The Idiot at Home Part 16

"I think a furnace-feeder would be a good thing, too," the Idiot continued, in a moment. "My furnace is a chronic sufferer from indigestion because on some days it is gorged with coal and on others with ashes. Seems to me if I could get a month's time in which to concentrate my attention upon a furnace-feeder, I could devise some kind of a contraption that would invoke the enthusiastic love of the suburban resident in Arctic lat.i.tudes the world over."

"I have often thought of that possibility myself," observed Mr. Pedagog, his eyes fondly resting upon a steaming plate of griddle-cakes that had just been brought in. "But coal is a rebellious quant.i.ty. A furnace-feeder would need to be delicately adjusted, and coal cannot be handled with delicacy. It requires a chute rather than a tube. It must be manipulated with the shovel, not the sugar-tongs."

"Correct," said the Idiot. "Therefore, _you_ would experiment on a chute or a shovel, abandoning all idea of refining the coal. I, on the other hand, would experiment with the coal itself, Mr. Pedagog. Why not liquefy it, and let it drop automatically into the furnace through a self-acting spigot?"

"Liquefy coal?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"Certainly," replied the Idiot. "We liquefy pretty nearly everything else. If liquid air, why not liquid coal? Everything we have in nature in these days apparently can be liquefied, and while I am not familiar with the process, I see no reason why a ton of coal should not be reduced to such a shape that it can be bottled. Once bottled and provided with an automatic dropper, it could easily be adjusted so as to flow in proper quant.i.ties into the furnace at proper intervals."

"It would be very expensive. Do you know what a pint of liquid air costs?" demanded the Doctor.

"No," said the Idiot. "I neither breathe nor drink it. The plain old stuff is good enough for me, and cheap if you don't have to go to the mountains or the sea-sh.o.r.e to get your supply."

"Granting coal could be liquefied," the Doctor a.s.sented, "I venture to say that a ton of it would cost as much as five hundred dollars."

"I've no doubt it would," said the Idiot; "but I could afford a ton of coal at five hundred dollars if my scheme worked. A successful invention would make bread seem cheap at ten dollars a loaf. There's another thing I should put my mind on, and that is a method of cooking a cauliflower so that everybody in the house, as well as the neighbors, should not know that you are doing so," he continued. "I am particularly fond of cauliflower, but it is undeniable that in the process of cooking it becomes obtrusive, almost to the point of ostentation. I've spoken about it many times. Mike, the gardener, to whom I've spoken on the subject, thinks the cauliflower itself, if sprinkled with _eau de Cologne_ while growing, would cease to be obnoxious in the cooking; but that is too expensive a process. It would take a dozen cases of _eau de Cologne_ to bring a single cauliflower to maturity. My son, Tommy, has stated that he thinks it might be boiled in Florida-water instead of in the simple variety that comes from the pipes. A good suggestion for a small boy, but also expensive. Hired men and small boys do not think of the exchequer of the princ.i.p.al in their plans. They don't have to. Their allowance and wages are usually all velvet--an elegant vulgarism for surplus--and for my own part I have constantly to veto their little schemes for the betterment of my condition in order to have any condition at all left. But as far as the arrangement of an odorless cauliflower-cooker is concerned, it is as simple as A B C, barring one or two complications."

"I wish you'd hurry up and invent it," cried Mrs. Idiot, with enthusiasm. "What are the main features of this simple contrivance?"

"I'd have a boiler, in the first place, in which to boil the animal,"

said the Idiot. "When the water was ready I'd clap the creature into it, and before it had time to remonstrate I'd fasten a hermetically sealed cover over the top."

"But when you took it off the results would still be overpowering," said Mr. Pedagog.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'FINDING OUT WHAT IS BEING COOKED FOR DINNER'"]

"No, my dear sir," said the Idiot, "for the simple reason that I should affix a cold-air box and a flue to the hermetically sealed boiler.

Through the cold-air box fresh air would constantly flow into the boiler. Through the flue all the aromatic drawbacks of the cauliflower would be carried off through the chimney into the upper air. Anybody who wished to know whether we were going to have cauliflower for dinner or not would have to climb up to the roof and sniff at the chimney-top to find out."

"It _is_ simple, isn't it, Mrs. Idiot?" Mrs. Pedagog said.

"Very," replied Mrs. Idiot. "Indeed, it seems so extremely simple that I should like to know where the complications lie."

"Where all the complications in cooking lie, my dear," said the Idiot, "in the cook. The chief complication would lie in getting a cook who could, or if she could, would, use the thing intelligently."

"I don't see," said Mr. Brief, dryly--"I don't see but that what you ought to devote your time to, my dear Idiot, is the invention of an intelligent cook."

"Humph!" laughed the Idiot. "I may be an idiot, Mr. Brief, but I'm not an a.s.s. There are some things that man may reasonably hope to accomplish--such as setting fire to the Hudson River, or growing b.u.t.ternuts on the summit of Mont Blanc--but as for trying to invent an intelligent cook who would stay in the country for more than two weeks for less than ten thousand dollars a year, that, sir, is beyond all the conceptions of the human mind."

"Ain't Bridget intelligent, pa?" asked Tommy.

Here was a complication, for Tommy liked to retail to Bridget the gossip of the day, and especially what "pa said."

"H'm--ah--oh yes, indeed, she is, Tommy," the Idiot replied, with some embarra.s.sment. "Very; she's been with us three months."

"How much do you pay her, pa?" asked the boy.

"Well," said the Idiot, "not more than fifteen hundred dollars a month.

Just take another griddle-cake, my son, and remember that there are some things little boys should not talk about."

"Like tumpany's bald heads?" lisped Mollie, complacently, her eye fixed upon Mr. Pedagog's s.h.i.+ning dome.

"Precisely," observed Mr. Pedagog, appreciating the situation.

And while everybody else laughed the Idiot looked upon his children with a sternly affectionate face.

"My dear," said he to Mrs. Idiot, "I think it is time the babies got ready for Sunday-school."

XIII

A SUBURBAN COMPLICATION

"Well, old chap," said the Poet some weeks later, when he happened to be spending the night off in the suburbs with his old friend, "how goes the n.o.ble art of inventing? Has your horseless cauliflower bloomed as yet?"

"Horseless cauliflower is good, but tautological," said the Idiot. "The cauliflower is an automobile in itself, without the intervention of man.

Who told you I was inventing instead of broking these days?"

"Mr. Pedagog said something about it the last time I met him," said the Poet. "He's a mighty good friend of yours. He says you are the most perfect Idiot he ever met."

"He's a bully good fellow," said the Idiot, affectionately. "You know I used to think Pedagog wasn't of any earthly use except to teach people things, but as I look back upon my experience with him he has never taught me anything that was worth forgetting. So he told you I was going into invention, did he?"

"Yes; and he said he thought you were going about it in the right way,"

rejoined the Poet. "You weren't spending ten thousand dollars to get a four-dollar invention on the market, he said, but were inventing things that you knew at the outset weren't worth risking your money on."

The Idiot smiled broadly.

"He said that, did he? Well, he doesn't know what he is talking about,"

he retorted. "I am spending money on my inventions. I have already invested fifty cents in my patent Clothes-Pin-Holding Laundry-Bonnet, and I have strung the wires along my fence to be used in my electric Hired-Man-Discourager; and when I have managed to save up a few dollars more I'm going to get a battery to attach to it, when woe betide that man of Jimpsonberry's if he tries to talk to Maria while she is at work!

Furthermore, I have extended the operations of that same useful invention so that it will meet a long-felt want in all suburban communities as a discourager of promiscuous wooing. You never lived in the country, did you?"

"Not permanently," said the Poet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'COURTING HIS BEST GIRL ON SOME OTHER FELLOW'S STONE WALL'"]

"Then you are not aware of a singular habit the young country swain has of courting his best girl on some other fellow's stone wall after the sun goes down," said the Idiot. "Some balmy evening next spring, if you'll come up here I'll show you one of the features of suburban life that will give you an idea for a poem. That stone wall that runs along the front of my place has been the scene of more engagements than I can tell you of. Many a time when I have come home late at night I have counted as many as ten couples sitting on the cold coping of that wall telling each other how beautiful the world is, and holding each other on with loving arms."

"Rather an affecting scene, that," said the Poet.

"It was at first," rejoined the Idiot, "and I rather liked to see it.

Indeed, I once suggested to Mrs. Idiot that we should have the coping upholstered, so that they might sit more comfortably. I even wanted to put a back along the inner side of it for them to lean against, but after a while it palled. We couldn't sit out on our own front porch on a summer evening and talk without sentimental interruptions that were demoralizing to a sustained conversation. We'd try to talk, for instance, about Browning, or Tennyson, or Le Gallienne, or some other poet of their cla.s.s, when we'd be interrupted by such sentiments as, 'Ess I is,' and 'I's oo ducky,' and 'Ain't de moon boofer?' Then when we had guests we never dared to take them out-of-doors, but remained cooped up inside the house, because Mrs. Idiot feared to intrude upon the sacred right of those ten couples to do their courting comparatively un.o.bserved."

"It must have been a nuisance," said the Poet.

"It grew to be so; but I hadn't the heart to stop it, even if I could have done so, so I put up a hedge to hide them from view and soften the sound of their voices; but it didn't work very long. They didn't seem to appreciate my motive, and it so happened that the hedge which I put up with the most innocent of intentions was a j.a.panese quince that blossoms out in thorns half an inch long, to an extent which suggests the fretful porcupine. These, for some reason or other, excited the animosity of my twenty young friends on the wall, and at the end of the season there were not two consecutive feet of the hedge that had not been hacked and cut to pieces by my indignant but uninvited guests."