THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE.CHAPTER XII.The Man with the Megaphone.
THE MAN WITH THE MEGAPHONE.
“WE’RE off,” sang out Noah, using a huge megaphone which could be heard throughout the length of the train. “Perhaps it was not necessary to tell you that we had started, but the megaphone man on all ‘Seeing New York’ trips is expected to begin his lecture with that observation, and as we’re going to the earth, we must do as mortals do.
“Due notice of our return will be published in the newspapers, but as our stay in the metropolis is indefinite, our address has been left with the constable, and the maid has been instructed to accept service.
“Speaking of maids reminds me that the dear women are rather hotter under their lace collars just now than usual and are saying things quite horrid. You see King Henry the Eighth insisted upon leaving the women at home. To this Cæsar was opposed.
“‘Your wife may be above suspicion,’ said Henry, ‘but I’m not so sure about mine. Six women tagging after a man are just about half a dozen too many.’
“Sir Walter Raleigh joined forces with Cæsar and they brought the matter to the attention of His Satanic Majesty. The metropolitan stores have just announced a bargain sale of dress goods, so Lucifer knew he would have an insurrection on his hands if he didn’t let the woman go shopping. You will notice that the ladies are with us.”
“If Lucifer had not been a fallen angel,” whispered King Henry in my ear, “he would not have known women so well!”
“Have you noticed the charming costume of Mother Eve, who is chaperoning the party?” asked Ward McAllister. “Her hat is made up of a little basket turned upside down, with trailing plants hanging from the top, kept from falling by a tangled mass of ribbon, tickled by a feather that like the ostrich from which it was taken, hides its head in a mound of lace and—but how can a mere man describe a woman’s bonnet adequately unless he has paid the bill for it? Adam says he would get a divorce if he could name anybody but a snake as co-respondent.”
The megaphone continued to assault our ear drums.
“We are still in the region regarded as mythical by Robert Ingersoll,” went on Noah, “and I am pleased to say that that gentleman is returning to haunt the famous city which is assessed for one of our largest avenues paved with good intentions. This resolution business begins Januaryfirst with a bracing against booze and a curtailing of the smoke luxury, but it’s bones to nickels that it ends on the third day of grace with a general retreat all along the line and the devil in full pursuit. Most men proceed to lay a whole sidewalk before the grade is fixed.”
The train started up hill with a jolt, but disdaining to notice the inconvenience of his passengers—it was a personally-conducted tour,—the Grand Sir Knight of the Hand Car continued:
“This road is inclined to take you to your destination, and I trust the gravity of the situation appeals to you. Passengers are permitted to do one of three things: They may remain seated on the up grade provided they ply their fans vigorously enough to keep the engine from getting a hot box; or they may get out and walk up hill, or if they need exercise, they may get out and push. This is a free country where pull doesn’t count.
“We always look out for the comfort of our patrons. No passenger ever got a cinder in his eye from a locomotive on this road. Electricity is the motive power and it may interest the scientists present to learn that I have discovered the composition of electricity and with it the secret of life. Its power is derived from the action of its principal element, oxygen, in the process of uniting with the other element, hydrogen, with which it compounds in varying proportions up to seven parts by weight of oxygen to one of hydrogen, beyond which point the product becomeswater. Up on earth, they need coal or its equivalent to furnish power to produce electricity. Down here we make it from the decomposition of water and permitting the oxygen and the hydrogen to re-unite. As a result of this friction we get a fire many times hotter than that produced by coal, emitting oxygen instead of carbonic acid gas. That explains the exhilaration of the air of Hades and is one reason for its popularity as a health resort.
“No charge is ever made on this line for excessive baggage. You may carry as much as you please, provided you carry it yourself. The only live stock taken in the baggage cars are camels. These ‘water wagons’ might be useful if the assembled company gets dry before New York is reached, and if the train should break down, the camel can always be depended upon to get a hump on itself.
“The Stygian subway, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest scenic route in the world—on a clear day. From the observation cars one gets a view of all that is to be seen—earth and darkness. This road is a great feat of engineering from the fact that it has no tunnels, no bridges and no curves. It is the only double tracked line in Hades and each rail is so widely separated from its fellow that they are not on speaking terms.
“A third rail was added for safety and rapid progress, movement having been the order ofthings since the earth began to revolve upon its axis. It was found that a single track would not fit the rolling stock and an attempt to propel a two-wheel car over a single-rail road by Ananias provoked much cussing. The road-bed did not lie so well as the engineer who laid it!
“This is the only line in the world where the time-tables are made solely to suit the public and where a man never loses his train nor his temper. If the schedule as formulated by the general manager, Myself, does not suit you, application to the division superintendent, Myself, will be all that is necessary. Complaints to the general passenger, agent, Myself, are at once referred to Me in My capacity of president and thus no time is lost in red tape. I hold every office within the gift of the road, the only practical solution to labor difficulties.
“We are now nearing Hellgate, which is at the entrance to New York. Never having been to America, I asked Benedict Arnold to write the remainder of the lecture. You may therefore depend upon this description of the Great Republic as being strictly impartial and without prejudice. As an aside, I may as well tell you that before starting for New York, Arnold took the precaution to put an iron band around his pocketbook.
“America, according to the man who sold it, is the land where preachers are paid from $500to $20,000 according to their ability to dodge Satan and tickle the ears of the wealthy; where no clergyman writes a sermon without a concordance in one hand and a popular novel in the other; where the deacons conduct an auction for the best pews, and where there is a daily round of theatricals by the Sunday School and chicken suppers by the Ladies’ Aid, with collections and religion thrown in for a change on Sunday.
“This is the land where the politician shakes poverty by the hand before election and later altogether; where they have a congress of four hundred men to make laws for a supreme court of nine to set aside; where they have prayers on the floor of the national capitol and whiskey in the basement; where men vote for what they do not want for fear they will get what they want by voting for it; where other men stay away from the polls one day and swear about the result the other three-hundred and sixty-four days in the year.
“American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start anagitation to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in.
“The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before he knew it himself!
“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis, Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated to the twentieth story.
“This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not largeenough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach.
“The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning the day with an orange phosphate at tenA.M., and finishing it and the pocketbook of her steady company at twelveP.M.with a menu of soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of conscience or a disordered stomach!
“America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy; where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets theaphorism that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual challenge to the world.
“America is a nation whose goddess of Liberty was foreign born, baptized in blood, then sent into exile, where, serene and indifferent, she turns her back on the land of her adoption and looks out to sea, a heartless statue! This is a country without a language of its own, with a national hymn that sings only of New England and is set to stolen music, whose only national dance is the cakewalk and most popular tune a rag-time coon song; a land whose people never allow the voice of conscience to speak louder than the bell of the cash register.”
“Despite his century of banishment, Benedict Arnold is still a traitor to his country,” I observed.
“Not at all,” answered Washington. “Why, he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘traitor’ when separated from its Websterian environment. His so-called betrayal of his country was but an incident to his winning a woman, and where there’s a woman, man will make a way. Before the organization of the Asbestos Society of Sinners, the historians conspired with Pluto to fry us in our own fat, but now, immune in our asbestos attire, it’s Siberiafor Satan, and there’s always something doing in the Douma of the Dead. As for me, I’m tired of being called ‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”
Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had ceased. It was not until the car shot out of the darkness that the letter dropped from my hand. I gasped in astonishment.
“The Battery! All change!” sang out the voice in the megaphone. But the car did not stop. As if shot from a catapult it leaped over the trees and vaulted the aquarium. It fluttered in the air and then settled down in the waters of the bay like a bird with a broken wing.
When I opened my eyes I was being rolled over a barrel, and an ambulance surgeon was forcing some very bad whiskey down my throat. Whether it was the liquor or the water I had swallowed I know not, but my surroundings seemed those of the Twenty-third Street water front, west, rather than of the Battery. Was I being rescued from the sinking of a ferry boat or from Noah’s Ark? Had my trip to Hades consumed only the flash of the grain of sand in Time’s hour-glass which had seen me sink to the bottom of theriver and rise again, or had I been the guest of the shades of the Styx for a day, a month, a year? A man who had taken a whiskey straight might have solved the problem, but to a man whose brain was befuddled by mixed drinks, coherent thought was impossible. I fell asleep, content to drift and drift and dream—of devils.
The End.