The Genial Idiot Part 15

"Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by it. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil effects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump you full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his pocket," said the Doctor.

"Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling," said the Idiot. "A college president might as well say that boys will play football, and that there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well as anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'd bounce him, that's what."

"Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,"

sneered the Doctor.

"Certainly," quoth the Idiot. "I dreamed it all out in my sleep last night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of establishments all over the country--"

"To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor. "A sort of Keeley Cure for shopping inebriates?"

"Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot. "The shopping inebriate is too much of a factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that popular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium."

"A what?" roared the Doctor.

"A shopnasium," explained the Idiot. "We have gymnasiums in which we teach gymnastics. Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what we might call shopnastics? Just think of what a boon it would be for a lot of delicate women, for instance, who know that along about Christmas-time they must hie them forth to the department stores, there to be crushed and mauled and pulled and hauled until there is scarcely anything left to them, to feel that they could come to our shopnasium and there be trained for the ordeal which they cannot escape."

"Very nice," said the Doctor. "But how on earth can you train them?

That's what I'd like to know."

"How? Why, how on earth do you train a football team except by practice?" demanded the Idiot. "It wouldn't take a very ingenious mind to figure out a game called shopping that would be governed by rules similar to those of football. Take a couple of bargain-counters for the goals. Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other. Then let sixty women start from number one and try to get to number two across the field through another body of sixty women bent on getting to the other one, and _vice versa_. You could teach 'em all the arts of the rush-line, defence, running around the ends, breaking through the middle, and all that. At first the scrimmage would be pretty hard on the beginners, but with a month's practice they'd get hardened to it, and by Christmas-time there isn't a bargain-counter in the country they couldn't reach without more than ordinary fatigue. An interesting feature of the game would be to have automatic cars and automobiles and cabs running to and fro across the field all the time so that they would become absolute masters of the art of dodging similar vehicles when they encounter them in real life, as they surely must when the holiday season is in full blast and they are compelled by the demands of the hour to go out into the world."

"The women couldn't stand it," said the Doctor. "They might as well be knocked out at the real thing as in the imitation."

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "They wouldn't be knocked out if you gave them preliminary individual exercise with punching-bags, dummies for tackle practice, and other things the football player uses to make himself tough and irresistible."

"But you can't reason with shopping as you do with football," suggested the Lawyer. "Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains the football player through the toughest of fights. The knowledge that the nation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is half the backing of your quarter-back."

"That's all right," said the Idiot, "but the make-up of the average woman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, the chase after a bargain does for a woman. I have known women so worn and weary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strength an hour later at a Monday marked-down sale of laundry soap and Yeats's poems. What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so on the question of incentive to action, Mr. Brief, the s.e.xes are about even. I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me to make a fortune. Dr. Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for the training and development of expert shoppers in all branches of shopnastics, under the medical direction of yourself and my business management would be a winner. Moreover, it would furnish a business opening for all those football players our colleges are turning out, for, as our inst.i.tution grew and we established branches of it all over the country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city, and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist of the hour?"

"Oh, well," said the Doctor, "perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, after all; but I don't think I care to go into it. I don't want to be rich."

"Very well," said the Idiot. "That being the case, I will modify my suggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Va.s.sar and other heads of women's colleges. As things are now they all ought to have a course of shopping for the benefit of the young women who will soon graduate into the larger inst.i.tution of matrimony. That is the only way I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be able to cope with the strenuous life that is involved to-day in the purchase of a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas. I know, for I have been through it; and rather than do it again I would let the All-American eleven for 1908 land on me after a running broad jump of sixteen feet in length and four in the air."

XVIII

FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS

"I have a request to make of you gentlemen," observed the Idiot, as the last buckwheat-cake of his daily allotment disappeared within. "And I sincerely hope you will all grant it. It won't cost you anything, and will save you a lot of trouble."

"I promise beforehand under such conditions," said the Doctor. "The promise that doesn't cost anything and saves a lot of trouble is the kind I like to make."

"Same here," said Mr. Brief.

"None for me," said the Bibliomaniac. "My confidence in the Idiot's prophecies is about as great as a defeated statesman's popular plurality. My experience with him teaches me that when he signals no trouble ahead then is the time to look out for squalls. Therefore, you can count me out on this promise he wants us to make."

"All right," said the Idiot. "To tell the truth, I didn't think you'd come in because I didn't believe you could qualify. You see, the promise I was going to ask you to make presupposes a certain condition which you don't fulfil. I was going to ask you, gentlemen, when Christmas comes to give me not the rich and beautiful gifts you contemplate putting into my stocking, but their equivalent in cash. Now you, Mr. Bib, never gave me anything at Christmas but advice, and your advice has no cash equivalent that I could ever find out, and even if it had I'm long on it now. That piece of advice you gave me last March about getting my head shaved so as to give my brain a little air I've never been able to use, and your kind suggestion of last August, that I ought to have my head cut off as a sure cure of chronic appendicitis, which you were certain I had, doctors tell me would be conducive to heart failure, which is far more fatal than the original disease. The only use to which I can put it, on my word of honor, is to give it back to you this Christmas with my best wishes."

"Bos.h.!.+" sneered the Bibliomaniac.

"It was, indeed," said the Idiot. "And there isn't any market for it.

But the rest of you gentlemen will really delight my soul if you will do as I ask. You, Mr. Brief--what is the use of your paying out large sums of money, devoting hour after hour of your time, and practically risking your neck in choosing it, for a motor-car for me, when, as a matter of fact, I'd rather have the money? What's the use of giving thirty-six hundred dollars for an automobile to put in my stocking when I'd be happier if you'd give me a certified check for twenty-five hundred dollars? You couldn't get any such discount from the manufacturers, and I'd be more greatly pleased into the bargain. And you, Doctor--generous heart, that you are--why in thunder should you wear yourself out between now and Christmas-day looking for an eighteen-hundred-dollar fur-lined overcoat for me, when, as a matter of actual truth, I'd prefer a twenty-two-dollar ulster with ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in the change-pocket?"

"I'm sure I don't see why I should," said the Doctor. "And I promise you I won't. What's more, I'll give you the ulster and the ten crisp one hundred dollars without fail if you'll cash my check for eighteen hundred dollars and give me the change."

"Certainly," said the Idiot. "How will you have it, in dimes or nickels?"

"Any way you please," said the Doctor, with a wink at Mr. Brief.

"All right," returned the Idiot. "Send up the ulster and the ten crisps and I'll give you my check for the balance. Then I'll do the same by you, Mr. Poet. My policy involves a square deal for everybody whatever his previous condition of servitude. Last year, you may remember, you sent me a cigar and a lovely little poem of your own composition:

"When I am blue as indigo, you wrote, And cold as is the Arctic snow, Give me no megrims rotting.

I choose the friend The Heavens send Who takes me Idiyachting.

Remember that? Well, it was a mighty nice present, and I wouldn't sell it for a million abandoned farms up in New Hamps.h.i.+re, but this year I'd rather have the money--say one thousand dollars and five cents--a thousand dollars instead of the poem and five cents in place of the cigar."

"I am afraid you value my verse too high," smiled the Poet.

"Not that one," said the Idiot. "The mere words don't amount to much. I could probably buy twice as many just as good for four dollars, but the way in which you arranged them, and the sentiment they conveyed, made them practically priceless to me. I set their value at a thousand dollars because that is the minimum sum at which I can be tempted to part with things that on principle I should always like to keep--like my word of honor, my conscience, my political views, and other things a fellow shouldn't let go of for minor considerations. The value of the cigar I may have placed too high, but the poem--never."

"And yet you don't want another?" asked the Poet, reproachfully.

"Indeed I do," returned the Idiot, "but I can't afford to own so much literary property any more than I can afford to possess Mr. Brief's automobile--and this is precisely what I am driving at. So many people nowadays present us at Christmas with objects we can't afford to own, that we cannot possibly repay, and overwhelm us with luxuries when we are starving for our necessities, so that Christmas, instead of bringing happiness with it, brings trial and tribulation. I know of a case last year where a very generous-hearted individual sent a set of Ruskin, superbly bound in full calf that would have set the Bibliomaniac here crazy with joy, to a widow who had just p.a.w.ned her wedding-ring to buy a Christmas turkey for her children. A bundle of kindling-wood would have been far more welcome than a Carnegie library at that moment, and yet here was a generous soul who was ready to spend a good hundred dollars to make the recipient happy. Do you suppose the lady looked upon that sumptuous Ruskin with anything but misery in her heart?"

"Oh, well, she could have p.a.w.ned that instead of her wedding-ring,"

sniffed the Bibliomaniac.

"She couldn't for two reasons," said the Idiot. "In the first place, her sensibilities were such that she could not have p.a.w.ned a present just received, and, in the second place, she lived in the town of Hohokus on the Nepperhan, and there isn't a p.a.w.nshop within a radius of fifty miles of her home. Besides, it's easier to sneak into a p.a.w.nshop with a wedding-ring for your collateral than to drive up with a van big enough to hold a complete set of Ruskin bound in full calf. It takes nerve and experience to do that with a cool and careless _mien_, and, whatever you may have in that respect, Mr. Bib, there are few refined widows in reduced circ.u.mstances who are similarly gifted. Then take the case of my friend Billups--some sharp of a tailor got out a judgment against Billups for ninety-eight dollars for a bill he couldn't pay on the fifteenth of December. Billups got his name in the papers, and received enough notoriety to fill him with ambition to go on the stage, and it nearly killed him, and what do you suppose his friends did when Christmas came around? Did they pay off that judgment and relieve him of the odium of having his name chalked up on the public slate? Not they.

They sent him forty dollars' worth of golf-clubs, sixteen dollars' worth of cuff-b.u.t.tons, eight ten-dollar umbrellas, a half-dozen silver match-boxes, a cigar-cutter, and about two hundred dollars' worth of other trash that he's got to pay storage-room for. And on top of that, in order to keep up his end, Billups has had to hang up a lot of tradesmen for the match-cases and cigar-cutters and umbrellas and trash he's sent to his generous friends in return for their generosity."

"Oh, rot," interrupted the Bibliomaniac. "What an idiot your friend Billups must be. Why didn't he send the presents he received to others, and so saved his money to pay his debts with?"

"Well, I guess he didn't think of that," said the Idiot. "We haven't all got the science of Christmas-giving down as fine as you have, Mr. Bib.

But that is a valuable suggestion of yours and I'll put it down among the things that can be done in the plan I am formulating for the painless Christmas."

"We can't relieve one another's necessities unless we know what they are, can we?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.

"We can if we adopt my cash system," said the Idiot. "For instance, I know that I need a dozen pairs of new socks. Modesty would prevent my announcing this fact to the world, and as long as I wear shoes you'd never find it out, but if, when Christmas came, you gave me twenty-five dollars instead of Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ in words of one syllable, you would relieve my necessities and so earn my everlasting grat.i.tude.

Dr. Capsule here wouldn't acknowledge to you or to me that his suspenders are held together in three places with safety-pins, and will so continue to be until these prosperous times moderate; but if we were to present him with nine dollars and sixty-eight cents on Christmas morning, we should discern a look of grat.i.tude in his eye on that suspender account that would be missing if we were to hand him out a seven-dollar gold-mounted shaving-mug instead. We should have shown our generous spirit on his behalf, which is all a Christmas present ever does, whether it is a diamond tiara or a chain of sausages, and at the same time have relieved his anxieties about his braces. His grat.i.tude would be double-barrelled, and his happiness a surer shot. Give us the money, say I, and let us relieve our necessities first, and then if there is anything left over we can buy some memorial of the day with the balance."

"Well, I think it's a pretty good plan," said Mrs. Pedagog. "It would save a lot of waste, anyhow. But it isn't possible for all of us to do it, Mr. Idiot. I, for instance, haven't any money to give you."

"You could give me something better," said the Idiot. "I wouldn't accept any money from you for a Christmas present."

"Then what shall it be?" asked the Landlady.