The Idiot at Home Part 9

"Then I should have to eliminate the billy-goat," said the Idiot. "That takes a great deal of humor out of it. I always laugh when I encounter a beast like that in poetry; he seems so helpless when incarcerated in a poem."

"That may be," observed the Poet. "But it is my belief that the goat, of all animals in the kingdom, was the last one designed to be used in poetry, anyhow. He is bad enough in prose, and in this case will b.u.t.t your poem to oblivion if you insist on keeping him in it. Any more?"

"No," said the Idiot; "that's the last."

"Well, you've got a good start," said the Poet, rising to light his pipe, which had gone out. "And if I were you I'd go on and finish the book. 'The Idiot's Book of Household Poetry' would have a great sale.

It has but one drawback that I can see. You harp on one string too much.

Every one of your poems preaches contentment, satisfaction--nothing else."

"That," said the Idiot, "is not an objection, but a virtue; for what other lesson," he added, with a glance of pride at his surroundings, "what other lesson, my dear Poet, should a home try to teach, and what other sentiment can mean so much to mankind?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I HAVEN'T EVER HAD A HOME; I'VE ALWAYS BOARDED'"]

"I don't know," said the Poet, with a little sigh. "I haven't ever had a home; I've always boarded."

Whereupon the Idiot rose up from his chair, and putting his arm about his friend's shoulder, said:

"How you do talk! Never had a home? Why, my dear fellow, what's this?

It's yours as long as it's mine!"

VIII

SOME CONSIDERATION OF THE HIRED MAN

"Who is that sitting down on your tennis-court, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr.

Brief, the lawyer. "Or is it anybody? I've been trying for the last half-hour to make out whether it's a man or one of those iron figures with which some people decorate their lawns."

"That," replied the Idiot, calmly, "is my hired man. I pay him forty dollars a month to sit down there and let the gra.s.s grow under his feet.

I heard you and Mr. Pedagog discussing the wonderful gra.s.siness of my lawn after dinner last night, and I meant to have told you then that the credit thereof belongs entirely to the restful nature of that man's soul. He will stand for hours rooted to one spot and looking with apparent aimlessness out over the river. To most people this would seem to be prompted by a sheer indisposition to work, but this would do him a rank injustice, for his immovability is due entirely to his system. He is letting the gra.s.s grow beneath him, and the fact that our gra.s.s is so nouris.h.i.+ng everywhere is due to his having stood for hours at various times over every square inch of territory to which I hold the t.i.tle-deeds."

The Idiot gazed out of the window at his retainer with affectionate admiration.

"He certainly clings closely to his system," said the lawyer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I FEEL THAT I COULD GO OUT AND MOW THREE ACRES OF GRa.s.s'"]

"He is a model," said the Idiot. "He has done more to make my life here easy than any one in my service. For instance, you know the hurly-burly of existence in town. I go to my office in the morning, and whether I have much work or little to do, I come home in the afternoon absolutely worn out. The constant hustling and bustling of others in the city wears upon my mind, and consequently upon my body. The rush and roar of cables and electric-cars; the activity of messengers running to and fro in the streets; the weary horses dragging great lumbering wagons up and down the crowded thoroughfares, all affect my nature and impair my energy; and then, the day's work done, I return here, where all is quiet and still, and the very contrast between that man, standing silently on his appointed spot, or leaning against the house, or lying off in sheer content under some tree, and the mad scramble for lucre in the city, invigorates my tired body until I feel that I could go out and mow three acres of gra.s.s before dinner; in fact, I generally do."

"I did not know that a restful nature was a requisite of a successful career as a hired man," said Mr. Pedagog.

"It is evident, then, that you have never had a hired man," rejoined the Idiot. "Nor can you ever have studied the species at close range.

Ceaseless activity would be his ruin. If he did to-day all there is to do, he would be out of employment to-morrow, consequently he never does to-day's work to-day, and cultivates that leisurely att.i.tude towards life upon which you have commented. Do you see that small beech-tree over there?" he added, pointing to a scrawny little sapling whose sole virtue appeared to be its rigid uprightness.

"Is that a beech-tree?" asked Mr. Brief. "I thought it was a garden stake."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'He WOULD GO OUT DAY AFTER DAY AND SIT DOWN BESIDE IT'"]

"It is a beech-tree," said the Idiot. "I planted it myself last autumn, and while it has as yet borne no beeches, I think if we give it time, and it withstands the rigors of the climate, it will produce its fruit.

But it was not of its possibilities as a beech-bearing tree that I intended to speak. I wanted to indicate to you by a material object the value of having a hired man who likes to lean against things. At the close of this last winter that tree, instead of being as erect as a grenadier, as it now is, was all askew. The strong westerly winds which are constantly blowing across that open stretch bent the thing until it seemed that the tree was bound to be deformed; but Mike overcame the difficulty. He would go out day after day and sit down beside it and lean against it for two and three hours at a time, with the result that the tendency to curve was overcome, and a tree that I feared was doomed to fail now bids fair to resemble a successful telegraph-pole in its uprightness. And, of course, the added warmth of his body pressing down upon the earth which covers its roots gave it an added impulse to grow."

"It is a wonderful system," smiled Mr. Brief. "I wonder it is not adopted everywhere."

"It is, pretty much," said the Idiot. "Most hired men do the same thing.

I don't think Mike differs radically from others of his kind. Of course, there are exceptions. My neighbor Jimpsonberry, for instance, has a man who is so infernally unrestful that he makes everybody tired. He is up every morning mowing Jimpsonberry's lawn at five o'clock, waking up every sleepy soul within ear-shot with the incessant and disturbing clicking of his machine. Mike would never think of making such a nuisance of himself. Furthermore, Jimpsonberry's lawn is kept so close-cropped that the gra.s.s doesn't get any chance, and in the heat of midsummer turns to a dull brick-red."

After a pause, during which the company seemed to be deeply cogitating the philosophical bearing of the subject under discussion, the Idiot resumed:

"There is another aspect of this matter," he said, "which Jimpsonberry's man brings to my mind. You know as well as I do that heat is contagious. If you feel as cool as a cuc.u.mber, and then all of a sudden see somebody who is dripping with perspiration and looking for all the world like a human kettle simmering on a kitchen-range, you begin to simmer yourself. It is mere sympathy, of course, but you simmer just the same, get uncomfortable and hot in the collar, and are shortly as badly off as the other fellow. So it is with Jimpsonberry's man. Time and time again he has spoiled all my pleasure by making me realize by a glance at his red face and sweating arms how beastly hot it is, when before I had seen him I felt tolerably comfortable. Mike, on the other hand, is not so inconsiderate, and I am confident would let the gra.s.s grow a mile high before he would consent to interfere with my temperature by pus.h.i.+ng the mower up and down the lawn on a humid day."

"Do you keep this interesting specimen of still life all through the year?" asked Mr. Brief, "or do you give him a much-needed vacation in winter? I should think he would be worn out with all this standing around, for nothing that I know of is more tiresome than doing nothing."

"No," said the Idiot. "Mike never seems to need a vacation. Sitting down and leaning against things and standing around don't seem to tire him in the least. It might tire you or me, but you see he's used to it. The only effect it has on him, as I view the matter, is that it wears out his clothes. It doesn't impair his lack of vigor at all. So by the simple act of occasionally renewing his wardrobe, which I do every time I discard a suit of my own, I revive his wasted vitality, and he does not require to be sent to Europe, or to take an extended tour in the White Mountains to recuperate. I keep him all through the winter, and his system is quite the same then as in summer, except that he does his sitting around and leaning indoors instead of in the open."

"I suppose he looks after the furnace and keeps the walks clear of snow in winter time?" suggested Mr. Pedagog, who was beginning to take an interest in this marvellously restful personage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'HE SHOVELS OFF A FOOT-PATH'"]

"Yes," said the Idiot; "and he attends to the windows as well. As a minder of the furnace he is invaluable. My house is as cool as a roof-garden all through the winter, and thanks to his unwillingness to over-exert himself shovelling coal into the furnace, I burn only about half as much as my neighbors, and my house is never overheated. This in itself is an indication of the virtue of Mike's method. One-half of the colds contracted by children nowadays are the result of overheated houses. Mike's method gives me a cool house at very moderate expense, owing to the great saving of coal, the children do not get colds because of overheating, and the expense of having a doctor every other day is averted. Then his snow-shovelling scheme goes back to the first principles of nature. Mike is not overawed by convention, and instead of following the steps of other men who shovel the snow entirely off, he shovels off a footpath to enable me to go to business, and then sits down and oversees the sun while it melts the balance. Sometimes, if the sun does not do the work promptly enough to suit him, he gets up little contests for the children. He divides up certain portions of the walk into equal parts, and starts the small boys on a race to see which one will get the portion a.s.signed to him cleaned off first, the prize being something in the nature of an apple, which the cook orders from the market. I believe my son Thomas won ten apples last winter, although I am told that the Jimpsonberry boy, whose father's man is cross, and insists on doing all the work himself, is the champion snow-shoveller of the street."

"Yes, he is, pa," put in Tommy. "Mike owes him 'leven apples. I only won eight."

"Well, that is a very good record, Thomas," said the Idiot, "and I will see to it that next winter you have a brand-new snow-shovel with which to enter the contest."

"Mike lets us chop the kindling-wood, too," said Tommy, suddenly perceiving a chance to put in a good word for the genial Mike. "I think he's the nicest hired man as ever was."

"He'll stop anything he's doing to talk to me," ventured Mollie, not wis.h.i.+ng to be backward in laying wreaths upon the brow of their friend.

"Yes, I have noticed that," said the Idiot. "Indeed, next to his extreme restfulness there is no quality that I know of in Mike that s.h.i.+nes out so conspicuously as his intense love for children. He will neglect his own interests, as Mollie has suggested, to talk to the little ones, and I rather like him for it. No boy dares go near the Jimpsonberry man, who has exerted himself into a perpetual state of nervous exhaustion."

"Well, if he cleans your windows, that is something," observed Mrs.

Pedagog, whose experience in keeping a boarding-house years before ent.i.tled her to speak as one having authority.

"Unless his system is the same in that work as in the other branches committed to his care," said Mr. Brief.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'SPEND A WHOLE DAY ON ONE WINDOW'"]

"It isn't quite," said the Idiot. "He really does exert himself in window-cleaning. I have frequently seen him spend a whole day on one window. His window-was.h.i.+ng system is a very ingenious one, nevertheless."

"It is, indeed," said Mrs. Idiot, with a show of feeling.

"A new window-was.h.i.+ng system?" grinned Mr. Pedagog.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "It is his own invention. He washes them on the outside in summer and on the inside in winter. The result is this opalescent gla.s.s which you see. You would hardly guess that these windows are of French plate. Still, we don't mind so much. I couldn't ask him to wash them on the outside in winter, it is so dreadfully cold, and in the summer, of course, they are always open, and no one, unless he were disagreeable enough to go snooping about after unpleasant details, would notice that they are not immaculate."