Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 7

Well, I have presented here only a t.i.the of the knowledge I have to-day gleaned from the daily press, that hitherto (by me, at least) underestimated inst.i.tution. I haven't stated that I now know who first used anthracite coal as a fuel, and when. You don't know that, I am sure. Neither do you know how many acres of corn were planted in England and Wales in 1915 and 1916, nor how many government employees there were in France before the war, nor that "A bundle of fine gla.s.s threads forms a new ink-eraser."

However, I must share with you my choicest acquisition. It seems little less than a crime to keep such knowledge from the world at large, to bury it at the bottom of a column on the ninth page of the first edition of the Springfield _Republican_. So I rewrite it here.

For oral delivery, I shall save it till some caller comes whom I particularly desire to impress. Then, with all the Old-World courtesy of Mr. Ezra Barkley, I shall offer this guest a chair, and as I do so I shall remark, with the careless casualness of the truly erudite: "Guatemala has only one furniture factory. It employs a hundred and fifty men."

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_Business Before Grammar_

We have just been perusing a copy of a certain magazine which proclaims on its cover that it has doubled its circulation in twenty months. Within, the editor sets forth what he believes to be the reasons for this gratifying growth. "The magazine accepts man as he is--and helps him," says the editor. "The magazine is edited to answer the questions that keep rising and rising in the average man's head.

It is not edited with the idea of trying to force into the average man's head a lot of information which he does not hanker for and cannot make use of."

Having always considered ourself an average man, we turned the pages hopefully, only to find a considerable amount of information we had never "hankered" for, and could not make use of, as, for instance, how to become the biggest "buyer" in the universe, or how a certain theatrical manager wants you to think he thinks he got on in the world (there is, to be sure, a quite unintentional psychological interest here), or how to remember the names of a hundred thousand people--dreadful thought! So we decided we were not, after all, an average man, and s.h.i.+fted to the fiction.

There were four short stories and a serial in this issue, and not one of them concerned itself with people who could speak correct English.

Some of the stories confined their a.s.saults upon our mother tongue to the dialogue, one was told by a dog (which, of course, excuses much, in prose as well as verse), and one was entirely written in what we presume to be a sort of literary Bowery dialect, which we have since been informed by friends more extensively read than ourself is now the necessary dialect of American magazine humor, as essential, almost, as the bathing-girl on the August cover.

"'I think we got about everything. I'll see that the things is packed in them wardrobe trunks an' sent to your hotel to-morrow morning. An' believe me, it's been _some_ afternoon, Mr. Bentley!'"

--This, at random, from one of the two stories which dealt with the "business woman," whose motto seems to be, "Business Before Grammar,"

even as it is the motto of the editor. The other "business woman" was not quite so lax. She tried as hard to speak correctly as the author could let her, and won a certain amount of sympathy for her efforts.

But the gem, of course, was the story told all in the literary Boweryese. A lack of acquaintance with past performances by our author prevented us from feeling quite sure who the supposed narrator might be, without reading the entire story, but we gathered from early paragraphs and from the ill.u.s.trations that the guy was a pug. (You see, it's contagious.) At any rate, this is how the story began:--

"The average guy's opinion of himself reaches its highest level about five minutes after the most wonderful girl in the world gasps 'Yes!' He always thought he was a little better than the other voters, but now he knows it! Of course, he figures, the girl couldn't very well help fallin'

for a handsome brute like him, who'd have more money than Rockefeller if he only knew somethin' about oil. He kids himself along like that, thinkin' that it was his curly hair or his clever chatter that turned the trick. Them guys gimme a laugh!

"When Mamie Mahoney or Gladys Van de Vere decides to love, honor and annoy one of these birds, she's got some little thing in view besides light house-keepin'. Some dames marry for spite, some because they prefer limousines to the subway, and others want to make Joe stop playin' the races or the rye. But there's always _somethin'_ there--just like they have to put alloy in gold to hold it together. Yes, gentle reader, there's a reason!

"But if you're engaged, son, don't let this disturb you.

I've seen some dames that, believe me, I wouldn't care _what_ they married me for, as long as they did!"

Having proceeded thus far, we turned back to the table of contents for affirmation of what we vaguely remembered to have read there. Yes, we _had_ read it! The tale was labeled by the editor, "A funny story."

So this is fiction for "the average man," and on this spiritual fare his cravings for literature are fed! So this is the sort of thing which doubles the circulation of a popular magazine in twenty months!

Such melancholy reflections crossed our mind, coupled with the thought that with no speech at all in the movies, and such speech as this in his magazines, the "average man" will either have to read his Bible every day or soon forget that there was once such a thing as the beautiful English language. And alas, the circulation of the Bible hasn't doubled in the past twenty months! "This magazine accepts man as he is--and helps him"--so reads the editor's self-puffery. What an indictment of man--and what an idea of help! We would hate to go to bed with his conscience,--if editors have such old-fas.h.i.+oned impediments.

But suddenly we caught a ray of light amid the encircling gloom. The editor hadn't stated what his circulation was twenty months ago! We recalled how Irvin Cobb once told us that the attendance at his musical comedy had doubled the previous evening--the usher had brought his sister. Doubtless the new circulation isn't more than a million,--and what is a mere million nowadays?

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_Wood Ashes and Progress_

"Once man defended his home and hearth; now he defends his home and radiator." The words stared out of the bulk of print on the page with startling vividness, a gem of philosophy, a "criticism of life," in the waste of jokes which the comic-paper editor had read and doubtless paid for, and which the public was doubtless expected to enjoy. The Man Above the Square laid aside the paper, leaned toward his fire, took up the poker (an old ebony cane adorned with a heavy silver k.n.o.b which bore the name of an actor once loved and admired) and rolled the top log over slowly and meditatively. The end of the cane was scarred and burned from many a contest with stubborn logs, and the Man Above the Square looked at the marks of service with a smile before he stood the heavy stick again in its place by the fireside.

"It isn't every walking-stick which comes to such a good end," he said aloud.

Then either because he was cold or in penitence for the pun, he walked over to the windows to pull down the shades. But before he did so he looked out into the night, his breath making a frosty vapor on the pane. Below him the Square gleamed in white patches under the arc-lamps, and across these white patches here and there a belated pedestrian, coat collar turned up, hurried, a black shadow. The cross on the Memorial Church gleamed like a cl.u.s.ter of stars, and deep in the cold sky the moon rode silently. A chill wind was complaining in the bare treetops beneath him and found its way to his face and body through the window c.h.i.n.ks. He drew down the shades quickly and pulled the heavy draperies together with a rattle of rings on the rods. Then he turned and faced his room.

A scarf of Oriental silk veiled the light of the single lamp, set low on his desk, and the fire had its own way with the illumination. It sent dancing shadows over the olive walls, it made points of light of the picture-frames and a glowing coal of the polished coffee-urn in the corner; it pointed pleasantly out the numberless books, but told nothing of their contents; it made dark the s.p.a.ces where the alcoves were, but suffused the little radius of the hearth that was bounded by an easy chair and a pipe-stand with a glow and warmth and comfort which were irresistible. The Man Above the Square came quickly into this charmed radius and sank again into the chair. "And some people insist on steam heat!" he said.

Then he looked into the rosy pit of wallowing, good-natured flames, and fancied he was meditating. But in reality he was going to sleep.

When he woke up the fire was out and he was cramped and cold. He stumbled to a corner, turned on the steam in a radiator, that the room might be warm in the morning, and returned to his chamber.

"After all, you have to build a fire; but the steam just comes," he growled, as he crawled sleepily into bed.

Toward morning the steam did come, but some hours before he was ready to rise. It came at intervals, forcing the water up ahead and thumping it against the top of the radiator with the force of a trip-hammer and the noise of a cannon. The Man Above the Square woke up and cursed.

The intervals between thumps he employed in wondering how soon the next report would come, which effectively prevented his going to sleep again. Presently the thumping ceased, and he dozed off, to awake later in ugly temper. He went out into the sitting room and found it cold as an ice-box.

"Where in blazes is all that steam which woke me up at daylight?" he shouted down the speaking-tube to the janitor. The answer, as usual, admitted of no reply, even as it offered no satisfactory explanation.

He dug into the wood-box and on the heap of feathery white ashes which topped the pile in the fireplace like snow--"the fall of last night" he called it--he laid a fire of pine and maple. In three minutes he was toasting his toes in front of the blaze, and good nature was spreading up his person like the tide up a bay.

"Modern conveniences would be all right," he chuckled, looking from the merry fire to the ugly radiator, "if they were ever convenient!"

Then he swung Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour, jumped into a cold plunge, and went rosy to his breakfast and the day's work, with the cheeriness of the fire in his heart.

But while he was gone there entered the chambermaid, and sad desecration was wrought. Chambermaids are another modern inconvenience. The Pilgrim Fathers got along without chambermaids; and even at a much later period chambermaids worked at least under the supervision of a mistress of the household. But nowadays they have their own way, even in abodes where there is one who could be a mistress if she would, or time from social duties and the improvement of her mind permitted. Of course, in the abode of a bachelor the chambermaid is supreme, for bachelors, at least in New York, have of necessity to live in apartments, not private boarding houses presided over by a careful mistress. Probably most of them prefer to; but that does not prove progress, none the less. But the Man Above the Square was not of this cla.s.s. He had a sharp elbow bone, in the first place, which is to signify that he was a "good house-keeper," as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I am home."

So when he entered his room again that evening and turned up the gas, his immediate utterance was not strictly the subject for reproduction.

To begin with, the chambermaid had, in disobedience to his strict orders, taken up the centre rug and sent it up on the roof for the porter to beat. Being an expensive rug, the Man Above the Square did not particularly relish having it frequently beaten. But still less did he relish the way it had been replaced. It was not in the centre of the room, so that two legs of the library desk in the middle stood on the border and two on the diamond centre. One end was too near the piano, the other consequently too far from the hearth. And in trying to tug it into position the maid had managed to pull every edge out of plumb with the lines of the floor. Of course, the photographs on the piano had smooches on the margins, where the maid's thumb had pressed as she held them up to dust beneath. Pudd'n-Head Wilson would alone have prized them in their present state. On the mantel each object was just far enough out of its proper place to throw the whole decorative scheme into a line of Puritanic primness. And the chairs, silent friends that are so companionable when an understanding hand places them in position, were now facing at stiff angles of armed neutrality, as if mutually suspicious. Not one of them said, "Sit in me."

But the worst was yet to come. Walking over to the fireplace, the Man Above the Square looked in and groaned.

"She's done it again!" he cried. "I'd move out of this flat to-night if I wasn't sure that any other would be as bad, this side of the middle of last century."

It was, indeed, a sorry piece of work. The splendid pile of gray and white wood ashes which that morning had been heaped high over the arms of the firedogs, and which drifted high into each corner and out upon the hearth, was no more. A little pile remained, carefully swept into the rear of the fireplace, but the bulk of the ashes had been removed and the arms of the firedogs stood inches above what was left.

"I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!" he muttered aloud, storming about the room. "Here I've been since Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid disobeys me--distinctly disobeys me--and shovels it all out!"

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.

"Didn't I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my ashes?" he demanded.

"But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty," she protested.

"Then don't sweep the room again!" he interposed. "I want the ashes left hereafter."

"But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it,"

said Eliza. "Most people like 'em cleaned out every week."