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+Project Gutenberg's Half-Hours with the Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Half-Hours with the Idiot
+
+Author: John Kendrick Bangs
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2011 [EBook #35017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALF-HOURS WITH THE IDIOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Annie McGuire. This book was produced from
+scanned images of public domain material from the Google
+Print archive.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT
+
+
+
+
+By John Kendrick Bangs
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A LITTLE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS
+  A LINE O' CHEER FOR EACH DAY O' THE YEAR
+  HALF HOURS WITH THE IDIOT
+
+
+
+
+HALF HOURS WITH
+THE IDIOT
+
+
+BY
+JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+BOSTON
+LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
+1917
+
+
+
+
+_Copyright, 1917,_
+BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+     I AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES                                   1
+    II AS TO THE FAIR SEX                                             22
+   III HE GOES CHRISTMAS SHOPPING                                     43
+    IV AS TO THE INCOME TAX                                           65
+     V A PSYCHIC VENTURE                                              84
+    VI ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION                                       101
+   VII THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY                              119
+  VIII FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN                                        137
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+AS TO AMBASSADORS' RESIDENCES
+
+
+"I am glad to see that the government is beginning to think seriously of
+providing Ambassadors' residences at the various foreign capitals to
+which our Ambassadors are accredited," said the Idiot, stirring his
+coffee with a small pocket thermometer, and entering the recorded
+temperature of 58 degrees Fahrenheit in his little memorandum book.
+"That's a thing we have needed for a long time. It has always seemed a
+humiliating thing to me to note the differences between the houses of
+our government officials of equal rank, but of unequal fortune, abroad.
+To leave the home of an Ambassador to Great Britain, a massive
+sixteen-story mausoleum, looking like a collision between a Carnegie
+Library and a State Penitentiary, with seven baths and four grand pianos
+on every floor, with guides always on duty to show you the way from your
+bedchamber to the breakfast room, and a special valet for each garment
+you wear, from sock to collar, and go over to Rome and find your
+Ambassador heating his coffee over a gas-jet in a hall bedroom on the
+top floor of some dusty old Palazzo, overlooking the garage of the
+Spanish Minister, is disconcerting, to say the least. It may be a
+symptom of American fraternity, but it does not speak volumes for
+Western Hemispherical equality, and the whole business ought to be
+standardized. An American Embassy architecturally should not be either a
+twin brother to a Renaissance lunatic asylum, or a replica of a four
+thousand dollar Ladies' Home Journal bungalow that can be built by the
+owner himself working Sunday afternoons for eight hundred dollars,
+exclusive of the plumbing."
+
+"You are right for once, Mr. Idiot," said the Bibliomaniac approvingly.
+"The last time I was abroad traveling with one of those Through Europe
+in Ten Days parties, I could not make up my mind which was the more
+humiliating to me as an American citizen, the lavish ostentation of one
+embassy, or the niggardly squalor of another; and it occurred to me then
+that here was a first-class opportunity for some patriot to come along
+and do his country's dignity some good by pruning a little in one place,
+and fattening things up a bit in another."
+
+"Quite so," said the Idiot, inhaling a waffle.
+
+"And I have been hoping," continued the Bibliomaniac, "that Congress
+would authorize the purchase of suitable houses in foreign capitals for
+the purpose of correcting the evil."
+
+"That's where we diverge, sir," said the Idiot, "as the lady said to her
+husband, when they got their first glimpse of the courthouse at Reno. We
+don't want to purchase. We want to build. The home of an American
+Ambassador should express America, not the country to which he is sent
+to Ambass. There's nothing to my mind less appropriate than to find a
+diplomat from Oklahoma named, let us say, Dinkelspiel, housed in a Louis
+Fourteenth chateau on the Champs Eliza; or a gentleman from Indiana
+dwelling in the palace of some noble but defunct homicidal Duck of the
+Sforza strain in Rome; or a leading Presbyterian representing us at
+Constantinople receiving his American visitors in a collection of
+bargain-counter minarets formerly occupied by the secondary harem of the
+Sublime Porte. There is an incongruity about that sort of thing that,
+while it may add to the gaiety of nations, leaves Uncle Sam at the wrong
+end of the joke. When the thing is done it ought to be done from the
+ground up. Uncle Sam should always feel at home in his own house, and I
+contend that he couldn't really feel that way in an ex-harem, or in one
+of those cold-storage Roman Palazzos where the Borgias used to dispense
+cyanide of potassium _frappe_ to their friends and neighbors. He doesn't
+fit into that sort of thing any more than he fits into those pink satin
+knee-breeches, and the blue cocked hat with rooster feathers that
+diplomatic usage requires him to wear when he goes to make a party call
+on the Czar. So I am hoping that when Congress takes the matter up it
+will consider only the purchase of suitable sites, and then go on to
+adopt a standardized residence which from cellar to roof, from state
+salon to kitchen, shall express the American idea."
+
+"You talk as if there were an American idea in architecture," said the
+Doctor. "If there is such a thing to be found anywhere under the canopy,
+let's have it."
+
+"Oh, it hasn't been evolved, yet," said the Idiot. "But it soon would be
+if we were to put our minds on it. We can be just as strong on evolution
+as we always have been on revolution if we only try. The first thing
+would be for us to recognize that in his fullest development up to date
+the real American is a composite of everything that is best in all other
+nations. Take my humble self for instance."
+
+"What, again?" groaned the Bibliomaniac. "Really, Mr. Idiot, you are
+worse than the measles. You can take that only once, but you--why, we've
+had you so often that it sometimes seems as if life were just one
+idiotic thing after another."
+
+"Oh, all right," said the Idiot. "In that case, let's take you for a
+dreadful example. What are you, anyhow, Mr. Bib, but the ultimate result
+of a highly variegated international complication in the matter of
+ancestry? Your father was English; your mother was German. Your
+grandparents were Scotch, Irish, and Manx, with a touch of French on one
+side, and a mixture of Hungarian, Danish, and Russian on the other. It
+is just possible that without knowing it you also contain traces of
+Italian and Spanish. Your love of classic literature suggests that
+somewhere back in the ages one of your forbears swarmed about Athens as
+a member of that famous clan, the Hoi Polloi. The touch of melancholy in
+your nature may be attributed to overindulgence in waffles, but it
+suggests also that Scandinavia had a hand in the evolution of your Ego.
+In other words, sir, you are a sort of human _pousse-cafe_, a mighty
+agreeable concoction, Mr. Bib, though a trifle dangerous to tackle at
+breakfast. Now, as I wanted to say in the beginning, when you intimated
+that I was in danger of becoming chronic, I am out of the same box of
+ancestral odds and ends that you are. I am a mixture of Dutch, French,
+English, and Manx, with an undoubted strain of either Ciceronian Roman
+or Demosthenesian Greek thrown in--I'm not certain which--as is
+evidenced by my overwhelming predilection for the sound of my own
+voice."
+
+"That much is perfectly clear," interjected the Bibliomaniac, "though
+the too-easy and overcontinuous flow of your speech indicates that your
+veins contain some of the torrential qualities of the Ganges."
+
+"Say rather the Mississippi, Mr. Bib," suggested Mr. Brief. "The
+Mississippi has the biggest mouth."
+
+"Well, anyhow," continued the Idiot, unabashed, "whether my speech
+suggests the unearthly, mystic beauty of the Ganges, or the placid
+fructifying flow of the Mississippi, the fact remains that the best
+American type is a composite of all the best that human experience has
+been able to produce in the way of a featherless biped since Doctor
+Darwin's friend, Simian, got rid of his tail, preferring to sleep
+quietly on his back in bed rather than spend his nights swinging
+nervously to and fro from the limb of a tree. Since we can't deny this,
+let's make a virtue of it, and act accordingly. What is more simple,
+then, than that a composite people should go in for a composite
+architecture to express themselves in marble, stone, and brick? Acting
+on this principle let our architecture express the glory that was
+Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the utility that was England, the
+economy that was Scotch, the _espieglerie_ that was France, the
+simplicity that was Holland, and the efficiency that was Germany, not to
+mention the philandery that was Constantinople. The problem will be how
+to combine all these various strains and qualities in one composite
+building, and that, of course, will have to be solved by architects. It
+isn't a thing like banking that under the theories of modern
+Statesmanship can be settled by chauffeurs, tobacconists, and
+undertakers, but will require expert handling. I don't know very much
+about architecture myself, but off-hand I should say that the exterior
+of the building might be a combination of late Victorian Queen Anne,
+softened somewhat with Elizabethan suggestions of neo-Gothic
+Graeco-Roman Classicism; with a Byzantine fullness about the eaves,
+relieved with a touch of Hebridean French Renaissance manifested in the
+rococo quality of the pergola effect at the front, the whole building
+welded into a less inchoate mass by a very pronounced feeling of
+Georgian decadence, emphasized with a gambrel roof, and the facade
+decorated with flamboyant Dutch fire escapes, bringing irresistibly to
+mind the predominance in all American art of the Teutonic-Doric, as
+shown in our tendency to gables supported by moorish pilasters done in
+Hudson River brick. Not being an architect myself I don't know that a
+building of that kind could be made to stand up, but we might experiment
+on the proposition by erecting a Pan-European building in Washington,
+and see whether it would stand or not. If it could stand through one
+extra session of Congress without cracking, I don't see why it couldn't
+be put up anywhere abroad with perfect confidence that it would stay up
+through one administration, anyhow."
+
+"A nightmare of that kind erected in the capital city of a friendly
+power would be just cause for war to the knife!" said Mr. Brief.
+
+"Well, I have an alternative proposition," said the Idiot, "and I am not
+sure that it isn't far better than the other. Why not erect a Statue of
+Liberty in every capital abroad, an exact reproduction of that
+monumental affair in New York Harbor, and let our Ambassadors live in
+them? They tell me there's as much room inside Liberty's skirts as there
+is in any ordinary ten-story apartment house, and there is no reason
+why it should not be utilized. My suggestion would be to have all the
+offices of the Embassies in the pedestals, and let the Ambassador and
+his family live in the overskirt. There'd be plenty of room left higher
+up in the torso for guest chambers, and in the uplifted arm for
+nurseries for the ambassadorial children, and the whole could be capped
+with a magnificent banquet hall on the rim of the torch, at the base of
+the brazen flame."
+
+"A plan worthy of the gigantic intellect that conceived it," smiled the
+Doctor. "But how would you have this thing furnished, Mr. Idiot? Would
+that be done by the Ambassadors themselves, or would the President have
+to call a special session of Congress to tackle the job?"
+
+"I was coming to that," said the Idiot. "It has occurred to me that it
+would be a fine thing to have forty-eight rooms in the statue, each
+named after one of our American States, and then leave it to each State
+to furnish its own room. This would lend a pleasing variety to the
+inside of the building that could hardly fail to interest the visitor,
+and would give the foreigners a very clear insight into our resources
+along lines of interior decorations. Think of the Massachusetts Room,
+for example--a fine old horse-hair mahogany sofa in one corner; a
+rosewood highboy off in another; an old-fashioned four-poster bed
+projecting out into the middle of the room, and a blue china wash-bowl
+and pitcher on a spindle-legged washstand near by; and on the wall three
+steel engravings, one showing John Hancock signing the Declaration of
+Independence, another of Charles Sumner preaching emancipation, and a
+third showing Billy Sunday trying to sweep back the waves of a damp
+Boston from the sand dunes of a gradually drying Commonwealth. Then the
+Michigan room would be a corker, lavishly filled with antique furniture
+fresh from Grand Rapids, and a bronze statuette of Henry Ford at each
+end of the mantelpiece for symmetry's sake, the ceiling given over to a
+symbolical painting entitled The Confusion of Bacchus, reproducing
+scenes in Detroit when announcement was made that the good old State had
+voted for grape-juice as the official tipple. Missouri's room could be
+made a thing of beauty and a joy forever, with its lovely wall paper
+showing her favorite sons, Dave Francis and Champ Clark alternately,
+separated by embossed hound-dogs, rampant, done in gilt bronze, and the
+State motto, Show Me, in red, white, and blue tiles over the fireplace.
+Really I can't imagine anything more expressive of all-America than that
+would be. Florida could take the Palm Room; New York the rather frigid
+and formal white and gold reception room; Maine as the leading
+cold-water State of the Union could furnish the bathrooms; California
+could provide a little cafeteria affair for a quick lunch in mission
+style, and owing to her pre-eminence in literature, the library could be
+turned over to Indiana with every assurance that if there were not books
+enough to go round, any one of her deservedly favorite sons, from George
+Ade to George McCutcheon, would write a five-foot shelfful at any time
+to supply the deficiency.
+
+"Murally speaking, a plan of this sort could be made historically
+edifying also. Florida could supply a handsome canvas showing Ponce de
+Leon discovering Palm Beach. In the New Jersey room the Battle of
+Trenton could be shown, depicting the retreat of Jim Smith, and the
+final surrender of Democracy to General Wilson. Ohio could emphasize in
+an appropriate medium the Discovery of the Oil Fields by Mr.
+Rockefeller. Pennsylvania could herald her glories with a mural painting
+apotheosizing William Penn and Andrew Carnegie in the act of forging her
+heart of steel in the fires of immortality, kept burning by a
+never-ending stream of bonds poured forth from the end of a cornucopia
+by Fortune herself. An heroic figure of Governor Blease defying the
+lightning would come gracefully from South Carolina, and Rhode Island,
+always a most aristocratic little State, could emphasize the descent of
+some of her favorite sons from Darwin's original inspiration by a frieze
+depicting a modern tango party at Newport, in which the preservation of
+the type, and a possible complete reversion thereto, should be made
+imperishably obvious to all beholders.
+
+"Then, to make the thing consistent throughout, the homes of
+Ambassadors having been standardized, Congress should order a standard
+uniform for her representatives abroad. This would settle once and for
+all the vexed question as to what an Ambassador shall wear when
+presented to King This, or Emperor That, or the Ponkapog of Thingumbob.
+I think it ought to be a definitely established principle that every
+nation should be permitted to choose its own official dud, but not the
+duds of others. There is no reason in the world why the King of England
+should be permitted to dictate the style of garments an American
+Ambassador shall wear. Suppose he ordered him to attend a five o'clock
+tea clad in yellow pajamas trimmed with red-plush fringe and gold
+tassels emerging from green rosettes? It would be enough to set the
+eagle screaming and to justify the sending of a Commission of Protest
+headed by Mr. Bryan over to London to slap Mr. Lloyd George on the
+wrist. Nor should the Kaiser be permitted to say how an American
+representative shall dress when calling upon him, compelling him to
+appear perhaps in a garb entirely unsuited to his style of
+beauty--something like the uniform of a glorified White Wing, for
+instance, decorated with peacock feathers, and wearing an alpine hat
+with a stuffed parrot lying flat on its back on the peak, on his head.
+That sort of thing does not gee with our pretensions. We are a free and
+independent nation, and it is time to assert our independence of the
+sartorial shackles those foreign potentates would fasten upon us. Let
+the fiat go forth that hereafter all American Ambassadors wheresoever
+accredited shall wear a long blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons,
+and forty-eight stars, lit by electricity from a small battery concealed
+in the pistol pocket, appliqued on the tails; red and white-striped
+doeskin trousers, skin tight, held down by straps under the boots; and
+an embroidered waist-coat, showing a couple of American eagles standing
+on their hind legs and facing the world with the defiant cry of We
+Pluribus Us; the whole topped off with a bell-crowned, fuzzy beaver hat,
+made of silver-gray plush, which shall never be removed in the presence
+of anybody, potentate or peasant, plutocrat or Cook tourist. If in
+addition to these items the Ambassador were compelled to wear a long,
+yellow chin whisker, it would be just the liverest livery that ever came
+down the pike of Brummelian splendor. It would emphasize the presence of
+the American Ambassador wherever he went, and make the effete nations of
+Europe, Asia, Africa, and Pan America sit up and take notice."
+
+"Doubtless," said the Bibliomaniac, rising impatiently. "And do you
+suppose the President could find any self-respecting American in or out
+of jail who would be willing to wear such a costume as that?"
+
+"Well," said the Idiot, "of course some of 'em might object, but I'll
+bet you four dollars and eighty-seven cents' worth of doughnuts against
+a Chautauqua rain check that any man who offered you seventeen thousand
+five hundred dollars a year for wearing those duds without having the
+money to back the offer up would find your name at the head of the list
+of his preferred creditors in less than three shakes of a lamb's tail!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AS TO THE FAIR SEX
+
+
+"I observe with pain," said the Idiot, as he placed the Bibliomaniac's
+pat of butter under his top waffle, "that there is a more or less
+acrimonious dispute going on as to the propriety of admitting women to
+the Hall of Fame. The Immortals already in seem to think that
+immortality belongs exclusively to the male order of human beings, and
+that the word is really 'Him-mortality', and decline to provide even a
+strap for the ladies to hang on in the cars leading to the everlasting
+heights, all of which causes me to rejoice that I am not an Immortal
+myself. If the one durable joy in life, the joy that neither crocks nor
+fades, association with the fair sex, a diversion which age cannot
+wither nor custom stale its infinite variety, is something an Immortal
+must get along without, it's me for the tall timbers of fameless
+existence. I rejoice that I am but a plain, common-garden, everyday
+mortal thing, ready for shipment, f. o. b., for the last terminal
+station on the road to that well-known Irish settlement, O'Blivion."
+
+"I didn't know that you were such an admirer of the fair sex, Mr.
+Idiot," said the Doctor. "Many years' residence in a refined home for
+single gentlemen like this would seem to indicate that the allurements
+of feminine society were not for you."
+
+"Quite the contrary," said the Idiot. "It proves rather my interest in
+the fair sex as a whole. If I had specialized sufficiently upon one
+single blessed damozel with pink cheeks, snappy brown eyes, and a
+pompadour that might strike a soaring lark as the most desirable nest in
+the world, to ask her to share my lot, and go halves with me in an
+investment in the bonds of matrimony, it might have been said--I even
+hope it would have been said--that the allurements of feminine society
+were not for me. Marriage, my dear Doctor, is no symptom that a man is
+interested in women. It is merely evidence of the irresistible
+attraction of one person for another. It's like sampling a box of
+candy--you may find the sample extremely pleasing and gobble it up
+ferociously, but if you were to gobble up the whole box with equal
+voracity it might prove hateful to you. In my case, I confess that I am
+so deeply interested in the whole box of tricks that it is the sample I
+fight shy of, and I have remained single all these years because my
+heart is no miserable little one-horse-power affair that beats only for
+one single individual, but a ninety-million horse-power dynamo that
+whirls madly around day and night, on time and overtime, on behalf of
+all. I could not possibly bring myself to love only one pair of blue
+eyes to the utter exclusion of black, brown, or gray; nor can I be sure
+that if in some moment of weakness I were to tie up irrevocably to a
+pair of black eyes, somewhere, some day, with the moon just right, and
+certain psychological conditions wholly propitious, a pair of
+coruscating brown beads, set beneath two roguish eyebrows, would labor
+in vain to win a curve of interest from my ascetic upper lip. To put it
+in the brief form of a cable dispatch, rather than in magazine language
+at fifteen cents a word, I love 'em all! Blonde, brunette, or in
+between, in every maid I see a queen, as Shakespeare would have said if
+he had thought of it."
+
+"That's rather promiscuous, isn't it?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"No, it's just playing safe, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "It's like a man
+with a million dollars to invest. It isn't considered quite prudent for
+him to put every red cent of that million into one single stock. If he
+put his whole million into U. S. Hot Air Preferred, at 97-7/8, for
+instance, and some day Hot Air became so cheap that the bottom dropped
+out of the market, and the stock fell to 8-3/8 that man would
+practically be a busted community. But if like a true sage he divided
+his little million up into twenty fifty-thousand dollar lots, and put
+each lot into some separate stock or bond, the general average would
+probably maintain itself somewhere around par whether the tariff on
+lyonnaise potatoes was removed or not. So it is with my affections. If I
+could invest them in some such way as that I might have to move out of
+here, and seek some pleasant little domestic Eden where matrimony is not
+frowned upon."
+
+"I rather guess you would have to move out of here," sniffed Mrs.
+Pedagogy the Landlady. "I might be willing to forego my rules and take
+somebody in here with one wife, but when a man talks about having
+twenty--why, I am almost disposed to give you notice now, Mr. Idiot."
+
+"Don't you worry your kindly soul about me on that score, Mrs. Pedagog,"
+smiled the Idiot. "With ostrich feathers at seventy-five dollars a
+plume, and real Connecticut sealskin coats made of angora plush going at
+ninety-eight dollars, and any old kind of a falal selling in the open
+market at a hundred and fifty per frill, there is no danger of my
+startling this company by bringing home one bride, much less twenty. I
+was only speculating upon a theoretical ideal of matrimony, a sort of
+_e pluribus unum_ arrangement which holds much speculative charm, but
+which in practice would undoubtedly land a man in jail."
+
+"I had no idea that any of my boarders could ever bring themselves to
+advance a single word in favor of polygamy," said the Landlady sternly.
+
+"Nor I," said the Idiot. "I don't believe even Mr. Bib here would
+advocate anything of the sort. I was merely trying to make clear to the
+Doctor, my dear lady, why I have never attempted to make some woman
+happy for a week and a martyr for the rest of time. It is due to my deep
+admiration for the whole feminine sex, and not, as he seemed to think,
+to a dislike of feminine society. The trace of polygamy which you seem
+to find in my discourse is purely academic, and it is clear to me that
+you have quite misunderstood my scheme. A true marriage, one of those
+absolutely indestructible companionships that we read about in poetry,
+involves so many more things than any ordinary human being is really
+capable of, that one who thinks about the matter at all cannot resist
+the temptation to speculate on how things might be if they were
+different. The active man of affairs these busy times needs many diverse
+things in the way of companionship. He needs a helpmate along so many
+different lines that no single daughter of Eve can reasonably hope to
+supply them all. For example, if a man marries a woman who is deeply
+interested in Ibsen and Bernard Shaw abroad, and deep thinkers like
+William J. Bryan and Thomas Riley Marshall at home, she no doubt makes
+him ecstatically happy in those solemn moments when his mind wishes to
+grapple understandingly with the infinite. But suppose that poor chap
+comes home some night worn to a frazzle with the worries and
+complications of his business affairs, his spirit fairly yearning for
+something fluffy and intellectually completely restful, do you suppose
+for a moment that he is going to be lifted out of the morass of his woe
+by a conversation with that lady of his on the subject of the
+Inestimable Infinitude of the Protoplasmic Suffragette as outlined by
+Professor Sophocles J. Plato in the latest issue of the _South American
+Review_? Not he, my dear Mrs. Pedagog. What he wants on that occasion is
+somebody to sit alongside of him while he pulls away on his old
+briarwood pipe, holding his tired little paddy in her soft right hand,
+while she twitters forth George Ade's latest Fable on 'The Flipper that
+Flapped', or something else equally diverting. The reverse of the
+picture is equally true. If there is anything in the world that drives a
+man to despair it is to have to listen to five o'clock tea gabble when
+he happens to be in a mood for the Alexander Hamilton, or Vice-President
+Marshall style of discourse. The facts are the same in both cases. The
+Bernard Shaw lady is a delight to the heart and soul in his Bernard Shaw
+moods. The George Ade lady is a source of unalloyed bliss in a George
+Ade mood, but they don't reverse readily, and in most cases they can't
+reverse at all. Then there are other equally baffling complications
+along other lines. A man may be crazy about poetry, and he falls in
+love, as he supposes, with a dainty little creature in gold-rimmed
+eyeglasses, who writes the most exquisite lyrics, simply because he
+thinks at the moment that those lyrics are going to make his life just
+one sweet song after another. He marries the little songbird, and then
+what happens?"
+
+"Never having married a canary, I don't know," said the Landlady, with
+a glance at her husband.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you," said the Idiot. "He has a honeymoon of lovely
+images. He feels like a colt put out to pasture on the slopes of
+Parnassus. Life runs along with the lilt of a patter song--and then, to
+indulge in a joke worthy of the palmiest days of London Punch, he comes
+out of Patter-Song! There dawns a day when he is full chock-a-block up
+to his neck with poetry, and the inner man craves the re-enforcement of
+the kind of flapjacks his mother used to make. One good waffle would
+please him more than sixty-seven sonnets on the subject of 'Aspiration.'
+Nothing short of a lustrous, smoking, gleaming stack of fresh buckwheats
+can hold him on the pinnacle of joy, and the lovely little lyrist, to
+whom he has committed himself, his destinies, and all that he has under
+a vow for life, hies herself singing to the kitchen, mixes the
+necessary amount of concrete, serves the resulting dishes at the
+breakfast table, and gloom, gloom unmitigated, falls upon that house.
+After eating two of her cakes poor old hubby begins to feel as if he had
+swallowed the corner stone of a Carnegie library. That lyric touch that
+Herrick might have envied and Tennyson have viewed with professional
+alarm has produced a buckwheat cake of such impenetrable density that
+the Navy Department, if it only knew about it, would joyously grant her
+the contract for furnishing the armor plate for the new
+superdreadnoughts we are about to build so as to be prepared for Peace
+after Germany gets through with us. While eating those cakes the victim
+speculates on that old problem, Is Suicide a Sin? A cloud rises upon the
+horizon of his joy, and without intending any harm whatsoever, his mind
+involuntarily reverts to another little lady he once knew, who, while
+she couldn't tell the difference between a sonnet and a cabriolet, and
+had a dim notion when she heard people speaking of Keats that keats were
+some sort of a shellfish found on the rocks of the Hebrides at low tide,
+and much relished by the natives, could yet put together a tea biscuit
+so delicately tenuous of character that it melted in the mouth like a
+flake of snow on the smokestack of a Pittsburgh blast furnace. Thus an
+apparently secured joy loses its keen edge, and without anybody being
+really to blame, life becomes thenceforward, very gradually, but none
+the less surely, a mere test of endurance--a domestic marathon which
+must be run to the end, unless the runners collapse before reaching the
+finish."
+
+"For both parties!" snapped the Landlady, pursing her lips severely.
+"You needn't think that the men are the only ones to suffer--don't you
+fool yourself on that point."
+
+"Oh, indeed I don't, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "It's just as bad
+for the woman as for the man--sometimes a little worse, for there is no
+denying that women are after all more chameleonic, capable of a greater
+variety of emotions than men are. A man may find several women in
+one--in fact, he generally does. It is her frequent unlikeness to
+herself that constitutes the chief charm of some women. Take my friend
+Spinks' wife, for instance. She's the most exacting Puritan at home that
+you ever met. Poor Spinksy has to toe a straight mark for at least
+sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. Mrs. Spinks rules him with a rod
+of iron, but when that little Puritan goes to a club dance--well,
+believe me, she is the snappiest eyed, most flirtatious little tangoer
+in ninety-seven counties. Sundays in church she is the demurest bit of
+sartorial impressiveness in sight, but at the bridge table you want to
+keep your eyes wide open all the time lest your comfortable little
+balance at the bank be suddenly transformed into a howling overdraft. I
+should say that on general principles Mrs. Spinks is not less than nine
+or ten women, all rolled into one--Joan of Arc, Desdemona, Lucrezia
+Borgia, Cleopatra, Nantippe, Juliet, Mrs. Pankhurst, Eve, and the late
+Carrie Nation. But Spinks--poor old Spinksy--there's no infinite variety
+about him. At most Spinks is only two men--Mr. Henpeck at home and Mr.
+Overworked when he gets out."
+
+"I suppose from all of this nonsense," said the Landlady, "that your
+matrimonial ideal would be found in a household where a man rejoiced in
+the possession of a dozen wives--one frivolous little Hebe for his
+joyous moods; one Junoesque thundercloud for serious emergencies; one
+capable seamstress to keep his buttons sewed on; one first-class
+housekeeper to look after his domestic arrangements; one suffragette to
+talk politics to; one blue-stocking for literary companionship; one
+highly-recommended cook to preside over his kitchen; one musical wife to
+bang on the piano all day; one athletic girl for outdoor consumption,
+and a plain, common-garden giggler to laugh at his jokes."
+
+"I think I could be true to such a household, madame," said the Idiot,
+"but please don't misunderstand me. I'm not advocating such a scheme. I
+am only saying that since such a scheme is impossible under modern
+conditions I think it is the best thing that ever happened to my wife
+that she and I never met."
+
+"Do you think a household of that sort would be satisfied with you?"
+asked the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"The chances are six to one that it wouldn't be," said the Idiot. "I'd
+probably get along gloriously with Hebe and the giggler, but I guess the
+others would stand a fair show of finding marriage a failure. Wherefore
+am I wedded only to my fancies, content that my days should not be
+subjected to the strain of trying to be all things to one woman,
+preferring as I do to remain one thing to all women instead--their
+devoted admirer and willing slave."
+
+"Well, to come back to the Immortals," said the Doctor. "You don't
+really think, do you, that we have any women Immortals?"
+
+"Of course, I do," replied the Idiot. "The world is full of them, and
+always has been."
+
+Mr. Brief, the lawyer, tapped his forehead significantly.
+
+"I'm afraid that screw has come loose again, Doctor," he said.
+
+"Looks that way," said the Doctor, "but we'll tighten it up again in a
+jiffy."
+
+He paused a moment, and then resumed.
+
+"Well, Mr. Idiot," he said, "of course our ideas may differ on the
+subject of what makes an Immortal. Now, I should say that it is by their
+fruits that ye shall know them."
+
+"A highly original remark," observed the Idiot, with a grin.
+
+"That aside," said the Doctor, coolly, "let's take up, for purposes of
+discussion, a few standards. In music, Wagner was an Immortal, and
+produced his great trilogy. In poetry, Milton was an Immortal, and
+produced 'Paradise Lost.' In the drama, Shakespeare was an Immortal,
+and produced 'Hamlet', and, coming down to our own time, let us grant
+the obvious fact that Edison is headed toward immortality because of his
+wizardry in electricity."
+
+"Sure thing!" said the Idiot.
+
+"It is good to have you grant all I say so readily," said the Doctor.
+"Now then--let me ask you where in all history you find four women who
+in the matter of their achievement, in the demonstrated fruits of their
+labors, even measurably approached any one of these four I have
+mentioned?"
+
+"Why, Doctor," grinned the Idiot, "why ask me to steal candy from a
+baby? Why suggest that I try to drive a tack with a sledgehammer, or cut
+a mold of currant jelly with the whirring teeth of a buzz saw--"
+
+"Sparring for time as usual," cried the Doctor triumphantly. "You can't
+name one, and are simply trying to asphyxiate us with that peculiar
+variety of natural gas for which you have long been famous."
+
+"I'll fill the roster with examples if you'll sit and listen," said the
+Idiot. "I can match every male genius that ever lived from Noah down to
+Josephus Daniels with a woman whose product was of equal if not even
+greater value. Begin where you please--in any century before or since
+the flood, and I'll be your huckleberry--Wagner, Milton, Cromwell,
+Roosevelt, Secretary Daniels, Kaiser Wilhelm, Methuselah--I don't care
+who or what he is--I'll match him."
+
+"All right," said the Doctor. "Suppose we begin low with that trifling
+little frivoler in literature, William Shakespeare!"
+
+"Good!" cried the Idiot. "He'll do--I'll just mark him off with Mrs.
+Shakespeare."
+
+"What?" chuckled the Doctor. "Anne Hathaway?"
+
+"No," said the Idiot. "Not Anne Hathaway, but Shakespeare's mother."
+
+"Oh, tush!" ejaculated the Bibliomaniac impatiently. "What rot! A wholly
+unknown provincial person of whom the world knows about as much as a
+beetle knows about Mars. What on earth did she ever produce?"
+
+"Shakespeare!" said the Idiot, in an impressive basso-profundo tone that
+echoed through the room like a low rumble of thunder.
+
+And a silence fell upon that table so deep, so abysmally still, that one
+could almost hear the snowflakes falling upon the trolley tracks sixteen
+blocks away.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+HE GOES CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
+
+
+"Mercy, Mr. Idiot," cried Mrs. Pedagog, as the Idiot entered the
+breakfast room in a very much disheveled condition, "what on earth has
+happened to you? Your sleeve is almost entirely torn from your coat, and
+you really look as if you had been dropped out of an aeroplane."
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Pedagog," said the Idiot, wearily, "I feel that way. I
+started in to do my Christmas Shopping early yesterday, and what you now
+behold is the dreadful result. I went into Jimson and Slithers'
+Department Store to clean up my Christmas list, and, seeing a rather
+attractive bargain table off at one end of the middle aisle, in the
+innocence of my young heart, I tried to get to it. It contained a lot of
+mighty nice, useful presents that one could give to his friends and
+relatives and at the same time look his creditors in the face--pretty
+little cakes of pink soap made of rose leaves for five cents for three;
+lacquered boxes of hairpins at seven cents apiece; silver-handled
+toothpicks at two for five; French-gilt hatpins, with plate-glass
+amethysts and real glue emeralds set in their heads for ten cents a
+pair, and so on. Seen from the floor above, from which I looked down
+upon that busy hive, that bargain table was quite the most attractive
+thing you ever saw. It fairly glittered with temptation, and I went to
+it; or at least I tried to go to it. I had been so attracted by the
+giddy lure of the objects upon that table that I failed to notice the
+maelstrom of humanity that was whirling about it--or perhaps I would
+better say the fe-maelstrom of humanity that was eddying about its
+boundaries, for it was made up wholly of women, as I discovered to my
+sorrow a moment later when, caught in the swirl, I was tossed to and
+fro, whirled, pirouetted, revolved, twisted, turned, and generally
+whizzed about, like a cork on the surface of the Niagara whirlpool. What
+with the women trying to get to the table, and the women trying to get
+away from the table, and the women trying to get around the table, I
+haven't seen anything to beat it since the day I started to take a
+stroll one afternoon out in Kansas, and was picked up by a cyclone and
+landed down by the Alamo in San Antonio ten minutes later."
+
+"You ought to have known better than to try to get through such a crowd
+as that these days," said the Doctor. "How are your ribs--"
+
+"Know better?" retorted the Idiot. "How was I to know any better? There
+the thing was ready to do business, and nothing but a lot of
+tired-looking women about it. It looked easy enough, but after I had
+managed to get in as far as the second layer from the outside I
+discovered that it wasn't; and then I struggled to get out, but you
+might as well struggle to get away from the tentacles of an octopus as
+to try to get out of a place like that without knowing how. I was caught
+just as surely as a fox with his foot in a trap, and the harder I
+struggled to get out the nearer I was carried in toward the table
+itself. It required all my strategy to navigate my face away from the
+multitude of hatpins that surged about me on all sides. Twice I thought
+my nose was going to be served _en brochette_. Thrice did the
+penetrating points of those deadly pins pierce my coat and puncture the
+face of my watch. Three cigars I carried in my vest pocket were shredded
+into food for moths, and I give you my word that to keep from being
+smothered to death by ostrich feathers I bit off the tops of at least
+fifteen hats that were from time to time thrust in my face by that
+writhing mass of feminine loveliness. How many aigrettes I inhaled, and
+the number of artificial roses I swallowed, in my efforts to breathe and
+bite my way to freedom I shall never know, but I can tell you right now,
+I never want to eat another aigrette so long as I shall live, and I
+wouldn't swallow one more canvas-backed tea rose if I were starving. At
+one time I counted eight ladies standing on my feet instead of on their
+own; and while I lost all eight buttons off my vest, and six from
+various parts of my coat, when I got home last night I found enough
+gilt buttons, crocheted buttons, bone buttons, filagree buttons, and
+other assorted feminine buttons, inside my pockets to fill an innovation
+trunk. And talk about massages! I was rubbed this way, and scourged that
+way, and jack-planed the other way, until I began to fear I was about to
+be erased altogether. The back breadth of my overcoat was worn
+completely through, and the tails of my cutaway thereupon coming to the
+surface were transformed into a flowing fringe that made me look like
+the walking advertisement of a tassel factory. My watch chain caught
+upon the belt buckle of an amazon in front of me, and the last I saw of
+it was trailing along behind her over on the other side of that whirling
+mass far beyond my reach. My strength was oozing, and my breath was
+coming in pants short enough to be worn by a bow-legged four-year-old
+pickaninny, when, making a last final herculean effort to get myself out
+of that surging eruption, I was suddenly ejected from it, like Jonah
+from the jaws of the whale, but alas, under the bargain table itself,
+instead of on the outside, toward which I had fondly hoped I was
+moving."
+
+"Great Heavens!" said the Poet. "What an experience. And you had to go
+through it all over again to escape finally?"
+
+"Not on your life," said the Idiot. "I'd had enough. I just folded my
+shredded overcoat up into a pillow, and lay down and went to sleep there
+until the time came to close the shop for the night, when I sneaked out,
+filled my pockets full of soap, clothespins, and other knickknacks, and
+left a dollar bill on the floor to pay for them. They didn't deserve the
+dollar, considering the damage I had sustained, but for the sake of my
+poor but honest parents I felt that I ought to leave something in the
+way of ready money behind me to pay for the loot."
+
+"It's a wonder you weren't arrested for shoplifting," said Mr. Brief.
+
+"They couldn't have proved anything on me," said the Idiot, "even if
+they had thought of it. I had a perfectly good defense, anyhow."
+
+"What was that?" asked the Lawyer.
+
+"Temporary insanity," said the Idiot. "After my experience yesterday
+afternoon I am convinced that no jury in the world would hold that a man
+was in his right mind who, with no compelling reasons save generosity to
+stir him to do so, plunged into a maelstrom of that sort. It would be a
+clear case of either attempted suicide or mental aberration. Of course,
+if I had been dressed for it in a suit of armor, and had been armed
+with a battle-axe, or a long, sharp-pointed spear, it might have looked
+like a case of highway robbery; but no male human being in his right
+mind is going to subject himself to the hazards to life, limb, eye, ear,
+and happiness, that I risked when I entered that crowd for the sole
+purpose of getting away unobserved with a package of nickel-plated
+hairpins, worth four cents and selling at seven, and a couple of
+hand-painted fly swatters worth ten cents a gross."
+
+The Landlady laughed a long, loud, silvery laugh, with just a little
+touch of derision in it.
+
+"O you men, you men!" she ejaculated. "You call yourselves the stronger
+sex, and plume yourselves on your superior physical endurance, and yet
+when it comes to a test, where are you?"
+
+"Under the table, Madame, under the table," sighed the Idiot. "I for one
+frankly admit the soft impeachment."
+
+"Yes," said the Landlady, "but I'll warrant you never found a woman
+under the table. We women, weak and defenseless though we be, go through
+that sort of thing day after day from youth to age, and we never even
+think of complaining, much less giving up the fight the way you did.
+Once a woman gets her eye on a bargain, my dear Mr. Idiot, and really
+wants it, it would take a hundred and fifty maelstroms such as you have
+described to keep her from getting it."
+
+"I don't doubt it," said the Idiot, "but you see, my dear Mrs. Pedagog,"
+he added, "you women are brought up to that sort of thing. You are
+trained from infancy to tackle just such problems, while we poor men
+have no such advantages. The only practice in domestic rough-housing
+that we men ever get in our youth is possibly a season on the football
+team, or in those pleasing little games of childhood like
+snap-the-whip, and mumbledypeg where we have to dig pegs out of the
+ground with our noses. Later in life, perhaps, there will come a war to
+teach us how to assault an entrenched enemy, and occasionally, perhaps
+around election time, we may find ourselves mixed up in some kind of a
+free fight on the streets, but all of these things are as child's play
+compared to an assault upon a bargain table by one who has never
+practiced the necessary maneuvers. To begin with we are absolutely
+unarmed."
+
+"Unarmed?" echoed the Landlady. "What would you carry, a Gatling gun?"
+
+"Well, I never thought of that," said the Idiot, "but if I ever tackle
+the proposition again, which, believe me, is very doubtful, I'll bear
+the suggestion in mind. It sounds good. If I'd had a forty-two
+centimeter machine-gun along with me yesterday afternoon I might have
+stood a better chance."
+
+"O you know perfectly well what I mean," said Mrs. Pedagog. "You implied
+that women are armed when they go shopping, while men are not."
+
+"Well, aren't they?" asked the Idiot. "Every blessed daughter of Eve in
+that melee yesterday was armed, one might almost say, to the teeth.
+There wasn't one in the whole ninety-seven thousand of them that didn't
+have at least two hatpins thrust through the middle of her head with
+their sharp-pointed ends sticking out an inch and a half beyond her dear
+little ears; and every time a head was turned in any direction blood was
+shed automatically. All I had was the stiff rim of my derby hat, and
+even that fell off inside of three minutes, and I haven't seen hide nor
+hair of it since. Then what the hatpins failed to move out of their path
+other pins variously and strategically placed would tackle; and as for
+auxiliary weapons, what with sharp-edged jet and metal buttons sprouting
+from one end of the feminine form to the other, up the front, down the
+back, across the shoulders, along the hips, executing flank movements
+right and left, and diagonally athwart every available inch of
+superficial area elsewhere, aided and abetted by silver and steel-beaded
+handbags and featherweight umbrellas for purposes of assault, I tell you
+every blessed damozel of the lot was a walking arsenal of destruction.
+All one of those women had to do was to whizz around three times like a
+dervish, poke her head either to the right or to the left, and gain
+three yards, while I might twist around like a pinwheel, or an electric
+fan, and get nothing for my pains save a skewered nose, or a poke in the
+back that suggested the presence of a member of the Black Hand Society.
+In addition to all this I fear I have sustained internal injuries of
+serious import. My teeth are intact, save for two feathers that are so
+deeply imbedded at the back of my wisdom teeth that I fear I shall have
+to have them pulled, but every time I breathe one of my ribs behaves as
+if in some way it had got itself tangled up with my left shoulder blade.
+Why, the pressure upon me at one time was so great that I began to feel
+like a rosebud placed inside the family Bible by an old maid whose lover
+has evaporated, to be pressed and preserved there until his return. This
+little pancake that is about to fulfill its destiny as a messenger from
+a cold and heartless outside world to my inner man, is a rotund,
+bulgent, balloon-shaped bit of puffed-up convex protuberance compared to
+the way I felt after that whirl of feminity had put me through the
+clothes-wringer. I was as flat as a joke of Caesar's after its four
+thousandth semiannual appearance in London Punch, and in respect to
+thickness I was pressed so thin that you could have rolled me around
+your umbrella, and still been able to get the cover on."
+
+"You never were very deep, anyhow," suggested the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Whence the wonder of it grows," said the Idiot. "Normally I am
+fathomless compared to the thin, waferlike quality of my improfundity as
+I flickered to the floor after that dreadful pressure was removed."
+
+"How about women getting crushed?" demanded the Landlady defiantly. "If
+a poor miserable little wisp of a woman can go through that sort of
+thing, I don't see why a big, brawny man like you can't."
+
+"Because, as I have already said," said the Idiot, "I wasn't dressed for
+it. My clothes aren't divided up into airtight compartments, rendering
+me practically unsinkable within, nor have I any steel-constructed
+garments covering my manly form to resist the pressure."
+
+"And have women?" asked Mrs. Pedagog.
+
+The Idiot blushed.
+
+"How should I know, my dear Mrs. Pedagog?" replied the Idiot. "I'm no
+authority on the subtle mysteries of feminine raiment, but from what I
+see in the shop windows, and in the advertising pages of the magazines,
+I should say that the modern woman could go through a courtship with a
+grizzly bear and come out absolutely undented. As I pass along the
+highways these days, and glance into the shop windows, mine eyes are
+constantly confronted by all sorts of feminine under-tackle, which in
+the days of our grandmothers were regarded as strictly confidential. I
+see steel-riveted contraptions, marked down from a dollar fifty-seven to
+ninety-eight cents, which have all the lithe, lissom grace of a Helen of
+Troy, the which I am led to infer the women of to-day purchase and
+insert themselves into, gaining thereby not only a marvelous symmetry of
+figure hitherto unknown to them, but that same security against the
+bufferings of a rude outside world as well, which a gilt-edged bond must
+feel when it finds itself locked up behind the armor-plated walls of a
+Safe Deposit Company. Except that these armorial undergarments are
+decorated with baby-blue ribbons, and sporadic, not to say spasmodic,
+doodads in filmy laces and chiffon, they differ in no respect from those
+wonderful combinations of slats, chest-protectors, and liver pads which
+our most accomplished football players wear at the emergent moments of
+their intellectual development at college. In point of fact, without
+really knowing anything about it, I venture the assertion that the woman
+of to-day wearing this steel-lined chiffon figure, and armed with
+seventy or eighty different kinds of pins from plain hat to safety,
+which protrude from various unexpected parts of her anatomy at the
+psychological moment, plus the devastating supply of buttons always
+available for moments of aggressive action, is the most powerfully and
+efficiently developed engine of war the world has yet produced. She is
+not only protected by her unyielding figure from the onslaughts of the
+enemy, but she fairly bristles as well with unsuspected weapons of
+offense against which anything short of a herd of elephants on stampede
+would be powerless. Your modern Amazon is an absolutely irrefragable,
+irresistible creature, and it makes me shudder to think of what is going
+to happen when this war of the sexes, now in its infancy, really gets
+going, and we defenseless men have nothing but a few regiments of
+artillery, and a division or two of infantry and cavalry standing
+between us and an advancing column of super-insulated shoppers, using
+their handbags as clubs, their hatpins glistening wickedly in the
+morning light, as they tango onward to the fray. When that day comes,
+frankly, I shall turn and run. I had my foretaste of that coming warfare
+in my pursuit of Christmas gifts yesterday afternoon, and my motto
+henceforth and forever is Never Again!"
+
+"Then I suppose we need none of us expect to be remembered by you this
+Christmas," said the Doctor. "Alas, and alas! I shall miss the generous
+bounty which led you last year to present me with a cold waffle on
+Christmas morn."
+
+"On the contrary, Doctor," said the Idiot. "Profiting from my experience
+of yesterday I am going to start in on an entirely new system of
+Christmas giving. No more boughten articles for me--my presents will be
+fashioned by loving hands without thought of dross. You and all the rest
+of my friends at this board are to be remembered as usual. For the
+Bibliomaniac I have a little surprise in store in the shape of a copy of
+the _Congressional Record_ for December 7th which I picked up on a
+street car last Friday morning. It is an absolutely first edition, in
+the original wrappers, and will make a fine addition to his collection
+of Americana. For Mr. Brief I have a copy of the New York Telephone Book
+for 1906, which he will find full of most excellent addresses. For my
+dear friend, the Poet, I have set aside a charming collection of
+rejection slips from his friends the editors; and for you, Doctor, as an
+affectionate memento of my regard, I have prepared a little mixture of
+all the various medicines you have prescribed for me during the past
+five years, none of which I have ever taken, to the vast betterment of
+my health. These, consisting of squills, cod-liver oil, ipecac, quinine,
+iron tonic, soothing syrup, spirits of ammonia, horse liniment, himalaya
+bitters, and calomel, I have mixed together in one glorious concoction,
+which I shall bottle with my own hands in an old carboy I found up in
+the attic, on the side of which I have etched the words, When You Drink
+It Think of Me!"
+
+"Thanks, awfully," said the Doctor. "I am sure a mixture of that sort
+could remind me of no one else."
+
+"And, finally, for our dear Landlady," said the Idiot, smiling
+gallantly on Mrs. Pedagog, "I have the greatest surprise of all."
+
+"I'll bet you a dollar I know what it is," said the Doctor.
+
+"I'll take you," said the Idiot.
+
+"You're going to pay your bill!" roared the Doctor.
+
+"There's your dollar," said the Idiot, tossing a silver cartwheel across
+the table. "Better hand it right over to Mrs. Pedagog on account,
+yourself."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+AS TO THE INCOME TAX
+
+
+"Well, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot cheerfully, as he speared a lonely prune
+and put it out of its misery, "have you made your return to the income
+tax collector yet?"
+
+"I both rejoice and regret to say that my income is not large enough to
+come under the provisions of the act," said the Bibliomaniac, "and
+consequently I haven't bothered my head about it."
+
+"Then you'd better get busy and send in a statement of your receipts up
+to January first, or you'll find Uncle Sam after you with a hot stick.
+For the sake of the fair name of our beloved home here, sir, don't
+delay. I'd hate to see a federal patrol wagon rolling up to our door for
+the purpose of taking you to jail."
+
+"But I am exempt," protested the Bibliomaniac. "I don't come within a
+thousand dollars of the minimum."
+
+"That may be all true enough," said the Idiot. "You know that, and I
+know that, but Uncle Sam doesn't know it, and you've got to satisfy him
+that you are not a plutocrat trying to pass yourself off as a member of
+one of those respectable middle-class financial families in which this
+land is so pleasingly rich. You've got to lay a statement of your
+financial condition before the government whether your income is
+ninety-seven cents a minute or forty-seven thousand dollars an hour.
+Nobody is exempt from that nuisance. As I understand it, the government
+requires every man, woman, and child to go to confession, and own up to
+just how little or how much he or she hasn't got. All men stand equal in
+the eyes of the law when it comes to the show-down. There is no
+discrimination in favor of the rich in this business, and the
+inconvenience of having a minion of authority prying into your private
+affairs is as much a privilege of yours as it is of Uncle John's, or
+good old Brother Scramble, the Egg King. Uncle Sam is going to put his
+eye on every man-jack of us and find out whether we are any good or not,
+and if so, for how much. He will have sleuths everywhere about to
+estimate the cubic financial contents of your trousers' pockets, and
+whether you keep your money in a bank, in a trust company, in a cigar
+box, your sock, or your wife's name, he is going right after it, and
+he'll get his share or know the reason why. There isn't a solitary
+nickel circulating in this land to-day that can hope to escape the eagle
+eye of the Secretary of the Treasury and his financial ferrets."
+
+"You surprise me," said the Bibliomaniac. "If what you say is true, it
+is a perfect outrage. You don't really mean to tell me that I have got
+to give a statement of my receipts to some snoopy-nosed old government
+official, do you?"
+
+"Even so," said the Idiot, "or at least that is the way I understand it.
+You've not only got to tell how much you've got, but you must also
+disclose the sources of your revenue. If you found a cent on the corner
+of Main Street and Desdemona Alley on the fifteenth day of December,
+1916, thereby adding that much to your annual receipts, you have got to
+enter it in your statement, and so clearly that the authorities will
+understand just how, when, and where it came into your possession, all
+under oath; and you are not allowed to deduct your current living
+expenses from it, either. If in stooping over to pick up that cent you
+busted your suspenders, and had to go and pay fifty cents for a new
+pair, thereby losing forty-nine cents on the transaction, you aren't
+allowed to make any deductions on that account. That cent is 'Net'--not
+'Nit', but 'Net.' Same way if in a crowded car you put your hand into
+what you presumed to be your own pocket, and pulled out unexpectedly a
+roll of twenty dollar bills amounting to two hundred dollars in all, and
+then in an absent-minded moment got away with it before you realized
+that it belonged to the man standing next to you, you'd have to put it
+down on your statement just the same as all the rest of the items, under
+penalty of prosecution for concealing sources of revenue from the
+officers of the law. Oh, it's a fine mess we smart Alexanders of the
+hour have got ourselves into in our effort to establish a pipe line
+between the plutocratic pocketbook and the United States Treasury. We
+all hypnotized ourselves into the pleasing belief that the income tax
+was going to be a jolly little club with which to hit old Brother Plute
+on the head, and make him fork over, while we Nixicrats sat on the fence
+and grinned. It was going to be great fun watching the Plutes disgorge,
+and we all had a notion that life was going to be just one exgurgitating
+moving picture after another, with us sitting in front row seats
+gloating over the Sorrows of Croesus and his coughing coffers. But,
+alas for our dreams of joy, it hasn't worked out quite that way. The
+vexation of the blooming thing is visited upon every one of us. Them as
+has has got to pay. Them as hasn't has got to prove that they don't
+have to pay, and I tell you right now, Mr. Bib, it is going to be a
+terrific proposition for a lot of chaps in this land of ours who are
+skinning along on nothing a year, but making a noise like a
+ten-thousand-dollar proposition."
+
+"I fear me their name is legion," said the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"I know one named Smythe," said the Idiot. "If a painter were looking
+around for a model for Ready Money in an allegorical picture Smythe
+would fill the bill to perfection. You ought to see him. He walks about
+the streets of this town giving everybody he meets a fifteen-thousand
+per annum look when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't got ten cents to his
+name. If he was invited to a submarine masquerade all he'd have to do
+would be to swallow a glass of water and go as a sponge. He makes about
+as big a splurge on a deficit as you or I could make if our salaries
+were raised nine hundred ten per cent., and then some. As a weekender he
+is in the A 1 class. He hasn't paid for a Sunday dinner in five years,
+nor has he paid for anything else in earned cash for three. His only
+sources of revenue are his friends, the pawn-shops, and his proficiency
+at bridge and poker. His only hope for staving off eventual disaster is
+the possibility of hanging on by his eyelids until he dawns as the last
+forlorn hope on the horizon of some freckle-faced, red-haired old maid,
+with nine millions in her own right. He owes every tailor, hatter, and
+haberdasher in town. When he needs twenty-five dollars he buys a
+fifty-dollar overcoat, has it charged, and takes it around the corner
+and pawns it, and ekes out the deficiency with a jackpot or a grand
+slam, in the manipulation of both of which he is what Socrates used to
+call a cracker-jack. If you ever saw him walking on the avenue, or
+entering a swagger restaurant anywhere, you'd stop and say to yourself,
+'By George! That must be Mr. Idle Rich, of whom I have heard so much
+lately. Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be him!'"
+
+"Him?" sniffed the Bibliomaniac, always a stickler for purity of speech.
+
+"Sure thing!" said the Idiot. "You don't stop to think of grammar when
+you are dazzled by that spectacle. You just give way, right off, to your
+natural, unrestrained, primitive instincts, and speak English in exactly
+the same way that the caveman spoke his tongue in those glorious days
+before grammar came along to curse education with its artificial
+restraints upon ease of expression. 'Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be
+him', is what you'd say as old Empty Wallet passed you by disguised as
+the Horn of Plenty, and all day long your mind would continue to advert
+to him and the carefree existence you'd think to look at him he was
+leading; and you, with a four-dollar bill within your reach every
+Saturday night, would find yourself positively envying him his wealth,
+when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't seen a single red cent he could
+properly call his own for ten years."
+
+"Oh, well--what of it?" said the Bibliomaniac. "Of course, there are
+sponges and snobs in the world. What are they to us?"
+
+"Why, nothing," said the Idiot, "only I wonder what Smythe and his kind
+are going to do when the income tax collector comes along and asks for
+his little two per cent. of all this showy exterior. It will be a
+terribly humiliating piece of business to confess that all this
+ostentatious show of prosperity is nothing but an empty shell, and that
+way down inside he is only an eighteen-karat, copper-fastened,
+steel-riveted bluff; fact is, he'll have the dickens of a time making
+the tax collectors believe it, and then he'll be face to face with a
+federal indictment for trying to dodge his taxes. And that business of
+dodging--that brings up another phase of this income tax that I don't
+believe many of us realized when we were shouting for it as a means of
+shackling Mr. Plute. Did you ever realize that it won't be very long
+before the government, in order to get this income tax fixed right, will
+have a lot of inspectors who will be delegated to do for you and me, and
+all the rest of us, what the Custom House inspectors now do for
+travelers returning from abroad? Every man and woman traveling upon the
+seas of life, Mr. Bib, will be required to enter the port of taxation
+and there submit a declaration of the contents of their boxes to the
+tax inspectors, which will be followed, as in the case of the traveler
+from abroad, by a complete overhauling of their effects by those same
+inspectors. The tesselated pave of your safe deposit companies and banks
+will look like the floor of an ocean steamship pier on the arrival of a
+big liner, only instead of being snowed under by a mass of shirts,
+trousers, Paris-made revelations in chiffons, silks, and brocades,
+necklaces, tiaras, pearl ropes, snipped aigrettes, and snowy drifts of
+indescribable, but in these free days no longer unmentionable, lingerie,
+it will be piled high with steel bonds, New Haven deferred dividends,
+sinking fund debenture certificates, government five eighths per cent.
+bonds, certificates of deposit, miscellaneous stocks, mining,
+industrial, railway, gilt-edged and wildcat, in one red unburial blent;
+while the poor owner, fearful lest in the excitement of the ordeal he
+may have neglected to mention some insignificant item of a million or
+two in Standard Oil, will sit by and sweat as the inspector tears his
+ruthless way through his accumulated stores for wealth."
+
+"It will be almost enough to make a man sorry he's rich," said the
+Doctor.
+
+"Oh, no," said the Idiot, "for the rest of us will be in the same
+pickle, only in a more humiliating position as the intruder reveals that
+the sum total of out lifetime of endeavor consists chiefly in unpaid
+bills labeled Please Remit. The Custom House inspectors are harder on
+the man with nothing to declare than they are on those whose boxes are
+full. They slam their things all over creation, and insult the owner
+with the same abandon with which they greet a recognized past-mistress
+in the arts of smuggling. Innocence is no protection when a Custom House
+inspector gets after you, and it will be the same way with the new
+kind. None of us can hope to escape. The income tax inspectors will come
+here just as eagerly as they will go to that palatial mausoleum in which
+Mr. Rockernegie dwells on the corner of Bond Avenue and Easy Street, and
+they'll rummage through our trunks, boxes, and bureaus in search of such
+interest-bearing securities as they may suspect us of trying to get by
+with. Mr. Bib will have to dump his bureau drawer full of red neckties
+out on the floor to prove to Uncle Sam's satisfaction that he hasn't got
+a fourteen-million-dollar bond issue concealed somewhere behind their
+lurid glow. The Doctor will have to sit patiently by and unprotestingly
+watch the inspectors going through the pockets of his unrivaled
+collection of fancy waist-coats in a heart-breaking quest for undeclared
+interests in mining enterprises and popular cemeteries. Trunks, chests,
+hatboxes, soapboxes, pillboxes, safety razor boxes--in fact, all kinds
+of receptacles in this house, from Mrs. Pedagog's ice chest to Mr.
+Whitechoker's barrel of sermons--will be compelled to disgorge their
+uttermost content in order to satisfy the government sleuths that we who
+dwell in this Palace of Truth, Joy, and Waffles, have not a controlling
+interest in Standard Oil hidden away lest we be compelled to pay our due
+to the treasury."
+
+"You don't mean to say that the law so provides, do you?" said the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Not yet," said the Idiot, "but it will--it's bound to come. In the very
+nature of the beast it is inevitable. There never was a tax yet that
+found a warm spot awaiting it in the hearts of its countrymen. The human
+mind with all its diabolical ingenuity has never yet been able to
+devise a tax that somebody somewhere--nay, that most people
+everywhere--did not try to dodge, and to catch the dodgers the
+government is compelled to view everybody with suspicion, and treat hoi
+polloi from top to bottom as if they were nothing more nor less than a
+lot of unregenerate pickpockets, horse-thieves, and pastmasters in the
+gentle art of mendacity."
+
+"Frightful!" said Mr. Whitechoker. "And is not a man's word to be taken
+as a guarantee of the accuracy of his return?"
+
+"Not so's anybody would notice it," grinned the Idiot. "When the
+government finds it necessary to nab leaders of fashionable society for
+trying to smuggle in one-hundred-thousand-dollar pearl necklaces by
+sewing them up in the lining of their hats, and to fine the most
+eminently respectable citizens in the country as much as five thousand
+dollars for returning from abroad portly with five or six-hundred yards
+of undeclared lace wound inadvertently about their stomachs, having in
+the excitement of their homecoming put it on in the place of the little
+flannel bands they have worn to ward off cholera and other pleasing
+foreign maladies, it loses some of its confidence in human nature, and
+acquires some of that penetrating inquisitiveness of mind which is said
+to be characteristic of the native of Missouri. It wants to be shown,
+and if the income tax remains in force, we might as well make up our
+minds that the inquisitorial inspector will soon be added to the
+official pay roll of the United States of America."
+
+"But," protested the Bibliomaniac, "that will be a plain common-garden
+espionage of so intolerable a nature that no self-respecting free people
+will submit to it. It will be an abominable intrusion upon our rights
+of privacy."
+
+The Idiot laughed long and loud.
+
+"It seems to me," said he, after a moment, "that when Colonel John W.
+Midas, of the International Hickory Nut Trust, advanced that same
+objection against the proposed tax a year or so ago, Mr. Bib, you sat in
+that very same chair where you are now and vociferously announced that
+there was nothing in it."
+
+"Oh, but that's different," said the Bibliomaniac. "Midas is a rich man,
+and I am not."
+
+"Well, I suppose there is a difference between a prune and a Canadian
+melon, old man, but after all, they're both fruit, and when it comes to
+being squeezed, I guess it hurts a lemon just as much as it does a lime.
+I, for one, however, do not fear the inspector. My securities are
+exempt, for they all pay their tax at the source."
+
+"What are they, coupon bonds?" grinned the Lawyer.
+
+"No," said the Idiot; "pawn tickets, interest on which is always paid in
+advance."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A PSYCHIC VENTURE
+
+
+"I beg your pardon, Doctor," said the Idiot, as he laid aside his
+morning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon the
+breakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-class home for single
+gentlemen. "I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissful
+intercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in the
+Waffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karat
+psychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I need
+one in my business."
+
+"Sike whats?" queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting a
+sizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.
+
+"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, a
+medium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business,
+who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again."
+
+"H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor.
+
+"Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot in
+double harness?"
+
+"Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said the
+Doctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in
+all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found
+those I know wholly reliable."
+
+"You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't
+looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a
+chance?" said the Idiot.
+
+"That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A man
+may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and
+absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet
+when he goes off, er--when he goes off--"
+
+"Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good title for a story
+that--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?"
+
+"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he
+goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so
+reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant
+patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as
+psychlists."
+
+"That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I can
+be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other
+respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."
+
+"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance."
+
+"What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?"
+asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of
+pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers
+now passed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?"
+
+"Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider their
+utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into
+communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get
+anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink
+pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I
+didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of
+climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed
+his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else.
+I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of
+ear-tabs and a fur overcoat."
+
+"And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniac
+scornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-day
+Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him
+by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his
+countrymen?"
+
+"I've only seen one message from Jefferson," said the Idiot, "and it
+seemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up in
+Schenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz--whizz--whizz,
+buzz--buzz--buzz, whizz--whizz--whizz!' Lots of people considered it
+drivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance."
+
+"Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can," said the
+Bibliomaniac. "The idea that the greatest political thinker of the ages
+could stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous."
+
+"Not at all," said the Idiot. "You have not the understanding mind.
+Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapidity
+with which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as he
+realized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political belief
+were putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple old
+Democrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit of
+entomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums of
+his native land."
+
+"Pouf!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You are a reactionary, Sir."
+
+"Ubetcha," said the Idiot. "First principles first, say I. But to come
+back to clairvoyants. I am very anxious to get hold of a medium, Doctor,
+and the sooner the better. I'm going to give up Wall Street. I can't
+afford to stay there any longer unless I move out of this restful
+paradise of food and thought and take up my abode in a Mills Hotel, or
+charter a bench in the park from the city. The only business we had in
+our office last week was a game of poker between the firm and its
+employes, and the firm tided itself over the emergency by winning my
+salary for the next six weeks. Another week of such activity would
+prostrate me financially, and I am going to open a literary bureau to
+deal in posthumous literature."
+
+"Posthumous literature is the curse of letters," said the Bibliomaniac.
+"It generally means the publication of the rejected, or personally
+discarded, manuscripts of a dead author, which results in the serious
+impairment of the quality of his laurels. It ought to be made a
+misdemeanor to print the stuff."
+
+"I agree with you entirely as to that, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "This
+business of emptying the pigeonholes of deceased scribes, and printing
+every last scrap of scribbling to be found there, whether they intended
+it to be printed or not, is reprehensible, and I for one would gladly
+advocate a law requiring executors of a literary estate to burn all
+unpublished manuscripts found among the decedent's papers merely as a
+matter of protection to a great name. But it isn't that kind of
+posthumous production that I am going in for. It's the production
+posthumously produced that I am after, and I need a first-class medium
+as a side partner to get hold of the stuff for me."
+
+"Preposterous!" sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's a
+lady over in England has recently published a book of short stories by
+the late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted to
+the world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, I
+don't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, and
+others, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get up
+a posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity."
+
+"I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall do
+will be to send the lady after Charles Dickens and good old Thackeray,
+and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences,
+and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself with
+just taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply them
+with subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definite
+policy.
+
+"Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could do
+with little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results would
+come from turning Dickens loose on the underworld, and setting
+Thackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! If
+there ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another
+'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I can
+hardly sleep nights for thinking about it."
+
+"I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quite
+perfect as it is."
+
+"No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. For
+example, think of a scene described by Dickens in which Fagin, now
+become a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takes
+little Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunman
+out of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of an
+electric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly moving
+platform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes so
+expert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they pass, missing the
+twentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man Fagin
+wants to scare and not kill.
+
+"Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle and
+expose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisite
+dullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man on
+the outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with the
+sounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he is
+writing about! Great heavens--the idea makes my mouth water!"
+
+"That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how are
+you going to get the facts over to Dickens and Thackeray?"
+
+"I shall not need to," said the Idiot. "All they'll have to do will be
+to project themselves in spirit over here into the very midst of the
+scenes to be described. As spirits they will have the entree into any
+old kind of society they wish to investigate, and in that respect they
+will have the advantage over us poor mortals who can't go anywhere
+without having to take our confounded old bodies along with us. Then
+after I had arranged matters with Dickens and Thackeray, I'd send my
+psychic representative after Alexander Dumas, and get him to write a
+sequel to 'The Three Musketeers', and 'Twenty Years After', which I
+should call 'Two Hundred and Ninety Years After, a Romance of 1916', in
+which D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should return to modern
+times and try their hands on trench work, introducing the aeroplane, the
+submarine, and all the other appurtenances of war, from the militant
+brick to the dynamite bomb. Why, a good, rip-staving old Dumas tale of
+adventure of to-day, with those old heroes of his mixed up with the
+Militant Suffragettes and the Crown Prince of Germany, would be what old
+Doctor Johnson would have called a cracker-jack, if he had had the
+slightest conception of the possibilities of the English language."
+
+"Wouldn't interest me in the least," said the Bibliomaniac coldly, "If
+there is anything under the canopy that I despise it is so-called
+romance. Now, if you could get hold of some of the solider things, such,
+for instance, as Macaulay might write, or"--
+
+"Ah!" said the Idiot, triumphantly, "it is there that my scheme would
+work out most beneficently. My special articles on historic events by
+personal participators would thrill the world.
+
+"From Adam I would secure the first and only authentic account of the
+Fall, with possibly an expression of his opinion as to the validity of
+the Darwinian theory. From Noah, aided and abetted by Shem, Ham, and
+Japhet, would come a series of sea stories narrating in thrilling style
+the story of The Flood, or How We Landed the Zoo on Ararat. A line or
+two from Balaam's Ass on the subject of modern Socialism would fill the
+reading world with wonder. A series of papers specially prepared for a
+woman's magazine by Henry VIII. on 'Wild Wives I Have Wedded', edited,
+possibly, with copious footnotes by Brigham Young, would bring fortune
+to the pockets of the publishers.
+
+"And then the poets--ah, Mr. Bib, what treasures of poesy would this
+plan of mine not bring within our reach! Dante could write a new
+'Inferno' introducing a new torture in the form of Satan compelling a
+Member of Congress to explain the Tariff bill. Homer could sing the
+sufferings and triumphs of arctic exploration in a new epic entitled
+'The Chilliad', or possibly expend his genius upon the story of the rise
+and fall of Bryan in immortal periods under the title of 'The
+Billiad'"--
+
+"Or describe your progressive idiocy under the title of 'The Silliad!'"
+put in the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Ubetcha!" cried the Idiot. "Or tell the sad tale of your life under the
+title of 'The Seniliad.' And in addition to these wonders, who can
+estimate to what extent we should all profit were our more serious
+reviews to secure articles from Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and old
+Ben Franklin on the present state of the nation! Why, an article
+dictated off-hand by the shade of Lincoln on the thousands who are now
+flattering themselves that they occupy his shoes, illustrated with those
+apt anecdotes of which he was a master, and pointed with his gloriously
+dry humor, under the title of 'Later Links', would alone make the
+venture worth while, even if nothing else came of it."
+
+"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, rising, "perhaps there is something
+in the idea after all, and I wish you success, Mr. Idiot--and, by the
+way, if the scheme works out as you expect it to, and you happen to come
+across old AEsculapius, ask him for me for an authoritative statement of
+the origin and proper treatment of idiocy, will you?"
+
+"Sure," said the Idiot, turning to his breakfast, "but it really isn't
+necessary to do that, Mr. Bib. Our good old friend, the Doctor here, is
+quite capable of curing you at any time you consent to put yourself
+unreservedly in his hands."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION
+
+
+"I see by the paper this morning," said the Idiot, as he put three lumps
+of sugar into his pocket and absent-mindedly dropped his eyeglasses into
+his coffee, "that, thanks to the industry of our Medical Schools and
+Colleges, the world is richer by thirty thousand new doctors to-day than
+it was yesterday. How does the law of supply and demand work in cases of
+that kind, Doctor Squills?"
+
+"Badly--very badly, indeed," said the Doctor, with a gloomy shake of his
+head. "The profession is sadly overcrowded, and mighty few of us are
+making more than a bare living."
+
+"I was afraid that was the case," said the Idiot sympathetically. "I was
+talking with a prominent surgeon at the Club the other night, and he was
+terribly upset over the situation. He intimated that we have been
+ruthlessly squandering our natural internal resources almost as
+riotously and as blindly as our lumbermen have been destroying the
+natural physical resources of the country. He assured me that he himself
+had reached a point in his career where there was hardly a vermiform
+appendix left in sight, and where five years ago he was chopping down
+not less than four of these a day for six days of the week at a thousand
+dollars per, it was now a lucky time for him when he got his pruning
+knife off the hook once a month."
+
+"That vermiform appendix craze was all a fad anyhow," said the
+Bibliomaniac sourly. "Like the tango, and bridge, and golf, and
+slumming, and all the rest of those things that Society takes up, and
+then drops all of a sudden like a hot stick. It looked at one time as if
+nobody could hope to get into society who hadn't had his vermiform
+removed."
+
+"Well, social fad or not," said the Idiot, "whatever it was, there is no
+question about it that serious inroads have been made upon what we may
+call our vermiforests, and unless something is done to protect them, by
+George, in a few years we won't have any left except a few stuffed
+specimens down in the Smithsonian Institution.
+
+"I asked my friend Doctor Cuttem why he didn't call for a Vermiform
+Conservation Congress to see what can be done either to prevent this
+ruthless sacrifice of a product that if suitably safeguarded should
+supply ourselves, and our children, and our children's children to the
+uttermost posterity, with ample appendicular resources for the
+maintenance in good style of a reasonable number of surgeons; or to
+re-seed scientifically where the unscientific destruction of these
+resources is uncontrollable. How about that, Doctor? Suppose you remove
+a man's vermiform appendix--is there any system of medical, or surgical,
+fertilization and replanting that would cause two vermiforms to grow
+where only one grew before, so that sooner or later every human interior
+may become a sort of garden-close, where one can go and pluck a handful
+of vermiform appendices every morning, like so many hardy perennials in
+full bloom?"
+
+"I'm afraid not," smiled the Doctor.
+
+"Anybody but the Idiot would know that it couldn't be done," said the
+Bibliomaniac, "because if it could be done it would have been done long
+ago. When you find men successfully transplanting rabbits' tails on
+monkeys, and frogs' legs on canary birds, you can make up your mind that
+if it were within the range of human possibility they would by this time
+have vermiform appendices sprouting lushly in geranium pots for
+insertion into the systems of persons desiring luxuries of that sort."
+
+"You mustn't sneer at the achievements of modern surgery, Mr. Bib," said
+the Idiot. "There is no telling how soon any one of us may need to avail
+himself of its benefits. Who knows--maybe a surgeon will come along some
+day who will be able to implant a sense of humor in you, to gladden all
+your days."
+
+"Preposterous!" snapped the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Well, it does seem unlikely," said the Idiot, "but I know of a young
+doctor who without any previous experience planted a little heart in a
+frigid Suffragette; and though I know the soil is not propitious, even
+you may sometime be blossoming luxuriantly within with buds of cheer and
+sweet optimism. But however this may be, it is the unquestioned and sad
+fact that a once profitable industry for our surgically-inclined
+brothers has slumped; and they tell me that even those surgeons who have
+adopted modern commercial methods, and give away a set of Rudyard
+Kipling's Works and a year's subscription to the _Commoner_ with every
+vermiform removed, are making less than a thousand dollars a week out of
+that branch of their work."
+
+"Mercy!" cried the Poet. "What couldn't I do if I had a thousand dollars
+a week!"
+
+"You could afford to write real poetry all the time, instead of only
+half the time, eh, old man?" said the Idiot affectionately. "But don't
+you mind. We're all in the same boat. I'd be an infinitely bigger idiot
+myself if I had half as much money as that."
+
+"Impossible!" said the Bibliomaniac, chuckling over his opportunity.
+
+"Green-eyed monster!" smiled the Idiot. "But speaking of this
+overcrowding of the profession, it is a surprise to me, Doctor, that so
+many young men are taking up medicine these days, when competent
+observers everywhere tell us that the world is getting better all the
+time.
+
+"If that is true, and the world really is getting better all the time,
+it is fair to assume that some day it will be entirely well, and then,
+let me ask you, what is to become of all the doctors? It will not be a
+good thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an army
+of unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made up
+as it will be of highly intelligent but desperately hungry men, face to
+face with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medical
+diploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the whole
+range of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussic
+acid and cyanide of potassium.
+
+"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with a
+grin at the Doctor.
+
+"Shudder isn't the word!" said the Idiot. "The bare idea makes my flesh
+creep like a Philadelphia trolley car! Coxey's Army was bad enough, made
+up as it was of a poor, miserable lot of tramps and panhandlers, all so
+unused to labor as to be really jobshy; but in their most riotous moods
+the worst those poor chaps could do was to heave a few bricks or a dead
+cat through a millinery shop window, or perhaps bat a village magnate on
+the back of the head with a bed slat. There was nothing insidiously
+subtle about the warfare they waged upon Society.
+
+"But suppose that, laboring under a smarting sense of similar wrongs,
+there should come to be such a thing as old Doctor Pepsin's Army of
+Unemployed Physicians and Surgeons, marching through the country, headed
+for the White House in order to make an impressive public demonstration
+of their grievances! What a peril to the body politic that would be! Not
+only could the surgeons waylay the village magnates and amputate their
+legs, and seize hostile editors and cut off the finger with which they
+run their typewriting machines, and point with alarm with; but the more
+insidious means of upsetting the public weal by pouring calomel into our
+wells, putting castor oil in our reservoirs, leaving cholera germs and
+typhoid cultures under our door mats, or transferring a pair of
+jackass's legs to the hind-quarters of an old family horse, found
+grazing in the pasture, would transform a once smiling countryside into
+a scene of misery and desolation."
+
+"Poor, poor Dobbin!" murmured the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"Indeed, Mr. Bib, it will be poor, poor Dobbin!" said the Idiot. "I
+don't think that many people besides you and myself realize how
+desperately serious a menace it is that hangs over us; and I feel that
+one of the first acts of the Administration, after it has succeeded in
+putting grape juice into the Constitution as our national tipple, and
+constructed a solid Portland cement wall across the Vice President's
+thorax to insure that promised four years of silence, should be an
+effort to control this terrible situation."
+
+"You talk as if it could be done," said the Doctor doubtfully.
+
+"Of course it can be done," said the Idiot. "Doctors being engaged in
+Inter-State Commerce--"
+
+"Doctors? Interstate Commerce?" cried Mr. Brief. "That's a new one on
+me, Mr. Idiot. Everybody is apparently in Interstate Commerce in your
+opinion. Seems to me it was only the other day that you spoke of
+Clairvoyants being in it."
+
+"Sure," said the Idiot. "And it's the same way with the doctors. In
+ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where a man passes from this state
+into the future state, you'll find a doctor mixed up in it somewhere,
+even if it's only as a coroner. This being so, it would be perfectly
+proper to refer the matter to the Interstate Commerce Commission for a
+solution.
+
+"Anyhow, something ought to be done to handle the situation while the
+menace is in its infancy. We need the ounce of prevention. Now, my
+suggestion would be that the law should step in and either place a limit
+to the number of doctors to be turned out annually, on a basis of so
+many doctors to so many hundreds of population--say three doctors to
+every hundred people--just as in certain communities the excise law
+allows only one saloon for every thousand registered voters; or else,
+since the State permits medical schools to operate under a charter,
+authorizing them to manufacture physicians and surgeons ad lib., and
+turn them loose on the public, the State should provide work for these
+doctors to do.
+
+"To this end we might have, for instance, a Bureau of Disease
+Dissemination, subject perhaps to the jurisdiction of the Secretary of
+the Interior, under whose direction, acting in cooeperation with the
+Department of Agriculture, every package of seeds sent out by a
+Congressman to his constituents would have a sprinkling of germs of one
+kind or another mixed in with the seeds, thus spreading little epidemics
+of comparatively harmless disorders like the mumps, the measles, or the
+pip, around in various over-healthy communities where the doctors were
+in danger of going over the hill to the poorhouse. Surely if we are
+justified in making special efforts to help the farmers we ought not to
+hesitate to do the doctors a good turn once in a while."
+
+"You think the public would stand for that, do you?" queried the
+Bibliomaniac scornfully.
+
+"Oh, the public is always inhospitable to new ideas at first," said the
+Idiot, "but after a while they get so attached to them that you have to
+start an entirely new political party to prove that they are
+reactionary. But, as the Poet says,
+
+  "Into all lives some mumps must fall,
+
+"and the sooner we get 'em over with the better. If the public once
+wakes up to the fact that the measles and the mumps are as inevitable as
+a coal bill in winter, or an ice bill in summer, it will cheerfully
+indorse a Federal Statute which enables us to have these things promptly
+and be done with 'em. It's like any other disagreeable thing in life. As
+old Colonel Macbeth used to say to that dear old Suffragette wife of
+his,
+
+  "If 'twere done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
+  It were done quickly.
+
+"It's like taking a cold bath in the morning. You don't mind it at all
+if you jump in in a hurry and then jump out again.
+
+"But even if the public didn't take that sensible view of it, we have
+legislative methods by which the thing could be brought about without
+the public knowing anything about it. For instance, supposing somebody
+in Congress were to introduce an innocent little bill appropriating five
+hundred thousand dollars, for the erection of a residence for a United
+States Ambassador to the Commonwealth of California, for the avowed
+object of keeping somebody in San Francisco to see that Governor Johnson
+didn't declare war on Japan without due notice to the Navy Department,
+what could be simpler than the insertion in that bill of a little joker
+providing that from the date of the enactment of this statute the
+Department of Agriculture is authorized and required to expend the sum
+of twenty thousand dollars annually on the dissemination, through
+Congressional seed packages, of not less than one ounce per package of
+germs of assorted infantile and other comparatively harmless disorders,
+for the benefit of the medical profession? Taxidermists tell us that
+there are more ways than one to skin a cat, and the same is true of
+legislation.
+
+"There's only one other way that I can see to bring the desired
+condition about, and that is to permit physicians to operate under the
+same system of ethics as that to be found in the plumbing business. If a
+plumber is allowed, as he is allowed in the present state of public
+morality, to repair a leak in such a fashion to-day that new business
+immediately and automatically develops requiring his attention
+to-morrow, I see no reason why doctors should not be permitted to do the
+same thing. Called in to repair a mump, let him leave a measle behind.
+The measle cured, a few chicken-pox left carelessly about where they
+will do the most good will insure his speedy return; and so on. Every
+physician could in this way take care of himself, and by a skilful
+manipulation of the germs within his reach should have no difficulty not
+only in holding but in increasing his legitimate business as well."
+
+"Ugh!" shuddered Mrs. Pedagog. "You almost make me afraid to let the
+Doctor stay in this house a day longer."
+
+"Don't be afraid, Madame," said the Doctor amiably. "After all, I'm a
+doctor, you know, and not a plumber."
+
+"I'll guarantee his absolute harmlessness, Mrs. Pedagog," said the
+Idiot. "We're perfectly safe here. It is no temptation to a doctor to
+sow the germs of disorder among people like ourselves who have reduced
+getting free medical advice to a system."
+
+"Well," said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, "your plan is all right for the
+doctors, but why the Dickens don't somebody suggest something for us
+lawyers once in awhile? There were seventy thousand new lawyers turned
+out yesterday, and you haven't even peeped."
+
+"No," said the Idiot, "it isn't necessary. You lawyers are well provided
+for. With one National Congress, and forty-eight separate State
+Legislatures working twenty-four hours a day, turning out fifty-seven
+new varieties of law every fifteen minutes, all so phrased that no human
+mind can translate them into simple English, there's enough trouble
+constantly on hand to keep twenty million lawyers busy for thirty
+million years, telling us not what we can't do, but what few things
+there are left under the canopy that a man of religious inclinations can
+do without danger of arrest!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY
+
+
+"Well, Mr. Idiot," said the Doctor, as the Idiot with sundry comments on
+the top-loftical condition of the thermometer fanned his fevered brow
+with a tablespoon, "I suppose in view of the hot weather you will be
+taking a vacation very shortly."
+
+"Not only very shortly, but excessively shortly," returned the Idiot.
+"Its shortliness will be of so brief a nature that nobody'll notice any
+vacant chairs around where I am accustomed to sit. But let me tell you,
+Dr. Squills, it is too hot for sarcasm, so withhold your barbs as far
+as I am concerned, and believe me always very truly yours, Nicholas J.
+Doodlepate."
+
+"Sarcasm?" said the Doctor in a surprised tone. "Why, my dear fellow, I
+wasn't sarcastic, was I? I am sure I didn't mean to be."
+
+"To the listener's ear it seemed so," said the Idiot. "There seemed to
+me to be traces of the alkali of irony mixed in with the tincture of
+derision in that question of yours. When you ask a Wall Street man who
+declines to carry speculation accounts these days if he isn't going to
+take a vacation shortly, it is like asking a resident of the Desert of
+Sahara why he doesn't sprinkle a little sand around his place.
+
+"Life on Wall Street for my kind, my good sir, of late has been just one
+darned vacation after another. The only business I have done in three
+months was to lend one of our customers a nickel, taking a subway
+ticket and a baseball rain check as collateral security."
+
+The Idiot shook his head ruefully and heaved a heart-rending sigh.
+
+"What we cautious Wall Street fellows need," said he, "is not a
+VA-cation, but a VO-cation."
+
+"Oh, well, a man of your fertility of invention ought not to have any
+trouble about that," said Mr. Brief. "You should be able without killing
+yourself to think up some new kind of trade that will keep you busy
+until the snow-shoveling season begins anyhow."
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot. "Ordinary by the exercise of some ingenuity and
+the use of these two brazen cheeks with which nature has endowed me, I
+can always manage to pull something resembling a living out of a
+reluctant earth. If a man slips up on being a Captain of Industry he can
+lecture on a sight-seeing coach, or if that fails him under present
+conditions in this old town, by a little economy he can live on his
+tips."
+
+"And at the worst," said the Bibliomaniac, "you always have Mrs. Pedagog
+to fall back on."
+
+"Yes," said the Idiot. "The state of my bill at this very moment shows
+that I have credit enough with Mrs. Pedagog to start three national
+banks and a trust company. But, fortunately for me, I don't have to do
+either. I have found my opportunity lying before me in the daily
+newspapers, and I am about to start a new enterprise which is not only
+going to pull a large and elegant series of chestnuts out of the fire
+for me but for all my subscribers as well. If I can find a good lawyer
+somewhere to draw up the papers of incorporation for my United States
+Telephonic Aid Society, I'll start in business this very morning at the
+nearest pay station."
+
+"If you want a good lawyer, what's the matter with me?" asked Mr. Brief.
+
+"I never was any good at riddles," said the Idiot, "and that one is too
+subtle for me. If I want a good lawyer, what is the matter with you? Ha!
+Hum! Well, I give it up, but I'm willing to be what the ancients used to
+call the Goat. If I want a good lawyer, Brudder Bones, what IS the
+matter with you? I ask the question--what's the answer?"
+
+"I don't know," grinned the Lawyer.
+
+"Well, I guess that's it," said the Idiot. "If I want a good lawyer I
+want one who does know."
+
+"But what's this new society going to do?" interrupted the Poet. "I am
+particularly interested in any sort of a scheme that is going to make
+you rich without forgetting me. If there's any pipe-line to prosperity,
+hurry up and let me know before it is too late."
+
+"Why, it is simplicity itself," said the Idiot. "The U. S. Telephonic
+Aid Society is designed to carry First Aid to the Professionally
+Injured. You have doubtless read recently in the newspapers how Damon, a
+retired financier, desirous of helping his old friend Pythias, an
+equally retired attorney, back into his quondam practice--please excuse
+that word quondam, Mrs. Pedagog; it isn't half as profane as it
+sounds--went to the telephone and impersonating J. Mulligatawny Solon,
+Member of Congress from the Chillicothe District, rang up Midas,
+Croesus, and Dives, the eminent bankers, and recommended Pythias as
+the only man this side of the planet Mars who could stave off the
+ruthless destruction of their interests by an uncontrolled body of
+lawmakers."
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Brief. "I read all that, and it was almost as unreal as
+a page out of the Arabian Nights."
+
+"Wasn't it!" said the Idiot. "And yet how simple! Well, that's my scheme
+in a nutshell, only I am going to do the thing as a pure matter of
+business, and not merely to show the purity of my affection for any
+Pythian dependent.
+
+"To show just how the plan will work under my supervision let us take
+your case first, Mr. Poet. Here you are this morning with your board
+bill already passed to its third reading, with Mrs. Pedagog tacking
+amendments on to the end of it with every passing day. Unfortunately for
+you in your emergent hour, the editors either view your manuscripts with
+suspicion or, what is more likely, refuse to look at them at all. They
+care nothing for your aspirations or your inspirations.
+
+"Your immediate prospect holds nothing in sight save the weary parcel
+postman, with his bent form, delivering daily at your door eleven-pound
+packages of unappreciated sonnets. You do not dare think on the morrow,
+what ye shall eat, and wherewithal shall ye be clothed, because no man
+liveth who can purchase the necessities of life with rejection
+slips--those checks on the Banks of Ambition, payable in the editors'
+regrets."
+
+"By George," blurted the Poet feelingly, "you're dead right about that,
+old man. If editors' regrets were legal tender, I could pay off the
+national debt."
+
+"Precisely," said the Idiot. "And it is just here, my dear friend, that
+the U. S. Telephonic Aid Society rushes to your assistance. Your case is
+brought to the society's attention, and I, as President, Secretary,
+Treasurer, and General Manager of the institution, look into the matter
+at once.
+
+"I find your work meritorious. No editor has ever rejected it because it
+lacked literary merit. He even goes so far as to print a statement of
+that fact upon the slip he sends back with it on its homeward journey.
+Like most other poets you need a little food once in awhile. A roof to
+cover your head is essential to your health, and under the existing laws
+of society you simply must wear clothes when you appear in public, and
+it becomes the Society's worthy job to aid you in getting all these
+things.
+
+"So we close a contract providing that for ten dollars down and fifteen
+per cent. of the gross future receipts, I, or the Society, agree to
+secure the publication of your sonnets, rondeaux, limericks, and
+triolets in the Hyperion Magazine."
+
+"That would be bully if you could only pull it off," said the Poet,
+falling naturally into the terminology of Milton. "But I don't just see
+how you're going to turn the trick."
+
+"On the regular 'Damon and Pythias' principle, as set forth in the
+newspapers," said the Idiot. "Immediately the contract between us is
+signed, I rush to the nearest pay station and ring up the editor of the
+Hyperion Magazine, and when I get him on the line we converse as
+follows:
+
+     "Me--Is this the editor of the Hyperion Magazine?
+
+     "Editor--Ubetcha. Who are you?
+
+     "Me--I'm President Wilson, down at the White House.
+
+     "Editor--Glad to hear from you, Mr. President. Got any more
+     of that new Freedom stuff on hand? We are thinking of
+     running a Department of Humor in the Hyperion, and with a
+     little editing I think we could use a couple of carloads of
+     it.
+
+     "Me--Why, yes, Mr. Bluepencil. I think I have a bale or two
+     of remnants in cold storage down at Trenton. But really that
+     isn't what I am after this morning. I wanted to say to you
+     officially, but confidentially, of course, that my
+     Ambassador to Great Britain has just cabled his resignation
+     to the State Department. What with a little breakfast he
+     gave last week to the President of France and his tips at
+     his own presentation to the King, he has already spent four
+     years' salary, and he does not feel that he can afford to
+     stay over there much after the first of September.
+
+     "Editor--I'm on. I getcha.
+
+     "Me--Now, of course, I've got to fill his place right away,
+     and it struck me that you were just the man for the job. In
+     the first place you are tolerably familiar with the language
+     they speak in and about the Court of St. James's. I am told
+     by mutual friends that you eat peas with a fork, can use a
+     knife without cutting your lip, and have an intuitive
+     apprehension of the subtle distinctions between a
+     finger-bowl and a sauterne glass. It has also been brought
+     to my attention that your advertising pages have for years
+     been consistent advocates, in season and out, of the use of
+     grape juice as a refreshing beverage for nervous
+     Ambassadors.
+
+     "Editor--That's right, Mr. President.
+
+     "Me--Well, of course, all of this makes you unquestionably
+     _persona grata_ to us, and I think it should make you a
+     novel and interesting feature of diplomatic life along
+     Piccadilly.
+
+     "Editor--It sounds good to me, Mr. President.
+
+     "Me--Now to come to the difficulties in our way--and that is
+     what I have rung you up to talk about. There seems to be but
+     one serious objection to your appointment, Mr. Bluepencil.
+     At a Cabinet meeting called yesterday to discuss the matter,
+     Mr. McAdoo expressed the fear that if you go away for four
+     years the quality of the poetry in the Hyperion Magazine
+     will fall off. In this contention, Mr. McAdoo was supported
+     by the Secretary of Agriculture, whose name escapes me at
+     this moment, with the Postmaster General and the Secretary
+     of War on the fence. Mr. Daniels was not present, having
+     gone West to launch a battleship at Omaha. But in any event
+     there is where the matter rests at this moment.
+
+     "For my own part, however, after giving the matter prayerful
+     consideration, I think I can see a way out. The whole
+     Cabinet is very much interested in the poems of Willie
+     Wimpleton Spondy, the boy Watson. McAdoo is constantly
+     quoting from him. The Postmaster General has even gone so
+     far as to advocate the extension of the franking privilege
+     to him, and as for myself, I have made it a practice for the
+     last five years to begin every day by reciting one of his
+     limericks before my assembled family.
+
+     "Editor--I never heard of the boob.
+
+     "Me--Well, you hear of him now, and the whole thing comes
+     down to this: Mr. Spondy will call at your office with a
+     couple of bales of his stuff at ten o'clock to-morrow
+     morning, and you might have something besides a pink
+     rejection slip dripping with regrets ready for him. I don't
+     know what his rates are, but his stuff runs about ninety
+     pounds to the bale, and what that comes to at fifty per you
+     can figure out for yourself.
+
+     "Editor--How does Champ Clark stand on this thing?
+
+     "Me--He and Tommie Marshall are with us to the last
+     tintinnabulation of the gong.
+
+     "Editor--Then I am to understand just what, Mr. President?
+
+     "Me--That you don't go to England on our account until we
+     are absolutely assured beyond peradvanture that there will
+     be no deterioration in the quality of Hyperion poetry during
+     your absence.
+
+     "Editor--All right. Send the guy around this afternoon. He
+     can send the bale by slow freight. We always pay in advance
+     anyhow."
+
+The Idiot paused to take breath.
+
+"Then what?" asked the Poet dubiously.
+
+"You go around and get what's coming to you," said the Idiot. "Or
+perhaps it would be better to send a messenger boy for it. The more
+impersonal we make this business the better."
+
+"I see," said the Poet dejectedly. "But even at that, Mr. Idiot, when
+the Hyperion man doesn't get the Ambassadorship, won't he sue me to
+recover?"
+
+"Oh, well," said the Idiot wearily, "you've got to assume some of the
+burdens of the business yourself. We can't do it all, you know. But
+suppose they do sue you? You never heard of a magazine recovering
+anything from a poet, did you? You'd get a heap of free advertising out
+of such a lawsuit, and if you were canny enough to put out a book of
+your verses while the newspapers were full of it, they'd go off like hot
+cakes, and you could retire with a cool million."
+
+"And where do I come in?" asked the Doctor. "Don't I get any of these
+plums of prosperity your Telephonic Aid Society is to place within the
+reach of all?"
+
+"On payment of the fee of ten dollars, and signing the regular
+contract," said the Idiot. "I'll do my best for you. In your case I
+should impersonate our good old friend Andrew Rockernegie. Acting in
+that capacity I would ring up Mr. John D. Reddymun, and you'd hear
+something like this:
+
+     "Me--Hello, Reddy--is this you?
+
+     "Reddymun--Yes. Who's this?
+
+     "Me--This is Uncle Andy. How's the leg this morning?
+
+     "Reddymun--Oh, so so.
+
+     "Me--Everybody pulling it, I suppose?
+
+     "Reddymun--About the same as usual. It's curious, Andrew,
+     how many people are attached to my limb, and how few are
+     attached to me.
+
+     "Me--Yes, it's a cold and cruel world, John. But I'm
+     through. I've found the way out. They'll never pull my leg
+     again.
+
+     "Reddymun--By George, old man, I wish I could say as much.
+
+     "Me--Well, you can if you'll only do what I did.
+
+     "Reddymun--What's that?
+
+     "Me--Had it cut off.
+
+     "Reddymun--No!
+
+     "Me--Yep!
+
+     "Reddymun--When?
+
+     "Me--Just now.
+
+     "Reddymun--Hurt?
+
+     "Me--Never knew what was happening.
+
+     "Reddymun--Who did it?
+
+     "Me--Old Doctor Squills. He charged me ten thousand dollars
+     for the job, but I figure it out that it has saved me six
+     hundred and thirty three million dollars.
+
+     "Reddymun--Send him around, will you?
+
+     "Me--Ubetcha!"
+
+"And then?" said the Doctor.
+
+"And then?" echoed the Idiot. "Well, if you don't know what you would
+do if you were offered ten thousand dollars to cut a man's leg off I
+can't teach you, but I have one piece of advice to give you. When you
+get the order don't go around there with a case full of teaspoons and
+soup-ladles, when all you need is a good sharp carving knife to land you
+in the lap of luxury!"
+
+"And do you men think for one single moment," cried the Landlady, "that
+all this would be honest business?"
+
+"Well, in the very nature of the case it would be a trifle 'phoney',"
+said the Idiot, "but what can a man do these days, with his bills
+getting bigger and bigger every day?"
+
+"I'd leave 'em unpaid first!" sniffed the Landlady contemptuously.
+
+"Oh, very well," smiled the Idiot. "With your permission, ma'am, we
+will. You don't know what a load you have taken off my mind."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FOR TIRED BUSINESS MEN
+
+
+"Poor old Binks!" said the Idiot sympathetically, as he put down a
+letter just received from his friend and turned his attention to the
+waffles. "He's spending the good old Summer time in a sanitarium, just
+because he thinks he's got nervous prostration, and the Lord knows when
+he'll be back in harness again."
+
+"Who's Binks?" asked the Lawyer. "You talk as if the name of Binks were
+a household word."
+
+"Well, it is, in a way," said the Idiot. "Binks is one of those tired
+business men that we hear so much of these days. The kind they write
+comic operas and popular novels for, with all the thought taken out so
+that he may not have to burden his mind with anything worth thinking
+about. He's one of these billionaire slaves who's lost his thumb cutting
+off coupons and employs seventeen clerks with rubber stamps to sign his
+checks for him. He's succumbed to the strain of it all at last, and now
+the gobelins have got him. Do you approve of these sanitariums, Doctor?"
+
+"I most certainly do," said the Doctor. "Sanitariums are the greatest
+blessings of modern life, and, for my part, I'd like to see a law passed
+requiring everybody to spend a month in one of them every year of his
+life, where he could be under constant scientific supervision. It would
+add ten years to the lives of every one of us."
+
+"Well, I hope you are right, but I don't know," said the Idiot
+dubiously. "Seems to me there's too much coddling going on at those
+places, and mighty few people get well on coddling. I've given the
+matter some thought, and I've known a lot of men who had nothing but a
+pain in their toe who got so much sympathy over it that they became
+hopeless invalids inside of a year. There's more truth than humor in
+that joke about the little Irish boy who was asked how his mother was
+and replied that she was enjoying poor health this year."
+
+"O, that's all tommyrot," said the Doctor. "Perfect nonsense--"
+
+"I hope so," said the Idiot, "but after all nobody can deny that there
+are a great many people in this world who really do enjoy bad health who
+wouldn't if it weren't for the perquisites."
+
+"Perquisites?" frowned the Bibliomaniac. "Great Heavens, Mr. Idiot, you
+don't mean to insinuate that there is graft in ill health, just as there
+is in everything else, do you?"
+
+"I sure do," replied the Idiot. "Take me, for instance--"
+
+"I for one must decline to take you until I know whether you are a
+chronic disorder, or merely a temporary epidemic," grinned Mr. Brief.
+
+"Idiocy is pretty contagious," smiled the Idiot, in reply, "but in this
+case I wish to be taken as a patient. Let us say, for instance, that I
+am off in the country at a popular hotel, and all of a sudden some fine
+morning I come down with a headache--"
+
+"That's a debatable hypothesis," said the Lawyer. "Is it possible for
+the Idiot to have a headache, Doctor?"
+
+"I have known similar cases," said the Doctor. "I knew an old soldier
+once who lost his leg at Gettysburg, and years afterward could still
+feel the twinges of rheumatism in one of his lost toes."
+
+"Thanks for the vindication, Doctor," said the Idiot. "Nevertheless,
+just to please our learned brother here, I will modify the hypothesis.
+
+"Let us suppose that I am off in the country at a popular summer hotel,
+and all of a sudden some fine morning I come down with a violent pain in
+that anatomical void where my head would be if, like Mr. Brief, I always
+suffered from one. I am not sick enough to stay in bed, but just badly
+enough off to be able to loll around the hotel piazzas all morning and
+look forlorn.
+
+"Everybody in the place, of course, is immediately sympathetic. All are
+sorry for me, and it is such an unusual thing for one of my volatile,
+not to say fluffy, nature to suffer that a vast amount of commiseration
+is manifested by my fellow guests, especially by the ladies.
+
+"They turn me at once into a suffering hero. As I lie listlessly in my
+steamer-chair they pass me by on tip-toe, or pause and inquire into the
+progress of my aches and show a great deal more interest in my condition
+than they do in bridge or votes for women. One fetching young creation
+in polka-dotted dimity, aged twenty-three, offers to stay home from a
+picnic and read Robert W. Chambers aloud to me. Another goes to her room
+and brings me down a little jar of mint jelly, which she feeds to me on
+the end of a macaroon or a lady finger, while still a third, a pretty
+little widow of twenty-seven summers, now and then leaves her embroidery
+to put a cool little hand on my forehead to see if I have any fever--"
+
+"A most alluring picture," said the Doctor.
+
+"It almost makes my head ache to think of it!" said the Idiot. "But to
+continue, this goes on all morning, and then when afternoon comes they
+hang a nice little hammock for me, filled with dainty sofa cushions, out
+under the trees, and as they gently swing me to and fro a charming
+creature from Wellesley or Vassar sits alongside of me and fans my
+fevered brow, driving away dull care, flies, and mosquitoes until
+twilight, when, after feeding me on more macaroons, washed down with
+copious libations of sparkling lemonade, a bevy of elfin maids sit
+around in a circle and sing 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean', while the
+aforesaid little widow comes now and then to brush my scalp-lock back
+from my brow with the aforesaid pink paddy."
+
+"Oh, well, what of it?" interrupted the Doctor. "I've known many a
+stronger man than you made a fool of--"
+
+"What of it?" demanded the Idiot. "What of it? There's a lot of it. Do
+you suppose for one minute that I am going to get well under those
+circumstances?"
+
+"I wouldn't," said the Lawyer.
+
+"Not on your faith in the Materia Medica!" cried the Idiot. "That
+headache would become immortal. As undying as a poet's fame. Life would
+become for me one blissful eternity of cerebellian suffering under those
+conditions. Rather that lose my job as the cynosure of all that lovely
+solicitude I'd hire a bellboy to come to my room in the morning with a
+croquet mallet and hammer my head until it split, if I couldn't get one
+in any more legitimate fashion.
+
+"The quiet joy of lying off there with all those ministering angels
+about me, secretly enjoying the discomfiture of all the other men about
+the place--they nursing their wrath; their sisters, cousins, aunts,
+rich grandmothers, and best girls nursing me--get well? me? never,
+Doctor!
+
+"But if, on the other hand, nobody came near me all day long save a
+horse marine of a landlady armed with a bottle of squills, with the
+request that I go to bed until I felt better, why then I'd be a well man
+in just seven and a half minutes, dancing the tango, and challenging all
+the rheumaticky old beaux about the place to a hundred yards' dash for
+the fifteenth turkey trot with the little widow at the Saturday night
+hop."
+
+"Yes, I admit that there is such a thing as too much coddling," said the
+Doctor. "There are people who are inclined to hug their troubles, and
+for whom too much sympathy is a positive deterrent in the process of
+recuperation, but after all, my dear fellow, until we find something
+better the sanitarium must serve its purpose, and a great many people
+are unquestionably helped along by its beneficent operations."
+
+"I haven't a doubt of that," said the Idiot, "and here's to them! Long
+may they wave! I quaff this pony of maple syrup to the health of the
+sanitariums of the land--but just the same, for the tired business man,
+and his name is not only Smith, but Legion, there should be some other
+kind of an institution where this coddling process is frowned upon."
+
+"Why not devote that massive brain of yours to the working out of the
+idea?" suggested the Bibliomaniac. "The great trouble with you, Mr.
+Idiot, is that you are prolific in thinking out things that ought to be
+done, but there you stop. How to do them you never tell us. Why don't
+you give us a constructive notion once in awhile?"
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, with a grateful smile. "I've been
+fishing for that particular nibble for the past eighteen minutes, and I
+was beginning to fear the shad were shy this morning. You have saved the
+day, Sir. Speaking of Mr. Bib's idea that we ought to have something to
+take the place of the sanitarium for the tired business man, Doctor, how
+do you think an irritarium would pay?"
+
+"A what?" cried the Doctor, holding his waffle like Mohammed's coffin,
+suspended in midair.
+
+"An irritarium," repeated the Idiot. "An institution of aggravation,
+where, instead of being coddled into permanent invalidism, we should be
+constantly irritated, provoked, exacerbated, or, as my old friend
+Colonel Thesaurus says in his Essay on Excitation, exasperated into a
+cantankerously contentious pugnacity!"
+
+"And for what purpose, pray?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.
+
+"As an anti-coddling resource for the restoration of our pristine
+powers," said the Idiot. "Just take our old friend, the tired business
+man, for example. He has been working forty-eight hours a day all winter
+long, and with the coming of spring he is first cousin to the frazzle,
+and in the matter of spine twin brother to the jellyfish. His middle
+name is Flabby, and his nerve has succumbed to the superior numbers of
+nerves.
+
+"He is headed straight for the Down-and-Out Club. His lip quivers when
+he talks, and his hand is the center of a seismic disturbance that turns
+his autograph into a cross between a dress pattern and a futurist
+conception of a straight line in the cold gray dawn of the morning
+after. He has prolonged fits of weeping, and when it comes to making up
+his mind on any definite course of action he vacillates between two
+possibilities until it is too late, and then decides wrong.
+
+"Now, under present conditions they railroad this poor wreck off to a
+sanitarium, where the very atmosphere that he breathes is the dread
+thing that has haunted his sleepless hours all winter long--that of
+retirement. He is made to believe that he is a vurry, vurry sick man,
+and the only real pleasure that is left to him is bragging about his
+symptoms to some other unfortunate incarcerated with him; and after each
+period of boastful exposure of these symptoms in the exchange provided
+for the swapping of these things in the sanitariums of the day, he goes
+back to his room more than ever convinced that his case is hopeless;
+and, confronted by the bogey of everlasting ill health, he lets go of
+himself altogether and a long, long, tedious period of rehabilitation
+begins which may or may not get him into shape again in time for the
+fall season."
+
+"It's the only way," said the Doctor. "Don't fight your doctor. Just let
+go of yourself, and let him do the rest."
+
+"Well, I'd like to see my system tried for a while," said the Idiot.
+"I'll guarantee that any tired business man who will go to my irritarium
+will get his spine and his spunk, his nerve and his dander, back in a
+jiffy.
+
+"The first morning, after giving him a first-class breakfast that fills
+his weary soul with peace, I'd turn him loose in a picture gallery on
+the walls of which are hung soft, dreamy reproductions of pastoral
+scenes calculated to lull his soul into an unsuspecting sense of calm,
+and while he is looking placidly at these lovely things I'd have a husky
+attendant wearing sneakers creep quietly up behind him and give him such
+a kick as should for a moment make him feel that the earth itself had
+blown up. It wouldn't be a pleasant, sympathetic little love tap
+calculated to make him feel that he never even wanted to get well, but a
+violent, exacerbating assault; utterly uncalled for and unexpected; a
+bit of sheer, brutal provocation.
+
+"Do you suppose for an instant that the party of the second part would
+throw himself down forthwith upon a convenient divan and give way to a
+fit of weeping? Not he, my dear Doctor. The tire of that tired business
+man would blow out with a report like a crash of distant thunder. All
+the latent business manhood in him would be aroused into instant action.
+Nerves would fly, and nerve would return. Spinelessness and uncertainty
+would give way to spunk, and a promptitude of truculent reprisal worthy
+of the palmiest days of his commercial pre-eminence would ensue. Worn
+and weary as he was when he entered the irritarium, he would be so
+outraged by the rank discourtesy and utter injustice of that kick that
+he would beat up that attendant as if he were a world's champion
+battling with a bowlful of cold consomme for a ten-thousand-dollar
+purse."
+
+"Tush!" said the Doctor. "What do you suppose the attendant would be
+doing all this time? You seem to think your tired business man would
+find beating him up as easy as mashing potatoes with a pile driver."
+
+"It would be part of my system," said the Idiot, "that the attendant
+should allow himself to be thrashed, so that the tired business man,
+irritated into a show of spirit and deceived into thinking that he was
+still some fighter, would leave the place next day, his courage renewed
+and his confidence in himself completely restored. Instead of
+inoculating him with Nut chops and hot water for a weary period of six
+months, I'd pin the red badge of courage on him at the very start; and
+I miss my guess if he wouldn't go back to business the next morning as
+fit as a fiddle, and spend most of his time for the next two years
+telling everybody who would listen how he walloped the life out of one
+of the huskiest attendants he could find in a month of Sundays."
+
+"And you really think such brutal methods would work, do you?" asked the
+Bibliomaniac.
+
+"I have eight dollars that are willing to state it is a fact to any
+two-dollar certificate ever printed by Uncle Sam," returned the Idiot.
+"Why, Mr. Bib, I had a very dear friend once who was paralyzed. So
+completely paralyzed was he that he couldn't move without help, and,
+what was worse, couldn't even talk.
+
+"He went to a sanitarium, and for seven long and weary months he was
+dipped in a warm bath every morning by two attendants, an Irishman and
+a Dutchman. One held him by the shoulders and the other by the ankles,
+and day after day for nearly a year they dipped, and dipped, and dipped
+him. He showed no signs of improvement whatsoever until one bitterly
+cold winter's morning, the two attendants, having been off on a spree
+the night before, forgot to turn on the hot-water faucet and dipped him
+into a tub of ice water!
+
+"The effect was electrical. The patient was so mad that he impulsively
+broke the dam of silence that had afflicted him for so long and let
+loose a flow of language on those attendants that made the wrath to come
+seem like the twittering of a bird; and before they had recovered from
+their astonishment he had leaped from the tub, pinked the Irishman on
+the eye with a cake of soap, and, after chasing the Dutchman downstairs
+into the parlor, spanked him into a state of coma with a long-handled
+bath brush he had picked up off the floor."
+
+"And I suppose he is giving lessons in the tango to-day!" interjected
+the Lawyer, with a laugh.
+
+"Nothing so mild," said the Idiot. "The last time I saw him he was
+starting off with old man Weston on his walk to Chicago. He told me he
+was going as far as Albany with Weston."
+
+"Well," said the Doctor, "it might work, but I doubt it. I should have
+to see the scheme in operation before I recommended it to any of my
+patients."
+
+"All right," said the Idiot. "Send 'em along, Doctor. Mr. Bib and I can
+take care of them right here."
+
+"Leave me out," snapped the Bibliomaniac. "I don't care to be a partner
+in any of your idiotic nonsense."
+
+"No, Mr. Bib," smiled the Idiot, genially. "I wasn't going to use you
+as a partner, but as a shining example of the effectiveness of my
+theory. I've been irritating you constantly for the past twenty years,
+and you are still able to eat your thirty-seven and a half flapjacks
+daily without turning a hair, and that's some testimonial."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Half-Hours with the Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs
+
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