Decorative illustration drawing of a stylised face
There is a Hobgoblin that stalks in the path of the athletic young writers of the day and frightens them almost out of their wits.
The Hobgoblin is the third person singular, past tense, of the verb “Say,” and his name isSAID.
The HobgoblinSAIDdoes not stalk alone; with him stalk his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, indeed, all theSAIDfamily except old Gran’maQUOTH. Old Gran’maQUOTH, who is much too old to stalk, stays at home and dreams of the good old days when she was a verb of fashion, honored and courted by all the greatest writers of the day.
And when her grandchildren come home in the evening and tell how they frightened the athletic young writers almost out of their wits, she nearly bursts her old-fashioned stays, laughing at the drollery of it. “Egad!” she cries. “An’ I were an hundred years younger, I’d like nought better than to take a hand myself, and lay my stick about their backs, the young whippersnappers!”
And I for one, would like to see her do it.
How theSAIDfamily ever became professional Hobgoblins, I can not say. All I know is that, once a hardworking and highly respected family, suddenly they found themselves shunned. There was nothing left for them but to becomeHOBGOBLINS. Now their only pleasure in life is to see what funny antics they can make the athletic young writers perform in trying to escape from them.
And funny they certainly are.
Here are a few specimens from some of our leading “best sellers”:
“To think I have fallen to that!”gratedGilstar with clenched teeth.
“I get rather a good price,” Gilstardared.
“I’ll give you twenty-five dollars,” heofferedwildly.
“What are your terms?” heclucked.
But why bother about “best sellers,” when you can make almost as funny ones at home? Here is a home-brewed one:
“Where are you going to, my pretty maid?”“I’m going to the Doctor’s, to ask his aid,I caught a cold when I slept in the loft,”“Sir,” she coughed,“Sir,” she coughed,“I’m going to the Doctor’s sir,” she coughed.“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”“Oh, yes, indeed, if you’re not afraidOf catching my cold, I shall be pleased,”“Sir,” she sneezed,“Sir,” she sneezed,“Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir,” she sneezed.“Of catching your cold I have no fear,For I’ll take no chances, my pretty dear!”At this the maiden was sorely ruffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“What do you mean, kind sir,” she snuffled.“I mean I won’t kiss you, my pretty maid!”“Nobody asked you, my smart young Blade!”In her pocket-handkerchief, large and new,“Sir!” she blew,“Sir!” she blew,“Nobody asked you, sir!” she blew.
“Where are you going to, my pretty maid?”“I’m going to the Doctor’s, to ask his aid,I caught a cold when I slept in the loft,”“Sir,” she coughed,“Sir,” she coughed,“I’m going to the Doctor’s sir,” she coughed.“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”“Oh, yes, indeed, if you’re not afraidOf catching my cold, I shall be pleased,”“Sir,” she sneezed,“Sir,” she sneezed,“Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir,” she sneezed.“Of catching your cold I have no fear,For I’ll take no chances, my pretty dear!”At this the maiden was sorely ruffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“What do you mean, kind sir,” she snuffled.“I mean I won’t kiss you, my pretty maid!”“Nobody asked you, my smart young Blade!”In her pocket-handkerchief, large and new,“Sir!” she blew,“Sir!” she blew,“Nobody asked you, sir!” she blew.
“Where are you going to, my pretty maid?”“I’m going to the Doctor’s, to ask his aid,I caught a cold when I slept in the loft,”“Sir,” she coughed,“Sir,” she coughed,“I’m going to the Doctor’s sir,” she coughed.
“Where are you going to, my pretty maid?”
“I’m going to the Doctor’s, to ask his aid,
I caught a cold when I slept in the loft,”
“Sir,” she coughed,
“Sir,” she coughed,
“I’m going to the Doctor’s sir,” she coughed.
“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”“Oh, yes, indeed, if you’re not afraidOf catching my cold, I shall be pleased,”“Sir,” she sneezed,“Sir,” she sneezed,“Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir,” she sneezed.
“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, if you’re not afraid
Of catching my cold, I shall be pleased,”
“Sir,” she sneezed,
“Sir,” she sneezed,
“Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir,” she sneezed.
“Of catching your cold I have no fear,For I’ll take no chances, my pretty dear!”At this the maiden was sorely ruffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“Sir?” she snuffled,“What do you mean, kind sir,” she snuffled.
“Of catching your cold I have no fear,
For I’ll take no chances, my pretty dear!”
At this the maiden was sorely ruffled,
“Sir?” she snuffled,
“Sir?” she snuffled,
“What do you mean, kind sir,” she snuffled.
“I mean I won’t kiss you, my pretty maid!”“Nobody asked you, my smart young Blade!”In her pocket-handkerchief, large and new,“Sir!” she blew,“Sir!” she blew,“Nobody asked you, sir!” she blew.
“I mean I won’t kiss you, my pretty maid!”
“Nobody asked you, my smart young Blade!”
In her pocket-handkerchief, large and new,
“Sir!” she blew,
“Sir!” she blew,
“Nobody asked you, sir!” she blew.
Decorative illustration drawing of a stylised face
On the first of May I took a day off and used the telephone. It is best to take a day off if you want to get a number these times, and the number asked for was Spring one, nine, two, two—yes, Spring, Nineteen Twenty-Two. “There’s no such number,” said Central; “what you want is Winter 1921.” I assured her that was the last number in the world I desired, and after a wait of an hour or so she gave me Blizzard 1888 on a busy wire, comparing notes with Winter 1920, and I began to despair of ever getting my number.
I rang off and waited. I am a patient person, I waited a whole hour to allow thewire to cool off. Then I called again and this time I was rewarded by hearing at the other end of the wire a faint far-off, fuzzy, mewing sound.
It was the voice of the Pussy-Willow!
It was Lawrence Sterne, wasn’t it? who wrote, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” and it is quite a happy thought that the gentle airs that succeed the blustering winds of March, are a Providential concession to the tender nurslings of the April fields.
But the Pussy-Willow comes in February and early March and it would be asking too much to expect Providence to temper the wholesome and necessary rigors of these months for the sake of the venturesome kittens of the Willow bough.
Who but Providence (or Mr. Hoover) could ever have thought of the happy expedient of providing each and every Pussy-Willow, not only in the United States but also in England, France, Belgium and even Germany, with a warm fur overcoat!
And I verily believe that if the Pussy-Willows were lodged on the cold wet ground instead of perched on the high and dry branches, Providence (or Mr. Hoover) would have seen to it that in addition to fur coats they were provided with galoshes.
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The Pernicious Peaches whereof we speak are never out of season. They may be seen almost any month of the year on the covers of magazines, devoted to the moral and social uplift of young girls in general, and the American young girl in particular.
The February magazine peach crop is usually most abundant—All through the merry month of Saint Valentine they hang on the news-stands, singly or in clusters, and Peaches they are to be sure—Peaches in the stupidest, cheapest, slangiest nonsense of the word.
There they hang to quote the redundantDr. Roget, F. R. S.—“simpering, smirking, sniggling, giggling, ogling, tittering, prinking, preening, flaunting, flirting, mincing, coquetting, frivoling, attitudinizing, self-conscious artificial, smug, namby-pamby, sentimental, unnatural, stagy, shallow, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony, fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling, blatant, babbling, vacant, foolish, silly, senseless, addle-pated, giddy, childish, chuckle-headed, puerile,” and, what is above all else inexcusable in a peach—mushy.
And these (in journals that set the fashions moral, mental, social and sartorial) for our young American sister at the most impressionable age of her life—the age when, whatever may be her dormant possibilities, she is by her nature irresistibly impelled to pattern herself after the favorite girl of her class in school, or the favorite actress on the stage—to copy her coiffure, her dress, her deportment, even the expression of her face.
And how, you ask, can a young girl beharmed by imitating what, however vacuous or silly, is after all only an expression?
The answer is, that just as a persistent bend of thought modifies and in time fixes the expression of the face, so a habitual expression (or lack of expression) of face influences the bend of thought and, in time, fixes the character.
If you don’t believe this, dear girl, stand before your looking-glass and smirk at yourself as hard as you can, until you look (as much as it is possible for a human girl to look) like a magazine-cover Peach. Then try to hold the “Peach” look while you recite:
The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere rivulets dance their wayward roundAnd beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face.
The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere rivulets dance their wayward roundAnd beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face.
The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere rivulets dance their wayward roundAnd beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face.
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
You see it’s impossible! You can’t do it, any more than you can stroke your head upand down at the same time as you stroke your chest sideways. Your mouth has come out of curl—the foolish light has gone out of your eyes. Perhaps (if you really feel what you were reciting) you look just the least bit solemn. If so, try to hold the solemn look while you recite the following by a popular song writer:
Call me pet names dearest—Call me a birdThat flies to my breastAt one cherishing word,That folds its wild wings thereNe’er dreaming of flight,That tenderly sings there in loving delight.Oh my sad heart keeps piningFor one fond word,Call me pet names dearest,Call me a bird!
Call me pet names dearest—Call me a birdThat flies to my breastAt one cherishing word,That folds its wild wings thereNe’er dreaming of flight,That tenderly sings there in loving delight.Oh my sad heart keeps piningFor one fond word,Call me pet names dearest,Call me a bird!
Call me pet names dearest—Call me a birdThat flies to my breastAt one cherishing word,That folds its wild wings thereNe’er dreaming of flight,That tenderly sings there in loving delight.Oh my sad heart keeps piningFor one fond word,Call me pet names dearest,Call me a bird!
Call me pet names dearest—
Call me a bird
That flies to my breast
At one cherishing word,
That folds its wild wings there
Ne’er dreaming of flight,
That tenderly sings there in loving delight.
Oh my sad heart keeps pining
For one fond word,
Call me pet names dearest,
Call me a bird!
By the time you have finished, your solemn reflection in the glass will have changed to something almost as idiotic as the “peach” on the magazine cover.
Without question, the vulgar standards of expression these simpering sirens are setting for the impressionable young girl of today will degrade her just as surely as the wholesome, high-bred type of womanhood evolved by Charles Dana Gibson improved and developed all that was best in her sister of twenty years ago.
. . . .
The theory that nature imitates art is much older than Oscar Wilde, who (owing to the carelessness of Mr. Whistler) is supposed to have originated it.
It is so old that Mr. G. K. Chesterton any moment may rise to dispute it, and announce to an astonished London that it is Art that imitates Nature; nevertheless, Naturedoesimitate Art.
Is it possible that there is method in all this magazine madness? Is it possible that these magazines being devoted (among other devotions) to ladies’ attire, fear that too great an improvement in the female ofour species would divert her thoughts from the imbecilities of dress to higher—and less profitable—things?
Allah forbid!
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I sometimes ask myself (when there is no one else to pester) whether the present tendency toward Primitivism, in Art, Religion, Government, Conduct and Costume (everything in fact) may not be a sign that the world is coming, if not already come, to its second childhood, and I invariably answer myself in the affirmative.
Second Childhood, as of course you know, is the “happy hour” of an old age whose faculties have diminished to the exact degree that marks the undeveloped mental and physical attributes of infancy.
Take any baby—not your own, dearreader, yours is an exception I know, but any common ordinary baby—and I think when you have examined it you will agree with me that, judged by ultra-modern standards of culture, it is the most decadent being on earth.
To begin with, the baby’s sociological viewpoint is a mixture of passionate pessimism and pure unmitigated Anarchism.
Its musical output is a hysterical cacophony with all the exasperating disregard of consonance and key characteristic of the up-to-date composition.
Its Plastic and Graphic Art (achieved through the accident of the inverted Porridge bowl or the overturned inkwell) is the Post-Impressionism of Matisse and Picasso, whose law is the Law of Moses—“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
The Literary Message of the baby is acombination of the styles of Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandberg and an unassisted Ouija board and is only to be interpreted through the medium of maternal intuition.
And as for the Art Sartorial, are not the fashions feminine venturing each successive season a little nearer to that of the newborn babe?
“Well,” says I to myself, “supposing we admit that Modern Culture and Infancy are identical in expression, and that the World is entering upon its second childhood; what does it mean⸺ Is it the end of all things or only a fresh start?”
There you have me! I reply. There are some questions that even I cannot answer. I give it up.
If, as Dr. Einstein asserts, our planet has been receiving crooked light-rays all this time, it is a very serious matter and there is no knowingwhatmay come of it; certainly the Cosmic Light Company ought to be investigated. But don’t be down-hearted, dear Reader, some day the Einstein Amendmentto the Law of Gravitation may be repealed, and made retroactive into the bargain; it is all a matter of Relativity and it may turn out that the Relativity-shoe is on the other foot and that it is the Earth’s orbit that is on the blink and not the light rays at all.
Perhaps Mr. G. B. Shaw will enlighten us—as a projector of crooked light-rays, he ought to know something about it.
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Once when marooned on a small island in the midst of a turbulent sea of traffic, latitude Fifth Avenue, longitude Forty-second Street, I asked the governor of the island, a man of great stature and kingly mien, what he thought was the origin of the institution known as the Complimentary Banquet. Checking with an imperious gesture a monstrous traffic wave that seemed like to engulf us both the next moment, his voice came to me calm and reassuring above the tumult that surged and roared about us. “If it’s a wake you do be meaning, sorr, sure it’s as old as Ireland itself, it is!”
And the Traffic Cop was right.
Nearly two thousand years ago Strabo, the Greek geographer, describing the natives of Ivernia, wrote: “They are more savage than the English, and enormous eaters, deeming it commendable to devour their deceased relatives.”
In this, probably the first reference in literature to the Irish wake, the suggestion that the departed one contributed anything more than the honor of his company must be taken with a grain of salt. Strabo was an awful liar, and whole barrels of salt might be used on his “Geography” without perceptibly affecting its flavor. In all probability the cannibal touch was nothing more than an unseemly concession to the yellow taste of the Attic metropolis.
Nevertheless, though he never appeared on the menu, the “departed relative,” thesine qua nonof all festive gatherings, was (as the social instinct developed among the savage tribes) ever in increasing demand, and it is to be feared that in smart Iverniancircles it was not unusual to speed the departing relative in promoting the gaiety of an otherwise dull season.
Under such conditions it is hardly to be wondered at that in Ivernia, at that period, personal popularity was the most unpopular thing imaginable, and what more thinkable than that the reluctant candidate for a complimentary dinner should feign for the occasion the grewsome condition necessary for qualification.
With the spread of Christianity, this irksome feat of mimicry on the part of the Guest of Honor, at first a protective subterfuge, grew to be a social convention. And irksome indeed it was.
To feign at a banquet by the exercise of self-control a state of unconsciousness, joyfully achieved by one’s fellow guests through more convivial channels, was no task for the amateur. Then it was that, puffed up, comatose, obese, along came the Professional Diner Out. And now, after nearly two thousand years, what have we to show?
Could the savage rite, described by Strabo, depressing as it must have been, by any possibility be as gloomy as the Testimonial Banquet of today? Is the Guest of Honor, sitting at the High Table feigning unconsciousness, the miserable target for asphyxiating bombs of wit, of anecdote, and of reminiscence—is he any less to be pitied than the deceased relative of the Ivernian dinner? Yet we call ourselves civilized; we think it barbaric to hang a fellow being for anything short of murder. Why have we not equal consideration for the innocent Guest of Honor? Why do we not dine him in effigy?
Few of us have forgotten the outrage of 1912 when William Dean Howells was dragged from his comfortable fireside by Col. Harvey, then the editor of Harper’s Magazine, who deaf to his cries and entreaties, dined, wined and flashlighted in the presence of a frenzied mob armed to the teeth with knives, and forks and spoons.
How much more humane to have dinedMr. Howells in effigy! A waxen image simulating as far as possible the kindly features of the Great Novelist, sitting in the place of honor, bowing, even smiling by means of some ingenious mechanism! This, with a phonograph record of the graceful speech of acknowledgment, and the ravening public would have gone home happy and none the wiser. Thus with the dawn of a new era of Humanity, one more chapter of the ponderous book of martyrs would be closed forever.
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When Old Doctor Monroe discovered and patented his famous anti-monarchical specific, warranted to prevent the spread of Effete Despotism, Imperialitis and Throne Trouble, why didn’t he invent some equally Reliable Nostrum to check the epidemic of Old World names that was spreading like a blight of infantile paralysis among the thousands of husky young cities then springing up all over the United States? Rome, Syracuse, Troy, Thebes, Memphis, Ithaca, and a host of others, names dark and ill ominous to chubby young cities with no evil traditions to live down to, staining their bright bannerswith bloody blots and black bars of sinister tradition where should only be the golden stars and crimson bars of freedom.
Indian names such as Oshkosh and Kankakee were to be had ready-made for the asking; but they were few and for the most part too grotesque and Asiatic sounding for the liking of a serious-minded young republic just starting out in the city-raising business.
But it is no easy task to find new names for cities, above all names that are euphonious, and the last place one would expect to find them is the Medical Dictionary. The names of diseases? And why should that deter us? If a Rose by any other name will smell as sweet, surely a Rose with any other smell will at least look and sound as pretty. Good Doctor Watts (or was it Mr. Wesley?)[2]when adapting tunes for his new hymn-book answered his critics by exclaiming, “Why should the devil have all the best tunes!”
Why, indeed! And by the same token, why should the Diseases have all the prettiest sounding names?
Try one on your city and see if you don’t like it.
Has not Dyspepsia, Maine, an austere dignity about it that no old-world city name could possibly confer?
Neurasthenia, Kansas, on the other hand, brings up visions of shady sidewalks, pleasant gardens, and glimpses through slender trees, of a sun-kissed river. If your doctor should prescribe for you mountain air and outdoor exercise would you not instantly buy a ticket to Colic, Vermont? What more catchy name than Measles, Illinois, or Diphtheria, Wisconsin? Stripped of medical association there is scarcely a name in all themateria medicathat is wholly lacking in euphonistic charm.
Why not bring the matter before a Special Session of Congress? Anything is better than Persepolis and Pekin—even Tonsilitis, Missouri.
[2]It was Martin Luther.
[2]It was Martin Luther.
[2]It was Martin Luther.
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Certain it is that Cats are disappearing; that is to say the common friendly Tabbies and Tommies of the town we used to see doing their morning marketing in the ash cans, or with whom we were wont to pass the time of day in the neighboring door-yards.
In the last week I have seen only two street cats and only one to speak to, and that one was a stray orphan kitten who had been adopted by a kind-hearted bookbinder; the other when I would have accosted her gave me one strange look and vanished.
I glanced hurriedly down at my shoes as my hands flew instinctively to my necktieand hat, but the foot-gear were mates (of long standing) and the hat and tie were each in its proper place; nothing was there about my attire to shock the sensibilities of the most fastidious feline!
What did it mean? No cat had ever treated me with such discourtesy before. Then it was that I bethought me of how few of the feline brotherhood or sisterhood I had seen abroad of late.
Have they been carried off by an epidemic? Do cats catch influenza? or catalepsy? Has the scrap-market been affected by the high cost of living? Has the percentage of nutriment in the garbage can diminished to the vanishing point? Have the mice struck for shorter hours?
As I pondered thus at the corner of a lowly street, there tripped past my line of vision a fur coat whose opulence and sheen made its background of untidy brick and stone seem doubly dull and dingy. The motive power of this unlikely pelt was (as far as could be seen) lisle thread and oxfordties but I made no further note of the girl; my mind was fixed on the coat—it was the third of its kind I had observed in as many minutes in that mean street.
A shiver ran through me; I had seen a ghost, a procession of ghosts. It was as if a ouija board had suddenly screamed miaou!
And they say cats come back.
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One by one the idols of tradition go by the board. William Tell’s Apple and Paul Revere’s Ride were long ago cast into the trash-basket of Fiction; even Joan of Arc has been received into the mythology of Sainthood, and now that hero of our happy childhood, Casablanca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, is about to be snatched from us by that reckless iconoclast, Mr. Irvin Cobb.
Like the ruthless Woodman in the poem, Mr. Cobb has struck his axe into the very roots of this revered tree of our childish belief⸺
According to Cobb, the Casabianca-tree is only a nut tree and a horsechestnut tree at that. Writing in theSaturday Evening Post, he tells us that Casabianca was nothing more than a “feeble-minded leatherhead.” If that be so then Barbara Frietchie was a leatherhead, and Edith Cavell, and all the host of those who gave up or were ready to give up their lives for that purely imaginary thing, an ideal, and whatcouldthe blessed Evangelist have been thinking of when he wrote “He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” John 12:25.
Exactly two thousand years ago when the city of Pompeii was destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a Roman sentinel, another idol of tradition just such a leatherhead as Casablanca, refused to desert his post and was burned to death for the very foolish reason that he was “on duty.” He is there to this day, standing “at attention,” in the shape of a cast made from the matrix of molten lava that enveloped his livingbody and you may call him a leatherhead if you like, but the memory of his leatherheadedness will endure when sensible people like you, dear reader, and me and Mr. Cobb are forgotten.
. . . .
Nevertheless there are two sides to every question, and it is quite possible that Casabianca may have been a perfectly sensible lad, whose only thought was to disobey his captain and desert his post, but the tar melting from the heat in the seams of the deck, and adhering to his feet caused him to stick to the ship. Be that as it may,Ishall stick to Casabianca!
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Mr. Finchsifter has compared my Lake to a gleaming sapphire reposing on a corsage of emerald green plush.
I have never seen Mr. Finchsifter’s wife—I do not even know that Finchsifter is married, but since the emerald plush bosom of his poetic fancy, stands for miles and miles of heaving Pines and fluttering Laurels and Finchsifter stands barely four feet six in his stockings, by all the laws of natural selection the human embodiment of his Brobdingnagian simile, must be either Mrs. Finchsifter or some not impossible Eve of a Finchsifter dream Paradise. A colossal counterpart(I picture her), of the waxen Demi-Goddess in the Finchsifter show window displaying with revolving impartiality on a faultless neck and bosom the glittering treasures of India, Africa, Peru, Mexico and Maiden Lane.
To be strictly truthful, I do not know that Mr. Finchsifter’s show window can boast such a waxen deity as I have described; indeed for all I know he possesses neither a show window nor the merchandise to advertise in such a window, but I have as the saying is, a “hunch” that Mr. Finchsifter’s imagery as applied to my Lake is based on something more than a mere academic interest in the adornment, textile or lapidarious of the human form.
And my Lake—in the first place it is not my Lake (but of that later), neither does it resemble a sapphire any more than the Pines and Laurels on its bank (save that when agitated they heave or flutter) resemble a green plush corsage.
If I were asked for an image, I shouldcompare my Lake to an India-rubber band rather than to a sapphire. In form an elongated ellipse, it possesses an elasticity of circumference that is little short of miraculous.
The boastful pedestrian, glowing from his early morning trot around its shore will tell you it is a good ten miles.
The persistent swain, scheming to lure his Heart’s Desire, high heeled and reluctant, to the amorous shades of “Lover’s Landing,” tells her, upon his honor, that it is not more than a mile all the way round. To be precise, the distance round my Lake is something between a stroll and a “constitutional”—or to put it relatively about what the circumambulation of an ocean liner’s deck would be to an athletic inch worm.
As I said before, my Lake is not my Lake. It is nobody’s Lake. Not a human habitation profanes its bosky shores. The only beings that make even a pretense of ownership are five starch-white swans that patrol it from morning till night, turning fitfullythis way and that and probing its depths and shallows with their yellow bills as if seeking for the missing Deed of title. On certain days when the diamond Lake is still, and the Pine and Laurel corsage is untroubled by a tremor, the starch-white company is doubled by five ghostly “understudies” who reflect their whiteness curve for curve and feather for feather with a fidelity of inversion that may find its match only in the art of a Shaw or a Chesterton.
It was on such a day as this that I met Mr. Finchsifter. I had completed the circuit of the Lake and leaving the wooded path that skirts its shore ascended through the woods to the level ground above, where on the further side of a well kept automobile road rises the lofty iron grille that engirdles for miles the country seat of Barabbas Wolfe, the Sausage King, typifying at once, by the safe deposit-like thickness of its bars and the view-inviting openness of its scrollwork, the innate love of show, temperedby newly acquired exclusiveness of a lord not to the manor born.
Gazing, in beady eyed appraisal at the neat but somewhat constricted Italian garden to which the railing at this point invited the eye—stood Finchsifter.
In this crowded jungle of spotless stone Lions, tomblike seats and arches backed by California privet and immature cypresses there was an irreverent suggestion of the Villa D’Este done into American slang.
He turned hearing my step, “Where is it I have seen it—before?”
“In the movies perhaps”—I ventured.
“That’s it! Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “I knew I had seen it somewhere!”
After ascertaining my name in reluctant payment for the unsolicited tender of his own he continued, “but the Lions show better in the ‘pictures’ don’t they? Why didn’t they get them with moss already.”
“With moss?” I queried.
“Sure!” said Finchsifter. “Didn’t youknow such a stone Lion comes also with the moss, the same as the genuine old antique furniture comes with the real hand-made worm-holes!”
I remembered guiltily how on the occasion of my last visit to Lake towers when asked by Mrs. Barabbas Wolfe, what I thought of her marble Lions, I had exclaimed with truthful enthusiasm “Wonderful! But my dear ladyhowdo you keep them so clean?”
We walked on together, and though avoiding as we did so the physical proximity of my Lake we could not exclude it wholly from our conversation.
It was a passing glitter of the water caught through the pines below us at a turn in the road that inspired the Diamond-plush simile from which try as I may, I shall never be able to dissociate the image of my Lake.
Greatly to my surprise I found myself becoming interested in Finchsifter, and during the luncheon which followed our returnto my Bungalow and the dinner that evening at his hotel, we laid what promised to be the foundation of a lasting friendship.
To be sure he was a man of many words, but the words of Finchsifter were well trained words, old family servants that knew their places and never presumed, or took liberties with the listener.
If a reply or comment were imperative—an adjective caught at random gave instant clue to what had gone before—even as a single toe joint restores to the naturalist the forgotten form of the Iohippus.
Finchsifter was a mental rest cure, his talk was soothing as a verbal brain massage. I conceived that one might form the Finchsifter habit, in time even become a slave to it as men become slaves to cocaine, Psychoanalysis, or Taxicabs.
But this was not to be.
As a would-be suicide has been turned from his purpose by the chill of the water into which he has plunged—so it was byFinchsifter himself that I was cured of the Finchsifter habit.
It was on the occasion of our second meeting, appointed at the suggestion of Finchsifter that we take our matutinal walk around the Lake in each others company.
He greeted me with a delighted smile, exclaiming as he took my hand in both of his very new saffron gloves.
“I have a great idea found—!—You are a poet? yes? Then you know all about this Free Verse which I read always about in the magazines? Perhaps you can yourself make it? Yes?” His face fairly shone with the inner flame of his project.
I found myself harkening against my will. What possible interest could Finchsifter have in verse of any kind—let alone free verse. “This will never do,” I reflected. “If he compels me to listen—then we shall cease to be friends—I came here to rest. I might as well take the first train back to New York!” Finchsifter was still talking. Eyeing me keenly as if mentally debatingmy trustworthiness—he continued: “If it is sure enough Free, then it don’t cost nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, recalled abruptly from my own thoughts.
“Free verse!” cried Finchsifter. “That’s my scheme!—but don’t you tell it—It is between only ourselves—fifty-fifty—we split everything—wecreate the demand—we corner the supply, you and me together corner all the free verse in the United States—in this world for that matter and sell it for—” Again he hesitated—“If I might ask it—about what does a Poet get for such a little piece of poetry? The kind that is not free. A piece so long I mean.”—He measured a sonnet’s width of air between his thumb and fore-finger—“what do you get for that much?” I told him what the magazines pay me.
“What! A dollar a line! Gott in Himmel! we make a fortune! That’s what I tell Rebecca—If we corner all the free verse in the United States and sell it for no moreas five cents a line—we make our fortune! but a dollar a line!—Himmel!”—he fairly danced for ecstasy and then it was I made the discovery, by which I lost if not a Fortune at least a Finchsifter.
I stood still as the tide of words with its flotsam of tossing gestures, continued—I heard nothing. I only waited for Finchsifter to subside.
“Am I right!” He gasped at length with what by every law of supply and demand should have been his latest breath.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about”—I replied angrily. “All I know is we’re walking the wrong way.”
“What do you mean the wrong way?” said Finchsifter.
“The wrong way round the Lake that’s what I mean!”
. . . .
I don’t know how long we stood there arguing the question, I only know that his mind was inaccessible to reason, persuasion—even bribery, for, as a last resort, I offeredto give him a list of all the best free verse writers in America if he would only listen to reason—nothing would move him—Finchsifter had always walked round the lake from right to left and always would—and what I said about his rubbing its precious plush corsage the wrong way of the nap was all rot.
I turned on my heel and left him. Half an hour later when we met at Lover’s Landing which is exactly half way round the Lake we passed without speaking.
And now I must wait each day until Finchsifter has taken his walk from right to left round my Lake, taking my walk (from left to right) in the chill of the evening to pacify the tutelary Goddess by smoothing back her green plush corsage, which has been rubbed the wrong way by Finchsifter.
Decorative illustration drawing of a stylised face
After the passage of the Ninety-eighth Amendment making it a misdemeanor to “manufacture, sell, own, possess, purchase, nurse, dandle or otherwise caress or display that effigy of the infant form commonly known as a Doll” … the abolition of that feathered symbol of vicarious maternity, the Stork, followed as a matter of course.
The passage of the Anti-Stork Bill or, to be more accurate, the Ninety-ninth Amendment, thanks to the tenacity and tact of President John Quincy Epstein, was the most expeditious piece of legislation putthrough by the hundred and fifth Congress.
It must not be forgotten, however, that the introduction of lectures on obstetrics into the curriculum of the kindergartens had done much to educate the child vote and that at the time the fate of the Stork was hanging in the balance, that once esteemed Bird of Prurient Evasion was already becoming unpopular and well on its way to join the Dodo.
And now the department of government devoted to the cause of Infant Uplift, having abolished the Mock-Offspring and settled the fate of the Bird of Nativity, cast about for some new Field of Endeavor.
And what more fitting than that they should light upon that hoary old imposter masquerading under the several aliases Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Father Christmas?
At once the Propaganda was started.
Press agents were engaged, lecture tours arranged, magazines subsidized.
No matter what it might cost, this “Vulturegnawing at the Palladium of Infant Emancipation” must be destroyed!!
Santa Claus, once, in the memory of living men and women, adored by children and winked at by their parents, was now branded as an imposter, a mountebank, a public nuisance, and a perverter of infant intelligence.
Santa Claus was an outlaw from the Commonwealth of Reason.
It was “thumbs down” for Santa!
It may be well to explain right here (since none of the events chronicled in this History has yet happened) that the movement for the Emancipation and Self-Determination of Infants, which has now taken such great strides, had its initiation in the presidential term of Miles Standish Sovietski when Congress extended the franchise to every child over five years of age who had made any serious contribution to literature or higher mathematics.
It was in the same year that President Sovietski signed the Sixty-fourth Amendmentto the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the publication of fairy tales, and Congress suspended the Limitation-of-Search Act in order that private libraries and nurseries might be raided without warning and all copies of the forbidden works summarily seized and destroyed.
Simultaneously with the federal enactment, the states of Washington, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon, ever in the advance of any great intellectual movement, passed laws prohibiting “the personification or representation, public or private, in theatre, music hall, club house, lodge, church fair, schoolhouse, or private residence, of any supernatural, fairy, or otherwise mythical person or persons or fraction thereof.”
The passing of a Constitutional Amendment was now an almost every-day occurrence. Indeed, since the ratification of the Forty-fourth Amendment prohibiting the use of sarsaparilla as a beverage (coffee and tea had been legislated out of existence five years earlier) the enactment of a newAmendment excited little or no comment. Even the Seventy-ninth Amendment forbidding “the use of caviar, club sandwiches, and buttonhole bouquets, except for medicinal purposes,” received only casual notice in the Metropolitan Dailies.
The twentieth century was rapidly nearing its close and the political apathy that for fifty years had been gradually benumbing the Public morale now threatened to paralyze completely what little still remained of courage and initiative.
Even the latest work of Bernard Shaw, “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Infinite,” published (with a five volume preface) on Mr. Shaw’s hundred and fortieth birthday, aroused so little resentment that his projected visit to the United States had to be abandoned, in spite of the fact that “Bean and Soup o’Bean,” written only a week earlier, was acknowledged to have contributed largely to the triumph of the Seventy-ninth Amendment, making Vegetarianism compulsory in the United States.
The Hundredth Amendment passed quickly though the earlier stages of routine and perfunctory debate without any appreciable sign of anything approaching popular protest.
Here and there a guarded expression such as “Poor old Santa! I’m sorry he’s got to go!” was voiced, in the privacy of a club, by some elderly gentleman. Nothing more.
Somewhere, behind Somebody, was a Power that directed and guided—perhaps threatened. Nobody knew who or what or where it was or in what manner it worked, but work it did and to such purposes that, after a scant week of cut and dried speech-making that deceived no one, the Amendment was submitted unanimously by both houses of Congress and the foregone conclusion of ratification was all that remained to make the abolition of Santa Claus an accomplished fact.
Then, inevitably as fish follows soup, followed the ratification.
The Hundredth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting Santa Claus, slipped through the ratification process like an oil prospectus in a mail chute. There was only one hitch, Rhode Island, but since Rhode Island had refused to ratify a single one of the last Seventy-nine Amendments, her action was accepted as part of the program and a proof of unanimity.
So Santa Claus was abolished?
Not so fast please!—Who’s writing this History anyway?