of those big academic problems that professors select as a life work. It began to be understood that he was “working on Homer’s Odyssey”; then that he was doing a book on Homer’s Odyssey, and then that he had nearly done it, and only needed time to complete it. And all the time he hadn’t started. Professors are like that.
The years go by so easily — Commencement Day and a new session — you can’t begin anything then — mid-session, impossible — final exams and the end of the session — out of the question to start anything then; a man must rest sometime. And you don’t start Homer in the long vacation on the coast of Maine.
So when Professor Dim retired, people on the street would stop him and ask, “How’s the book coming on?” And he could only turn pink and gurgle something. I’m the only one who knows that he hasn’t started it. He’s been getting pretty frail the last two winters; some of his old pupils sent him south last winter, so that he could finish his book. He didn’t. They gave him a trip up north last summer — but not far enough. They talk now of sending him to Greece where the Odyssey began. They’re afraid, some of them — this, of course, they say very gently and kindly — they’re afraid that the old fellow may not live to finish the book. I know that he won’t. He hasn’t started.
But as to this retirement business, let me give a word of advice to all of you young fellows round fifty. Some of you have been talking of it and even looking forward to it. Have nothing to do with it. Listen; it’s like this. Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? You hadn’t realized it. And you notice that the sun has set already, the day gone before you knew
AS HISTORY GROWS DIM
(ALL THAT WILL be left of our Forgotten Worthies in a future dictionary)
GLADSTONE — a bag, travelling-bag with a specially wide mouth.
VICTORIA — low carriage, with a broad seat.
PRINCE ALBERT — a stuffed coat, very long, formal and never unbuttoned.
BISMARCK — a specially fat German rump steak, not popular now.
SALISBURY — another steak, English, made of what was left over from a Bismarck.
CHATEAUBRIAND — a French beefsteak, made of something else.
GOETHE (pronounced goat-ee) — a form of chinbeard once worn in Arkansas.
LINCOLN — a kind of car, formerly very popular.
WELLINGTON — a long boot, high sole.
BLUCHER — short boot with a low sole.
CARDINAL WOLSEY — a brand of gents’ underwear.
HENRY CLAY — a cigar.
JEFFERSON — a hotel, avenue, or post-office.
NAPOLEON, WASHINGTON, CAESAR, SAMSON — trade names used in the plumbing business for bath-room fixtures.
MARIE ANTOINETTE, JOSEPHINE, MARIE LOUISE, EUGENIE — trade names used in ladies’ underwear.
KING EDWARD, BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE, CLAVERHOUSE, ROBERT BRUCE — stallions with a pedigree.
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE & JOHN — side streets in Montreal.
TWENTY CENTS’ WORTH OF MURDER
I AM ONE of those who like each night, after the fret and worry of the day, to enjoy about twenty cents’ worth of murder before turning off the light and going to sleep. Twenty cents a night is about the cost of this, for first-class murder by our best writers. Ten-cent murder is apt to be either stale or too suggestive of crime. But I am sure that I am only one of uncounted thousands of crime readers who feel that the health and enjoyment gained is well worth the price, and share my gratitude toward the brilliant galaxy of crime writers who supply our needs. I could name them if I wished to, but everyone knows them so well that it is needless.
They will not therefore take it amiss if I offer them a few suggestions, endorsed I am sure by the same thousands of readers, still uncounted, as to what we want and what we don’t want in our current reading.
In the first place — if you don’t mind — don’t kill the victim too soon. We like to get to know him a little first. I mean, don’t start with his body. Don’t have Inspector Higginbottom summoned hastily in paragraph 1 of page 1 to the Mansions Apartments because there’s a dead body just found upstairs. The thrill is too short. We lost interest. Even when it turns out that there’s been “foul play” it doesn’t rouse us; we expected it. Nor even when it turns out that the dead man is a leading member of the Stock Exchange; that’s all right, we never heard of him anyway.
Oh, no, give us a chance to learn to know the man a little, and like him, and then his death is like that of a friend; or let him be such a mean hound that we get to hate him; then when his body is found, who is happier than we are?
Now another little point. When you do find his body, don’t have a string of people, a houseful of them, who have to be under suspicion one after the other, so that we can see it all coming — the butler, the private secretary, the French maid, the handy man (too handy, perhaps) — well, everybody knows the standing list. All these people commit murders. To these are added the guests; after all, do we really know them? And, now we think of it, even the family lawyer there over night — family lawyers are often crooked. So every one of these has to be “eliminated,” one after another. All right for the author at ten cents a word for elimination, but poor stuff for us, even at a cent a page.
And, oh, yes, with this, please cut out the diagram that goes with it, called Plan of Arundel House, Ground Floor, Upper Floor. It’s a bum drawing, anyway, done by the author, of course, to make it look circumstantial. But it’s the same plan, as a matter of fact, that I’ve seen for twenty-one years — Arundel House, or Wisteria Lodge, or No. 1 Jefferson Avenue. It’s all cut into little rooms with gaps for doors, marked “study,” “bedroom,” “bath” — one bath for all those people — and in one room is a little diagram like a sausage marked “body.” Well, I can’t study all that out; I have no time. Never mind explaining what window “gives” on the lawn and what other windows “give” on what; windows always “give” in detective stories. In real life they are made to go up and down. And the French windows on the ground floor of Arundel House (Plan I), never mind explaining which side they’re bolted on; I can’t follow it.
