Delphi complete works of.., p.833
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 833
Then I clung to the hope that Beverly-Jones would forget. But no. In due time his wife wrote to me. They were looking forward so much, she said, to my visit; they felt — she repeated her husband’s ominous phrase — that I should wake them all up!
What sort of alarm clock did they take me for, anyway!
Ah, well! They know better now. It was only yesterday afternoon that Beverly-Jones found me standing here in the gloom of some cedar-trees beside the edge of the pond and took me back so quietly to the house that I realized he thought I meant to drown myself. So I did.
I could have stood it better — my coming here I mean — if they hadn’t come down to the station in a body to meet me in one of those long vehicles with seats down the sides; silly-looking men in colored blazers and girls with no hats, all making a hullabaloo of welcome. “We are quite a small party,” Mrs. Beverly-Jones had written. Small! Great heavens, what would they call a large one? And even those at the station turned out to be only half of them. There were just as many more all lined up on the piazza of the house as we drove up, all waving a fool welcome with tennis rackets and golf clubs.
Small party, indeed! Why, after six days there are still some of the idiots whose names I haven’t got straight! That fool with the fluffy moustache, which is he? And that jackass that made the salad at the picnic yesterday — is he the brother of the woman with the guitar, or who?
But what I mean is, there is something in that sort of noisy welcome that puts me to the bad at the start. It always does. A group of strangers all laughing together, and with a set of catchwords and jokes all their own, always throws me into a fit of sadness, deeper than words. I had thought, when Mrs. Beverly-Jones said a small party, she really meant small. I had had a mental picture of a few sad people, greeting me very quietly and gently, and of myself, quiet, too, but cheerful — somehow lifting them up, with no great effort, by my mere presence.
Somehow from the very first I could feel that Beverly-Jones was disappointed in me. He said nothing. But I knew it. On that first afternoon, between my arrival and dinner he took me about his place, to show it to me. I wish that at some proper time I had learned just what it is that you say when a man shows you about his place. I never knew before how deficient I am in it. I am all right to be shown an iron-and-steel plant, or a soda-water factory or anything really wonderful, but being shown a house and grounds and trees, things that I have seen all my life, leaves me absolutely silent.
“These big gates,” said Beverly-Jones, “we only put up this year.”
“Oh,” I said. That was all. Why shouldn’t they put them up this year? I didn’t care if they’d put them up this year or a thousand years ago.
“We had quite a struggle,” he continued, “before we finally decided on sandstone.”
“You did, eh?” I said. There seemed nothing more to say; I didn’t know what sort of a struggle he meant, or who fought who; and personally sandstone or soapstone or any other stone is all the same to me.
“This lawn,” said Beverly-Jones, “we laid down the first year we were here.” I answered nothing. He looked me right in the face as he said it and I looked straight back at him, but I saw no reason to challenge his statement.
“The geraniums along the border,” he went on, “are rather an experiment. They’re Dutch.”
I looked fixedly at the geraniums but never said a word. They were Dutch; all right, why not? They were an experiment. Very good; let them be so. I know nothing in particular to say about a Dutch experiment.
I could feel that Beverly-Jones grew depressed as he showed me round. I was sorry for him, but unable to help. I realized that there were certain sections of my education that had been neglected. How to be shown things and make appropriate comments seems to be an art in itself. I don’t possess it. It is not likely now, as I look at this pond, that I ever shall.
Yet how simple a thing it seems when done by others. I saw the difference at once the very next day, the second day of my visit, when Beverly-Jones took round young Poppleton, the man that I mentioned above who will presently give a Swiss yodel from a clump of laurel bushes to indicate that the day’s fun has begun.
Poppleton I had known before slightly. I used to see him at the club. In club surroundings he always struck me as an ineffable young ass, loud and talkative, and perpetually breaking the silence rules. Yet I have to admit that in his summer flannels and with a straw hat on he can do things that I can’t.
“These big gates,” began Beverly-Jones as he showed Poppleton round the place, with me trailing beside them, “we only put up this year.”
Poppleton, who has a summer place of his own, looked at the gates very critically.
“Now, do you know what I’d have done with those gates, if they were mine?” he said.
“No,” said Beverly-Jones.
“I’d have set them two feet wider apart; they’re too narrow, old chap, too narrow.” Poppleton shook his head sadly at the gates.
“We had quite a struggle,” said Beverly-Jones, “before we finally decided on sandstone.”
I realized that he had one and the same line of talk that he always used. I resented it. No wonder it was easy for him.
“Great mistake,” said Poppleton. “Too soft. Look at this” — here he picked up a big stone and began pounding at the gate post— “see how easily it chips! Smashes right off. Look at that, the whole corner knocks right off; see?”
Beverly-Jones entered no protest. I began to see that there is a sort of understanding, a kind of freemasonry, among men who have summer places. One shows his things; the other runs them down, and smashes them. This makes the whole thing easy at once. Beverly-Jones showed his lawn.
“Your turf is all wrong, old boy,” said Poppleton. “Look! it has no body to it. See, I can kick holes in it with my heel. Look at that, and that! If I had on stronger boots I could kick this lawn all to pieces.”
“These geraniums along the border,” said Beverly-Jones, “are rather an experiment. They’re Dutch.”
“But my dear fellow,” said Poppleton, “you’ve got them set in wrongly. They ought to slope from the sun you know, never to it. Wait a bit” — here he picked up a spade that was lying where a gardener had been working— “I’ll throw a few out. Notice how easily they come up. Ah, that fellow broke! They’re apt to. There, I won’t bother to reset them, but tell your man to slope them over from the sun. That’s the idea.”
Beverly-Jones showed his new boat-house next and Poppleton knocked a hole in the side with a hammer to show that the lumber was too thin.
“If that were my boat-house,” he said, “I’d rip the outside clean off it and use shingle and stucco.”
It was, I noticed, Poppleton’s plan first to imagine Beverly-Jones’ things his own, and then to smash them, and then give them back smashed to Beverly-Jones. This seemed to please them both. Apparently it is a well-understood method of entertaining a guest and being entertained. Beverly-Jones and Poppleton, after an hour or so of it, were delighted with one another.
Yet somehow, when I tried it myself, it failed to work.
“Do you know what I would do with that cedar summer-house if it was mine?” I asked my host the next day.
“No,” he said.
“I’d knock the thing down and burn it,” I answered.
But I think I must have said it too fiercely. Beverly-Jones looked hurt and said nothing.
Not that these people are not doing all they can for me. I know that. I admit it. If I should meet my end here and if — to put the thing straight out — my lifeless body is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should like there to be documentary evidence of that much. They are trying their best. “This is Liberty Hall,” Mrs. Beverly-Jones said to me on the first day of my visit: “We want you to feel that you are to do absolutely as you like!”
Absolutely as I like! How little they know me. I should like to have answered: “Madam, I have now reached a time of life when human society at breakfast is impossible to me; when any conversation prior to eleven a.m. must be considered out of the question; when I prefer to eat my meals in quiet, or with only such mild hilarity as can be got from a comic paper; when I can no longer wear nankeen pants and a coloured blazer without a sense of personal indignity; when I can no longer leap and play in the water like a young fish; when I do not yodel, cannot sing, and, to my regret, dance even worse than I did when young; and when the mood of mirth and hilarity comes to me only as a rare visitant — shall we say at a burlesque performance — and never as a daily part of my existence. Madam, I am unfit to be a summer guest. If this is Liberty Hall indeed, let me, oh, let me go!”
Such is the speech that I would make if it were possible. As it is, I can only rehearse it to myself.
Indeed, the more I analyze it the more impossible it seems, for a man of my temperament at any rate, to be a summer guest. These people, and, I imagine, all other summer people, seem to be trying to live in a perpetual joke. Everything, all day, has to be taken in a mood of uproarious fun.
However, I can speak of it all now in quiet retrospect and without bitterness. It will soon be over now. Indeed, the reason why I have come down at this early hour to this quiet water is that things have reached a crisis. The situation has become extreme and I must end it.
It happened last night. Beverly-Jones took me aside while the others were dancing the fox-trot to the victrola on the piazza.
“We’re planning to have some rather good fun to-morrow night,” he said— “something that will be a good deal more in your line than a lot of it, I’m afraid has been up here. In fact, my wife says that this will be the very thing for you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“We’re going to get all the people from the other houses over, and the girls—” this term Beverly-Jones uses to mean his wife and her friends— “are going to get up a sort of entertainment with charades and things, all impromptu, more or less, of course—”
“Oh,” I said. I saw already what was coming.
“And they want you to act as a sort of master-of-ceremonies, to make up the gags and introduce the different stunts and all that. I was telling the girls about that afternoon at the club, when you were simply killing us all with those funny stories of yours, and they’re all wild over it.”
“Wild?” I repeated.
“Yes, quite wild over it. They say it will be the hit of the summer.”
Beverly-Jones shook hands with great warmth as we parted for the night. I knew that he was thinking that my character was about to be triumphantly vindicated, and that he was glad for my sake.
Last night I did not sleep. I remained awake all night thinking of the “entertainment.” In my whole life I have done nothing in public except once when I presented a walking-stick to the vice-president of our club on the occasion of his taking a trip to Europe. Even for that I used to rehearse to myself far into the night sentences that began: “This walking-stick, gentlemen, means far more than a mere walking-stick.”
And now they expect me to come out as a merry master-of-ceremonies before an assembled crowd of summer guests.
But never mind. It is nearly over now. I have come down to this quiet water in the early morning to throw myself in. They will find me floating here among the lilies. Some few will understand. I can see it written, as it will be, in the newspapers.
“What makes the sad fatality doubly poignant is that the unhappy victim had just entered upon a holiday visit that was to have been prolonged throughout the whole month. Needless to say, he was regarded as the life and soul of the pleasant party of holiday makers that had gathered at the delightful country home of Mr. and Mrs. Beverly-Jones. Indeed, on the very day of the tragedy, he was to have taken a leading part in staging a merry performance of charades and parlor entertainments — a thing for which his genial talents and overflowing high spirits rendered him specially fit.”
When they read that, those who know me best will understand how and why I died. “He had still over three weeks to stay there,” they will say. “He was to act as the stage manager of charades.” They will shake their heads. They will understand.
But what is this? I raise my eyes from the paper and I see Beverly-Jones hurriedly approaching from the house. He is hastily dressed, with flannel trousers and a dressing gown. His face looks grave. Something has happened. Thank God, something has happened. Some accident! Some tragedy! Something to prevent the charades!
I write these few lines on a fast train that is carrying me back to New York, a cool, comfortable train, with a deserted club-car where I can sit in a leather arm-chair, with my feet up on another, smoking, silent and at peace.
Villages, farms and summer places are flying by. Let them fly. I, too, am flying — back to the rest and quiet of the city.
“Old man,” Beverly-Jones said, as he laid his hand on mine very kindly — he is a decent fellow, after all, is Jones— “they’re calling you by long-distance from New York.”
“What is it?” I asked, or tried to gasp.
“It’s bad news, old chap; fire in your office last evening. I’m afraid a lot of your private papers were burned. Robinson — that’s your senior clerk, isn’t it? — seems to have been on the spot trying to save things. He’s badly singed about the face and hands. I’m afraid you must go at once.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, “at once.”
“I know. I’ve told the man to get the trap ready right away. You’ve just time to catch the seven-ten. Come along.”
“Right,” I said. I kept my face as well as I could, trying to hide my exultation! The office burnt! Fine! Robinson singed! Glorious! I hurriedly packed my things and whispered to Beverly-Jones farewell messages for the sleeping household. I never felt so jolly and facetious in my life. I could feel that Beverly-Jones was admiring the spirit and pluck with which I took my misfortune. Later on he would tell them all about it.
The trap ready! Hurrah! Good-bye, old man! Hurrah! All right. I’ll telegraph. Right you are, good-bye. Hip, hip, hurrah! Here we are! Train right on time. Just these two bags, porter, and there’s a dollar for you. What merry, merry fellows these darky porters are, anyway!
And so here I am in the train, safe bound for home and the summer quiet of my club.
Well done for Robinson! I was afraid that it had missed fire, or that my message to him had gone wrong. It was on the second day of my visit that I sent word to him to invent an accident — something, anything — to call me back. I thought the message had failed. I had lost hope. But it is all right now, though he certainly pitched the note pretty high.
Of course I can’t let the Beverly-Joneses know that it was a put-up job. I must set fire to the office as soon as I get back. But it’s worth it. And I’ll have to singe Robinson about the face and hands. But it’s worth that too!
— Frenzied Fiction
OXFORD SMOKING
TO MY MIND these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.
On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest university in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet — it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, which in America, as yet, we can emulate, but not equal.
The lack of building fund necessitates the Oxford students living in the identical old boarding-houses they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called “quadrangles,” “closes,” and “rooms”; but I am so broken in to the usage of my student days that I can’t help calling them boarding-houses. In many of these the old stairway has been worn down by the generations of students; the windows have little latticed panes; there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding-house at St. John’s College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brick structures, like the normal school at Schenectady, N.Y., or the Peel Street High School in Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Anyone could have told them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would not brighten Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones of the old inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought the boarding houses up to date.
The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the professors’ lectures. In the colleges of Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really necessary and useful part of the students’ training. Again and again I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club. In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life. At Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given, and may even be taken, but they are quite worthless and are not supposed to have anything much to do with the development of the students’ minds. “The lectures here,” said a Canadian student to me, “are punk.” I appealed to another student to know if this was so. “I don’t know whether I’d call them exactly punk,” he answered, “but they’re certainly rotten.” Other judgments were that the lectures were of no importance: that nobody took them: that they don’t matter: that you can take them if you like: that they do you no harm.
