Light interviews with shades
Date: 2025-01-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: American wit and humor; Spiritualism -- Humor

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Title: Light interviews with shades

Author: Robert Webster Jones

Release date: January 27, 2025 [eBook #75226]

Language: English

Original publication: Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co, 1922

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES ***

LIGHT
INTERVIEWS
WITH
SHADES

ROBERT
WEBSTER
JONES

LIGHT INTERVIEWS
WITH SHADES

BY
ROBERT WEBSTER JONES

Publishers DORRANCE Philadelphia

COPYRIGHT 1922
DORRANCE & COMPANY, INC.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I | Bluebeard Tells Why He Killed Wives | 11
II | Queen Elizabeth Discloses Why She Never Married | 20
III | John Paul Jones and A Grogless Navy | 29
IV | Joshua Advises Daylight Saving | 37
V | King Solomon’s Family Vacation Trip | 43
VI | Brigham Young Endorses Woman Suffrage | 50
VII | Hippocrates on Modern Doctors | 56
VIII | Methuselah Gives Longevity Secrets | 66
IX | Jesse James Talks on Tipping | 75
X | Shakespeare Mentions Movies | 80
XI | Adam Condemns Present Fashions | 88
XII | Captain Kidd Speaks on Tag Days | 96
XIII | Alfred the Great Tries to Find Prosperous King | 102
XIV | Old King Cole Gives Views on Prohibition | 111
XV | King Henry VIII Admits Some Matrimonial Mistakes | 116
XVI | Don Quixote Says He “Wasn’t So Crazy as Some Modern Reformers” | 123
XVII | Pharaoh Solves Servant Problem | 129
XVIII | Nero Discusses Jazz | 137
XIX | Lord Bacon Muses on Ciphers | 145

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

I
BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES

I drew this assignment to interview the shade of Bluebeard because our girl reporter backed out at the last minute,—said she had no objection to a nice, ladylike assignment such as getting Pharaoh’s daughter to talk about Annette Kellerman or having a chat with Joan of Ark, or whatever Mrs. Noah’s name was, but she balked at calling on a wife murderer who had never been introduced.

If I had not been warned in advance I should have thought this was surely an impostor—a barefaced one, too, for he wore no beard—to whose room I was ushered by a bellboy of the Olympus Hotel.

“Surprised at my appearance, eh?” he chuckled. “Everybody is. Expect to see a ferocious-looking monster with a long blue beard and a bowie knife sticking out of his belt. It’s about time the folks down below got the real facts, not only of my appearance but of my character. That’s why I’ve consented for the first time to talk for publication. I want to be set right in the eyes of those mistaken mortals. You are a young man and unmarried, I presume, from your happy, carefree countenance. Well, then, here is a thing I hope you’ll learn by heart: where singleness is bliss ’tis folly to have wives. I’ve tried it and I know. I, too, was once a happy, cheerful, careless bachelor, like Adam, you know. And like Adam I didn’t get my eyes opened until after marriage. By the way, speaking of Adam, did you ever pause to think that not until marriage came into the world did man have to dig for a living? Yet I digress. What I started out to say was that marriage is an excellent institution, but like all good things, it can be overdone. My mistake was in being too idealistic. I had resolved to find the ideal, the perfect wife, the kind you read about in poetry (a perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command). Well, my first wife laid too much emphasis on the ‘command.’ She took it literally. I found I had made a mistake and decided to bury it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Clementina was her name. She was not of a trustful nature. Invariably her first greeting on my returning home late at night took the sharply interrogatory form: ‘Where have you been?’ Frequently I would have been glad to tell her, only I could not remember. It has been said that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ but it did not seem to work out that way worth a cent at three o’clock in the morning. We had words, she seeking to obtain what she termed the ‘last’ one. But still there were always more to follow.

“I came in time to feel that I did not possess that treasure of treasures, a wife’s perfect confidence in her husband. One night, I remember, I started to get into bed with my overcoat on. It was merely a bit of harmless absent-mindedness. But Clementina continued to refer to the trifling incident daily, and nightly, for weeks afterwards. She even communicated the circumstance to friends and relatives, including her maternal parent, who naturally had no interest in the subject. When we were invited out to dinner she employed the incident as a conversational topic. I begged her to desist. She refused. I realized that it was high time to ‘try again.’ I need not go into details. But Clementina ceased to trouble and the weary was at rest. The coroner was a personal friend of mine. I had voted for him in three different precincts, and he kindly brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable uxoricide,’ or something of that sort, and everything was nice and comfortable.

“That was Clementina. Now let me see—let me see—who came next? Susannah? No, she was Number Three, I’m pretty sure. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but if I only had my old card index here I could tell you in two seconds. Sapphira? No, she came later. Oh, now I’ve got it: Maria. Yes, I had to get rid of Maria within a year. Nice, amiable girl she was, too, in most respects. Always had the meals on time, never hauled me out at night to call on the new neighbors, would rather darn socks for her husband than crochet a new sweater for herself, and had an impediment in her speech. I’d often heard there were such women, with impediments in their speech, but had never met one before. I thought it was a recommendation, but I was mistaken. It only made her take that much longer to say what she was going to say, anyway. When Maria and the impediment clashed it was always Maria that finally won out. But it took time. Verbally Maria required a long time to pass a given point, but she kept on until she passed it. Maria had one great fault. You’re not married, young man, and you may not grasp this defect in all its hideousness. But this was it: she always talked to me when I was trying to shave.

“At that time I wore a beard, but no side-whiskers, and I shaved every morning before breakfast. It was Maria’s invariable habit to stand at the bathroom door and engage in conversation—or rather monologue interspersed with questions. In consequence I got to spending more money for court-plaster than for shaving soap. A man stopped me on the street one day, gave a second look at my liberally-scarred countenance, and hailed me as a fellow graduate of Heidelberg. Finally, I decided that this business had gone on long enough. I gave Maria fair warning. The very next morning she stuck her head in at the door, just as I was trying to steer around a pimple below my right ear, and told me not to forget to bring home those lamb chops for dinner. I cut a gash an inch long and dropped the razor on the floor. That was Maria’s farewell appearance. There was no demand for an encore. The coroner kindly found that the impediment in her speech had stuck in her throat and she had choked to death. He was a good scout.

“And now we come to Susannah, Number Three, Series N. G. Susannah started out splendidly. She came highly recommended. I thought she was going to be one of the best wives I ever had. But, like all the others, she soon disclosed a fatal failing. I call it ‘fatal’ because it always turned out that way for all my wives. It may seem a trifle to you, young man, but that’s because you’ve never been married. The trouble was this, and it soon got on my sensitive nerves: the only time I could get Susannah’s absorbed, undivided attention was when I talked in my sleep. Then, I have reason to believe, she would sit up and listen by the hour. But at other times she might as well have been totally deaf, so far as paying attention to what I was trying to say was concerned. She always seemed to be thinking of something—I hope it wasn’t somebody—else. I’d start telling her about a business deal I’d just put through with some fellows up at Bagdad, or begin discussing the chances of the Damascus ball team for winning the pennant next year, and before I’d talked ten minutes I’d see as plain as day that she wasn’t hearing a word I said.

“She’d contracted the crocheting habit, too—I don’t know where she picked it up—and she’d work away, whispering to herself and nodding at me every now and then, until I thought I’d go wild. One night while I was right in the midst of telling her a funny story I’d heard at the Khayyam Country Club, she actually interrupted me to remark that she’d just found a new way of purling 14 by casting off 11 and dropping 34, or something of the sort, and I just up and—and— Well, there’s no need to harrow your feelings. Suffice it to say that I added one more to the Association of Former Mothers-in-Law of Bluebeard. Whenever one of my wives departed this life rather suddenly the ex-mothers-in-law always held a sort of indignation meeting. Sometimes they passed resolutions, too. But it didn’t seem to do any good. Just advertised the fact that I was a widower again. Didn’t seem to prejudice the girls against me. In fact, one leap-year I had to get a lot of rejection slips printed, like the magazine editors use, for replying to proposals. I read somewhere once that it always made a fellow popular to get a reputation as a lady-killer, and I seem to have proved it.

“And so it went. All the undertakers in town were trying to stand in with me. But I thought they went a little too far when they adopted a set of appreciative resolutions and invited me to address their annual convention. Some folks have no sense of propriety. The preachers showed more tact. It’s true that one offered to do all my marrying on the basis of a yearly contract, but that was a strictly private, business arrangement, the same as I had with the firm of caterers and liverymen which supplied both cakes and camels. I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off—Sapphira, who objected to my smoking in the front parlor; Anastasia, who believed the adjective ‘annual,’ as applied to house-cleanings, meant every week; Boadicea, who was strong for women’s rights, but refused to go downstairs first to tackle the burglar; Sheba, who took me along when she went shopping and parked me for two hours outside a department store; Delilah the Second, who wanted to cut my hair so as to save enough money to get herself a new winter hat, as if my overhead charges weren’t high enough already. These are just a few samples from my souvenir collection of matrimonial misfits that I happen to recall offhand. The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. If my experience helps other married men I shall be glad to have given this interview. I like to talk, because nowadays I feel I can do so without interrupting some wife or other. Just one word more, and then good night:

“There is no marrying in heaven. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

II
QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED

“Nothing would have induced me to talk for publication,” said Queen Elizabeth, as she negligently lit a cigarette and with a graceful gesture invited me to take a seat, “if you hadn’t printed that interview with that horrid old Bluebeard last week. They used to say that I was a heartless coquette, and that all the men were losing their heads over me. Well, if a young man had come to ask me, around the year 1588, why I had never married—as you have just done—he’d have lost his head in just about the time it would have taken the chief executioner to respond to a hurry call. But times have changed and we change with them. History has done many cruel wrongs to my memory, and I want to be set right. I didn’t stay single for lack of proposals, I can tell you. Why, before I was sixteen the front yard of our palace looked like a college campus, it was so full all the time of young men carrying flowers and boxes of candy and ringing the doorbell, wanting to know if Princess Elizabeth were in. I had every other girl in England jealous of me, if I do say it myself. But I saw too much of marriage at home. My father did enough marrying for the whole family.

“Life got to be just one stepmother after another. I began to lose count. I decided that one member of the family had given enough of a boost to the institution of matrimony, and it didn’t need any further endorsement from me. I soon appreciated the truth of the saying, ‘Man proposes.’ I got so many proposals I had my maids of honor knit a lot of mittens to hand to the fellows as a souvenir. Finally the men saw I was in earnest and let me alone; that is to say, most of them. A few foolish fellows continued to write poetry (that is what they called it) and send presents, but my mind was made up and I refused to change it. It was about this time that our court fool remarked that woman’s favorite occupations were changing her mind, her clothes and her name. And about five minutes afterward he changed his permanent address to the Tower of London. All the world’s a stage, as my friend Shakespeare used to say, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men consider themselves perfectly equipped for the rôle of comedian. But it’s possible to be too fatally funny.

“Now, about that interview with Brother Bluebeard last week. I suppose he thought he was funny when he said about the only time a man gets his wife’s absorbed, undivided attention is when he talks in his sleep. But that’s about the only time a man says anything worth listening to. It just made my blood boil—that man Bluebeard calmly talking about the wives he’d killed. Not that I believe half of it. He was only boasting. And that reminds me: there used to be an organization called the Ananias Club. But who ever heard of a Sapphira Club? There wouldn’t be enough members to hold a meeting in a telephone booth. But ‘all men are liars,’ and married ones have more ready-made opportunities. It has been estimated that in a married lifetime of forty years the average man will be called upon to answer the perfectly reasonable inquiry, ‘Where have you been?’ 14,610 times. This calculation allows for 365 answers in each ordinary year and 366 in leap-years. And when her husband replies to her altogether proper interrogation, too often the wife realizes, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half has not been told her.

“From Ananias to Munchausen and down to the modern press agent, the experts at exaggeration have all been men. Fishermen’s tales and sailors’ yarns are proverbial. A woman trying to tell a lie feels like a fish out of water, and at the first opportunity flops back into the ocean of truth.

“There’s another slander on women I’d like to say a few words about, and that’s the charge of talkativeness. Men have always flocked to the talkative professions like ducks to water. Most lawyers and barbers are men. Are there any women auctioneers? There are few women preachers. There was a time when all the talking in the world was done by one man, but there was no conversation until the arrival of Eve. She did the listening. It is essential to conversation that there be a listener, and man’s happiness was not complete until there was somebody to hear him talk. The average husband loves to deliver home lectures on baseball in summer and politics in winter. Here we have the reason for the popularity of women’s clubs. No man being present, they have a chance to talk. Go into any church Sunday morning and what do you see? An audience composed principally of women listening to a man talking. The recording angel who tries to keep up with a man has to be an expert at taking lightning dictation. One of the newest works in three large volumes is entitled, ‘Last Words of Great Men.’ The edition makes no pretensions to being complete. That, of course, would be impossible when we have had so many great men, all of them talking steadily to the last. But it is worth noting that we have only meagre records of the last words of any great woman. Poor thing! With her husband, and a man doctor and a clergyman at her bedside, what chance would she have?

“I’ll admit that there have been a few of the so-called great men of history who have not been noted for their love of talk, but when such a man is discovered everybody calls attention to him as if he were a genuine curiosity of nature. He is usually given a nickname indicative of his peculiarity, such as William the Silent, and people travel miles to get a look at him. Practically every man is Speaker of the House, and in his case the title is no misnomer. For instance, it’s a question whether all the ancient martyrs put together ever said as much about their sufferings as one modern man with a boil on his neck. Man even goes ahead and invents new languages like Esperanto and baseball, and golf.

“Wives of great men most remind us that they talked all of the time, and departing left behind them words that were not worth a dime. Isn’t that what one of your own American poets said? Sounds something like it, anyway.

“But you wanted to know just why I never married. Well, it was because of these nasty flings at women by the men that I’ve just been speaking of. If they say such things before marriage, what won’t they say after? They’re always talking about women’s curiosity, starting with Eve and the apple. I suppose if there had been a Saturday Eden Post, Adam would have written alleged jokes about it or run a funny department called ‘Musings of a Married Man.’ I blame that Eve and her apple story for this eternal joshing about feminine curiosity. You needn’t look surprised, young man. I’m talking twentieth not sixteenth century language these days, and since yours is a family newspaper probably it’s just as well that I am. When I was queen you’d have thought the English language consisted principally of proper nouns and improper adjectives. We called a spade a spade, and then some. If a lady disliked a gentleman she didn’t say he was a mean old thing. She began by calling him a diabolical blackguard and horse thief, and then gradually grew abusive.

“Woman’s curiosity! All the census-takers and private detectives and professional Paul Pry’s who stick their noses into other people’s businesses are men. So are all the explorers, the individuals who are so curious to find out what’s going on at the other end of the earth that they can’t content themselves at home. If, in the history of the world, a woman has ever been seized by an overwhelming desire to see what the North Pole looks like, she has cleverly concealed the fact. While the men were organizing North Pole and South Pole expeditions, and relief expeditions, and expeditions to rescue the relief expeditions, the wives and mothers remained patiently on the job at home. And when the missing discoverers came back covered with hero medals, and suffering from chilblains, and writer’s cramp, and lecturer’s sore throat, and coupon-clipper’s thumb, the women never asked why heroine medals seem so scarce these days. Talk about curiosity! There’s a universal inquiry which is being put by some man to some woman in some part of the world at every second of every minute of the twenty-four hours, and it is this: ‘What did you do with that LAST money I gave you?’ There it is again, that insatiable curiosity of man which will not let him rest. Man is a perambulating question mark, the personification of the rising inflection, a chronic case of interrogationitis. And he has the nerve to talk about woman’s curiosity!”

“How about Sir Walter Raleigh?”

“Ah, young man, there are exceptions to every rule, and a woman is generally willing to take an exception. Walter was an awfully nice fellow, at first, but I was dreadfully disappointed in him. Do you know, that business of the velvet cloak and the mud puddle was only what you would call a grandstand play? I found out later. It was his last winter’s cloak, and he was just on his way to the Charing Cross rummage sale to give it away, when he happened to meet me. I know it’s so, because I got it straight at the meeting of the Westminster Sewing Society from the Countess of Leicester’s sister-in-law, who said she was told by the cousin of a woman who knew an intimate friend of a friend of Walter Raleigh’s aunt. And she said he actually laughed about it afterward!

“Do you wonder I stayed single? Perhaps I’ve said too much already, but one word more and I am finished. Do you know, young man, why women say marriage is a lottery? It is because they draw most of the blanks.”

Subdued, but with a sigh of relief, I withdrew hastily from the royal presence, feeling that “man’s inhumanity to man” wouldn’t be a marker to what would have happened to Queen Elizabeth’s husband.

III
JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY

“Interview your great-uncle and find out what he thinks of our modern navy,” said the city editor.

“My great-uncle?” I asked.

“Admiral J. Paul Jones. Wasn’t he one of your distinguished relatives? You’ve got the same name.”

“Oh, Uncle John? I believe we are related, but he was one of the rough specimens—sort of a piece of bark on the family tree—other side of the family, you know.”

“Well, you may find his bark worse than his bite.”

“Which planet is his shade living on now, do you know?”

“Neptune, I presume.”

And that is where I found him. He gave me genial greeting.

“Shiver my timbers, but I’m glad to see you. Come alongside and cast anchor, my lad, and tell me what wind blew you here.”

I explained that the mighty world below was palpitating for a few timely remarks from its old fighting hero.

“Fire away, then,” he replied. “What’s the first question?”

“Do you believe, Admiral,” I asked, “that a navy can be run on water—that is to say, of course, the ships have to run on water ... but I mean the men. Do you think——” And then I got tangled up and came to a full stop, for the expression on the old sea dog’s face was a mixture of puzzlement and pugnacity.

“What do you mean?” he roared. “Not to give the men water in place of grog?”

His attitude was positively menacing. I began to grow nervous.

“Why—er—that is the idea, Admiral. Do you believe it is possible to conduct a navy efficiently on prohibition principles?”

“Prohibition? Never heard the word before. And now that I have heard it I don’t like the sound of it. What are you jibbing and windjamming in this way for? Come right out and run up your true colors. Do you mean to tell me that anybody is seriously proposing to do away with grog in the American Navy? I’d hang the dastardly rascal from the yard-arm. Walking the plank would be too good for him.”

“Well, Admiral, you might as well know the whole truth. Grog has not only been abolished in the Navy (and that took place some years ago), grog has been abolished throughout the country. Liquor can neither be manufactured nor sold anywhere in the United States.”

Perhaps I should have broken the startling news to the old fellow more gently. But instead of the expected outburst of anger he sat stunned, still as a statue, or a speak-easy in Harlem.

For two minutes or more he kept silent. Then he spoke. “Say it again,” he muttered in a weak tone, “and say it slow.”

I complied.

“No grog for them as fights the battles, no whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum, nothin’ but milk and water. What kind o’ putty-faced swabs—But I needn’t ask. I see it now. You’ve been conquered by them Turks and water-drinking Mohammedans. But who’d have thought it?” And he shook his grizzled head disconsolately. “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum,” he went on muttering to himself as in a daze, over and over again, until I thought it might be advisable to recall him to himself.

“America thinks a great deal of you, Admiral,” I interrupted his melancholy monologue. “The nation cherishes the memory of your thrilling exploits. It will never forget your heroic deeds.”

The old Admiral brightened up a bit at this, but quickly relapsed into his melancholy mood. “No whiskey, no brandy—” he began again, when I tried the effect of another diversion.

“The nation is still safe, Admiral, and it has the largest number of ships and sailors in its history. The recent great war produced its heroes, too. We do not lack for defenders, you will be glad to know, if ever America is assailed again.”

“Yes, I’ve heard something about it,” he grumblingly admitted. “There’s a new-fangled cowardly sort of craft that goes under water and stabs in the back, a regular assassin, I call it. Farragut and Perry and some of the boys went down to perform at a seance in Philadelphia the other night, and they heard a lot of talk about your new naval heroes that have made us back numbers. There was Sims, and Daniels, and Benson, and—and—Admiral What’s-his-name? I can’t just think of it. Gray? No, that’s not it exactly. Admiral—Admiral—”

“Not Grayson?”

“Yes, that’s it, Rear Admiral Grayson. His flagship was the George Washington, I believe. And Admiral Denby, what did he do? I just can’t recollect on the moment.”

“Mr. Denby is not an Admiral; he’s the Secretary of the Navy. He’s not supposed to go to sea. He sits at a desk, instead of standing on a deck.”

“Oh, I see. But Rear Admiral Grayson? I wish you would describe some of his exploits to me.”

“Well-er—that’s a little difficult to explain, Admiral Jones, for you have been so long out of touch with our system. Admiral Grayson is really a doctor, and—”

“You mean the admirals say he is a doctor and the doctors say he is an admiral?”

“Oh, no, Admiral, not so bad as that. He is a medical admiral, not a fighting admiral. Rear Doctor—I mean Rear Admiral—Grayson was a naval surgeon, and he has been regularly promoted to the post of rear admiral. His job was looking after the President’s health, and all agree that he tendered good service.”

“Oh, a medical admiral, eh?” grumbled the old sea dog in a disappointed tone. “So that’s what he is. I can see him now, standing on the bridge of the good ship Calomel, stethoscope in hand, studying the symptoms of the approaching foe, writing the battle orders on prescription blanks and getting ready to fire a volley of quinine pills, three times a day before meals, at the hated enemy. I can see him taking the temperatures of the crew before going into action, and then, with a lancet in one hand and a scalpel in the other, preparing to repel boarders. I can see him charging the enemy (five dollars a visit, half price for office calls, consultations fifteen, operations, what you’ve got), I can hear the ringing words of command to candidates for vaccination: ‘Present arms.’ I can see him, with his trusty clinical thermometer and his rapid firing hypodermic, bravely—”

“You’ve got the wrong idea, entirely, Admiral Jones,” I hastened to interrupt. “It’s different from your day. None of our admirals do any hand-to-hand encounters. There are no more clashes at close quarters. Sometimes ships fight each other four or five miles apart.”

The grizzled veteran looked as if he scarcely understood what I was saying.

“No coming together with grappling irons, and fighting it out fair and square with pistols and cutlasses on the quarterdeck? A modern naval battle is just a long-distance artillery duel between Sunday School classes composed of total abstainers, as likely as not commanded by a specialist on whooping cough and measles? I guess it’s a good thing I shuffled off when I did. In my time a sea fight was more a matter of men than of machinery. I wouldn’t know how to go about it today. Everything is changed. I’m sure I’d forget to order a double round of hot lemonade for all the crew, instead of a stiff glass of grog, before going into an engagement. I must tell Farragut about it. I suppose they wouldn’t let him say anything stronger than ‘Darn the torpedoes,’ or ‘Oh, fudge,’ if he were down on the job today. And Commodore Perry: ‘We have met the enemy and made ’em all sign the pledge.’ That’s the sort of message he’d be expected to send nowadays. I suppose with all these new-fangled inventions you’ve been telling me about, wireless, and range-finders, and searchlights, and turbines, and seaplanes and torpedoes and all the rest of ’em, a fellow has to stay sober to work ’em. In my day we always considered that a man fought better when he was about three sheets in the wind. I don’t say our ways were perfect, but I’m sure I wouldn’t feel at home on one of your big floating machine shops. I’d forget myself sometimes and want to get close enough to the enemy to see him without a telescope—or a stethoscope.

“Well, you’ll have to excuse me now, my lad. I have a date with Lord Nelson for three o’clock, to join in the historic and comforting ceremony known as splicing the main brace. I’ll break the news to him about what you’ve just been telling me. He’ll need a bracer after he hears it.”

And as the old hero hobbled away I could hear him muttering to himself: “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum; water, water everywhere, but not a drop o’ drink.”

IV
JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING

“How about an interview with one of the shades on daylight saving?” I suggested timidly, as the city editor was racking what he calls his brain in search of a suitable assignment.

“Right! Get hold of one of the old astronomers, Galileo, or Ike Newton, or—or—”

“How would Joshua do?”

“Joshua? You don’t mean Josh Whitcomb? He wasn’t a real character. He was only—”

“No, I mean the Biblical Joshua—fellow who made the sun stand still. That’s what our modern clock-fixers are trying to do. And as the pioneer, the original inventor of the scheme, a few views on his twentieth century imitators ought to be interesting.”

“Go to it. He can’t make the situation any more confusing than it is already.”

I found the ancient prophet reclining under his own vine and fig tree, studying a brightly colored seed catalogue. With alacrity he accepted my invitation to talk for publication.

“Daylight saving, eh?” he mused. “It’s odd how you moderns never seem to get any ideas of your own. Always the same old thing over again. There’s nothing new under the sun. And now you’re trying to beat old Tempus Fidgets with what you imagine is a brand new scheme, but really is older than Solomon’s mother-in-law. What do you expect to get out of it, anyway?”

I started to explain how getting up an hour earlier in the morning through putting the clocks ahead gave us an additional hour of daylight at the other end of the day, when the old prophet cut in: “Just fooling yourselves, eh, a great, big game of make-believe by grown-ups in order to have a little more time for play? You move the clock forward and pretend it’s an hour later, by general agreement? Well, why don’t you extend the idea while you’re about it and apply it to other things besides clocks and time?”

“What, for instance, Mr. Joshua?”

“Well, take the thermometer, an instrument that’s been invented since my time. When I lived on earth we never suffered much from either heat or cold, because we hadn’t any thermometers to tell us that we were uncomfortable. If it were one hundred and ten in the mighty scarce shade out on the desert, we didn’t know it. Eighty-five or a hundred and fifteen—it was all the same to us. We never had any hot waves. There were no daily lists of heat victims. The thermometer liar was unknown. Nobody was initiated into the Ananias Club for boasting that the thermometer on his back porch hadn’t in fifteen years varied a degree from the official weatherman’s. We may have felt a little warmer under the mantle some days than others, but we couldn’t tell in degrees how uncomfortable we were, and so we were spared a lot of suffering. It’s the thermometer that makes you moderns take such a morbid interest in the weather. If you hadn’t any means of measuring the heat and the cold, why, you wouldn’t care anything about them. I was a prophet, but I never went so far as to dare to prophesy the weather. I knew my limitations. But your government guessers, backed up by their thermometers, seem willing to take any chances. Now, I suppose it’s too much to expect you to abolish your worrisome thermometers entirely, but why not take a hint from your daylight saving business and tinkering with the clock twice a year, and do a little fixing of your thermometers?

“For example? Well, for a beginning you would have to adopt a new kind of thermometer with changeable or removable figures. On April first of each year let everybody mark his thermometer down ten degrees. That is to say, the present figure ninety would be replaced by eighty, and eighty by seventy, and so on. The first hot spell would prove the practicability of the device. The scheme is purely psychological, of course, but so is daylight saving. Under the old pessimistic thermometer, which has done so much to encourage the Society for the Promotion of Justifiable Profanity, the temperature, we will say, would be eighty-five degrees in the shade, provided you could find any. But according to the marked-down thermometer it would be only seventy-five, just warm enough to sit comfortably on the front porch and smoke your pipe and read the paper while your wife was washing the dishes in the kitchen. Then in mid-July along comes what, under the old arrangement, would have been a regular scorcher, with the mercury registering ninety-two and all the meteorological Munchausens in town down at the corner drugstore boasting that their pet instruments were registering one hundred and two plus, in the shade. But the optimistic thermometer, operating under the universal heat-saving law, would record only eighty-two degrees. And everybody would be comparatively cool and comfortable. In fact, you would practically never have it ninety degrees in your climate.

“Think what that would mean to perspiring humanity! For we all know how the thermometer affects our feelings. And the optimistic thermometer would work just as well in winter as in summer. It would only be necessary to mark it up ten extra degrees in October. Then you would have mighty few zero days. The saving in coal would be tremendous, for we all regulate the heating apparatus by the thermometer instead of the feelings. The optimistic thermometer in winter would register seventy degrees in the living room when the old-fashioned instrument would have made it only sixty. Isn’t that as sensible as daylight saving?”

“It is certainly a novel idea, Mr. Joshua,” I replied in a non-committal tone. “You seem to be carrying out to the logical extreme the Scriptural theory that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Do you know of any other practical application of the principle?”

“It is capable of indefinite extension,” responded the ancient prophet. “Take the matter of people’s ages. Lots of folks are so sensitive on the subject that it makes them unhappy and others are discriminated against in business or the professions because they happen to be a year or two past an arbitrary age limit and have a bit of gray in their hair. Now, why not by common agreement let everybody over the age of forty mark down his or her age ten years? We are all as old, not as we look or feel, but as we think we are. If we can say it is only five o’clock when it’s six, then we can assume we are only fifty years old when, according to the strict, literal calculation, we are really sixty. Let’s give psychology a chance.”

“Fine idea, Mr. Joshua. Make believe that it’s an hour later or earlier than it is, that it is ten degrees hotter or colder than it is, and that we are all ten years younger than the record says. We live largely in a world of self-delusion anyway. That is what makes living endurable. You would only carry the principle a little farther, if I understand you. But there’s one little device for human happiness I wish you would add to the others.”

“And that is?”

“A barometer that will always predict fair weather when I want to play golf Sunday morning and rain if my wife wants me to go to church.”

But from the look the prophet gave me I saw that Joshua couldn’t be joshed with impunity, and leaping into my astral airplane I glided back to good old terra firma.

V
KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP

“My wife has just told me where we are going to spend my summer vacation,” remarked the city editor. “It’s been said that nothing is absolutely certain in this world, but it’s as sure as anything can be that I’m going to spend my three weeks just where the missus tells me. We never have any discussion on the subject at our house—none of that mountains or seashore business George Ade wrote about, ending in a compromise on the wife’s favorite mountains. But it’s always a relief when the suspense is over and the annual announcement by friend wife is made.

“And that reminds me; how about an interview with one of the shades on the modern vacation, summer resorts and all that sort of thing? Got anybody in mind for it? Noah? No, that trip of his was no summer vacation picnic. Suppose you ask Solomon how he managed the annual vacation business with all those wives of his. They tell me he was the wisest man that ever lived, and I’ll say he needed to be?”

I was gratified to find the shade of the former monarch and much-married man not at all averse to talking for publication. “You see,” he observed with an apologetic smile, “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk without being interrupted. It’s quite refreshing to have an appreciative, interested listener. Fortunately you have come on the very day when the Wives and Daughters of Solomon Association is holding its annual convention, and the mothers-in-law also are attending in their capacity of honorary members. They haven’t the privilege of voting—only of speaking from the floor—but that’s quite satisfactory. They don’t care where they speak from so long as they speak.

“And so, as I have said, we can have a cozy little chat. What did you want me to talk about? Summer vacations? My boy, I could tell you things about the trips I have taken in my capacity as a multiple husband that would dissuade you from matrimony ever after. But I do not wish to relate all the harrowing details. I’ll just give you a hint.

“Well, to start at the beginning, during the first few years of my married life the summer vacation germ spared our happy home. But as I gradually added more wives to my collection, an agitation was begun to get me to take them away somewhere for the summer. The wives began to find fault with the Jerusalem climate.

“They started to criticise what they called the stuffy little rooms of the royal palace. They suggested that other families were closing their houses, or renting them furnished for the summer, and going to the shore of the Mediterranean, where resorts had sprung up that advertised paradoxically cool breezes and a hot old time. They made life so miserable for me that finally one day, after a committee of wives had presented the subject and threatened that they would all go away to Mediterranean City on their own hook if I didn’t consent, I yielded.

“And then ensued such a season of preparation as I hope I shall never have to go through again. Four hundred new trunks bought, four hundred new summer outfits ordered. The palace as if by magic became filled with seamstresses and fitters and millinery architects and all sorts of strange women I had never seen before. You couldn’t walk down the front stairs without stumbling over a seamstress or two.

“The parlor, the living room, the library, all seemed full of sewing societies. Perfect strangers thronged the halls, their mouths full of pins, and tape measures hung around their necks.

“And then, the night before we were to depart, a special committee of wives called on me to exhibit the standardized bathing suit they had decided upon and get my official O. K. At first I was inclined to criticise—and then I reflected what a very, an exceedingly small thing it was to quarrel about—and graciously gave my consent.

“The next day we left Jerusalem for Mediterranean City. And we created some sensation. I headed the procession, followed by the Mesdames Solomon mounted on the four hundred camels. Then came a detachment of mothers-in-law on army mules (they were invited to come in relays during the summer) and the first instalment of the baggage train brought up the rear.

“The second instalment was to come next day with the things the wives had forgotten and sent back for. And other baggage trains were to follow from time to time during the summer, as needed.

“We were several days upon the journey. Before leaving I had not felt that I needed a vacation, but before we finally arrived at Mediterranean City I was ready for the rest cure.

“You see, traveling in those days was not like what it is now. A camel with shock absorbers and air-cushion springs might be a comfortable vehicle, I should imagine, but in his primitive state a camel’s motion is quite different from that of a limousine or a parlor car. Rubber heels had not been invented or I would surely have had our camels equipped with them.

“We had to camp out along the roadside several nights, and none of the wives were used to that. And they did not hesitate to express their feelings. We had started out with a goat among our numerous menagerie, but at an early stage of the proceedings he escaped into the desert—doubtless in search of peace and quiet.

“However, he was not missed. I took his place. It was a rôle to which, in spite of my royal rank, I was accustomed. Everything that went wrong—and that meant practically everything that happened from start to finish—was blamed on me. I was even accused of having planned and perpetrated the excursion, when I had never had the slightest notion of leaving Jerusalem until they suggested it. Finally my patience was exhausted, and I up and told them if they didn’t like it they could go to Jericho. Then, as now, Jericho was far from being an ideal place of summer residence, and their complaints gradually ceased.

“Well, we finally arrived at Mediterranean City, and then our sorrows began in earnest. I don’t know whether you have ever had any practical experience with the Mediterranean mosquito. I have never been quite able to forgive Noah for bringing ’em into the ark. A reception committee of these pests met us at the city gate and escorted us to the Hotel Paymore—so we were stung twice—when we arrived and when we paid the bill on our departure.

“The first hitch came when the clerk started assigning the rooms. It seems there were only some two hundred with an ocean view—and four hundred wives demanding a room apiece. The clerk threw up his hands and appealed to me. He had heard of some puzzling problems I had solved in my capacity as the world’s champion wise man—I threw up my hands and appealed to the proprietor. And he joined in the pleasing indoor pastime, known as passing the buck, by sending in a riot call for the police. But they didn’t come. They were men of long experience, and they knew better than to come between man and wives.

“The upshot was that we drew lots for the first night, the arrangement after that being to take turns occupying rooms with the ocean view. As for myself, with my usual benign disposition, I took a six-by-nine chamber—a room commanding a splendid prospect of the great desert. But I had learned not to be too particular.

“I cannot say that I enjoyed my first and only family summer vacation. Think of four hundred wives wanting to be taken out rowing every day! Think of being required to affix wriggling angle-worms to four hundred separate and distinct fish-hooks! I need not enter into details. These samples are sufficient.

“It is enough to say that after the regular vacation period was over I was compelled, on the advice of my chief physician, to enter the Jerusalem Sanitarium and Rest Cure in order to recuperate. It was ‘never again’ for me.

“I hear there is some complaining today among married men over having to take their wives to the seashore or the mountains. But they should pause to consider that their experience, at worst, can be only one four-hundredth as strenuous and wearing as was mine. I remember the day we got back home to the palace in Jerusalem. Every last one of those wives was so glad to be back that she went up to her room and had what she called ‘a good cry.’”

“And what did you do, Your Majesty?”

“Oh, I went down cellar and took a smile.”

And, notwithstanding my citizenship in the dryest nation on earth, I felt that Solomon had richly earned that spirituous solace.

VI
BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE

“I’ve got a job for you that’s some assignment. You say you always have to suggest the subjects for these interviews with the shades. Well, here’s one for you that I thought of last night all by myself. Interview Collector Brigham Young on woman suffrage.”

“Collector Young? I can’t quite recall on the moment. Let’s see: what did he collect?”

“Wives. Had one of the largest modern collections on record. When they were young used to call ’em his souvenir spoons. You may have a tough time getting him to talk, but if you succeed it ought to be hot stuff. I can imagine what Brigham Young would think of woman suffrage.”

But my usually infallible city editor was wrong on both points. Collector Young was not averse to talking for publication, and his views on woman suffrage were quite different from those he might have been presumed to hold.

“Take a seat. Glad to see you,” he exclaimed with all the affability I had been accustomed to receive during my adventures in interviewing illustrious spirits. “Thought I mightn’t wish to talk for publication? Why, I’ll talk for anything. Mighty glad of the opportunity. I talk now on the slightest provocation. Sometimes when there’s nobody else to talk to I talk to myself. Do you realize, young man, what it was to have forty-nine wives, simultaneously, and just about how much chance a husband had to get in an occasional remark edgewise? And as for getting the last word in a more or less animated discussion! Why, it always looked as if there never were going to be any last word.

“But after my extensive and varied matrimonial experience, as I have said, you can imagine the amount of pent-up opinions, the quantity of suppressed conversation I still have in my system. For thirty-two years my principal rôle in life was that of silent listener. Think of having to sit still and listen to forty-nine separate and distinct, and largely contradictory, reports of the meeting of the Mount Zion Missionary and Sewing Society! Think of listening every Sunday afternoon to forty-nine individual criticisms, chiefly destructive, of the feminine fashions observed in the congregation! Imagine the position of a so-called head of the house who could never utter a word without interrupting somebody or other! But the most maddening experience I had to undergo was when they all came down with the crocheting craze at the same time—or else the knitting mania—another form of feminine insanity—it’s all one to me. When the spell was on they wouldn’t talk to anyone else or let anyone else talk to them. It put them out of their count, they said. But they’d sit there in the front parlor—the whole regiment of them—and knit away, muttering some mysterious words to themselves. And never condescending to explain to a mere man what it was all about. They declared that would be ‘casting purls before swine.’ The click-click-click of the needles, forty-nine pairs of them all going at once, would sound like a knitting mill running full blast. And they always knitted in the evening, the time they insisted on my being at home. Said it made them nervous to be left alone in the house at night. Why, the forty-nine of them could have talked an ordinary burglar to death in half an hour and robbed him of his tools. But they thought they ought to have a man’s protection.”

“That reminds me, Mr. Young, of something I wanted to ask you before I knew you were going to be so courteously communicative. You will pardon me, I know, but I have often wondered how certain things were managed in such a-er-er—such a numerous establishment. For instance, the average husband with only one wife expects to be asked where he has been when he returns home late at night, but if he had forty-nine matrimonial partners, why, er-er—”

“You want to know whether they would all ask him at once? No, sir. That wasn’t the arrangement. We had committees for all such matters. Otherwise there would have been intolerable confusion. It would never have done in the world. A husband might inadvertently give twenty or thirty different—er-er—explanations of his unavoidable tardiness, and then when they got to comparing notes there would have been trouble. As I have said, we had committees. There was a committee on late returns and excuses, a committee for seeing that husband wore his rubbers to the office, a committee for reminding him to get his hair cut, a committee on new hats and gowns for summer and other seasons, a committee to get him to put on the screen doors in May, a committee to remind him about birthdays one week in advance, a committee for—oh, everything you can imagine. It was like a Legislature or Congress—except that instead of one there were forty-nine Speakers in the House.”

“Very interesting, Mr. Young, I am sure. But I was instructed to get your views on woman suffrage. Do you approve of women voting?”

“I don’t quite like the form of your question. Put it this way: do I object to women voting? I do not, for two reasons: first, I know better, after my extensive experience, than to object to anything women want to do, since it can do no good; and second, since women run things, anyway, to suit themselves, the act of voting is merely a symbol or ceremony of registration of their power. They were the real rulers before they got the ballot, and the vote isn’t going to change the situation any. The only hitch I see will come if the women can’t make up their minds as to just what and whom they want to vote for. I suppose in states where women have never voted before there may be a little trouble with those who have changed their minds after casting their ballot and want to get it back for a minute to add a postscript. But on the whole I don’t see why any man—any married one at least—should object to woman suffrage. Since the average voter gets his instructions from a political boss, anyway, it might be more convenient to have that boss in the family. Woman is assuming new duties and responsibilities every day. The hand that used to roll the baby carriage now rolls the cigarette.”

“You have spoken, Mr. Young,” I remarked as I rose to depart, “as if the wife were always the ruler, the autocrat of the home. Are you aware that the Census Bureau now officially recognizes the husband as the head of the house?”

Brigham smiled sadly as he replied: “Yes; but they only take a census once in ten years.”

And I tiptoed silently from the pathetic presence of one who had married not wisely, but too much.

VII
HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS

“What did you say about a hip-pocket?” queried the city editor suspiciously. “I want a drink as much as any man, but since prohibition arrived no camel has had anything on me. I believe in respecting the law even if—”

“I didn’t say anything about a hip-pocket,” I cut in. “I said it might be a good scheme to interview old Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, and find out what he thinks about modern doctors and surgeons and professional etiquette and whether times have improved any since he was in active practice a couple of thousand years ago. What do you think of the idea?”

“Go to it,” responded the C. E., “but be careful he doesn’t try to charge you ‘for professional advice.’ Make him understand that we’re doing the favor, not he. He ought to be glad of the free advertising. He’ll say at first he doesn’t want any publicity—it is unethical. See if he doesn’t. These doctors are all alike. I know ’em.”

Much to my surprise the city editor’s cynical prediction was verified by my victim’s opening remarks. “You want me to talk for publication, young man?” said the Father of Medicine. “You’re sure you’re not a representative of an eastern publishing house who has been authorized to place a few copies of a new encyclopedia with a selected number of the most prominent citizens, absolutely free of charge, on payment of a dollar down and five dollars a month for twenty years?”

Somewhat mystified, I replied in the negative.

“And you’re not demonstrating from purely philanthropic motives—the only charge being for packing and postage—a new tonic guaranteed to make the baldest pate blossom into a Paderewski?”

“No, sir, I’m not an agent of any kind. I have nothing to sell.”

“You are certain you are not promoting the sale of a new absolutely talk-proof safety razor for married men whose wives insist on conversing while they are trying to shave themselves? Or a new hip-pocket Testament holding one pint? Or a machine for manufacturing cigars at home, in anticipation of the next Great Reform? Or a self-spelling typewriter for business college graduates? You are not selling stock in a gold mine in Iceland at fifty cents par today, but price to be raised positively next Monday at ten o’clock to a dollar and a half, all shares guaranteed non-assessable and non-returnable? You are not the agent for a combination snow-shovel and lawn-mower, especially designed for the North American climate, transposable at a moment’s notice? You are not selling diamond-studded coupon clippers for profiteers or self-finding collar buttons, or—”

“My dear sir, I have nothing to sell at all. I am a reporter and I want—”

“Oh, a reporter? Well, why didn’t you say so at first, instead of causing all this confusion and waste of breath? I’ve been so bothered with agents of every sort lately that I can’t sleep nights. I told one that the other day and he pulled a bottle out of his bag and tried to sell me an infallible cure for insomnia. I resolved not to let another one into my house. But you’re a reporter, eh? That’s a refreshing novelty around here. Come in.

“But you must know that I never talk for publication. I have never done such a thing in my entire professional career. It would be entirely contrary to the ethics of my sacred calling. Somebody might say I was trying to advertise myself. You know doctors can’t be too careful. We never advertise. We may occasionally consent, under pressure, to the publication of an item in the society column saying that ‘Dr. Theophilus Sawbones of 52896 Arnica Avenue has returned after a two weeks’ trip to Atlantic City and resumed his practice.’ But that isn’t advertising. That’s news. You never see a surgeon, for instance, descending to the low commercial plane of your merchants, and announcing in a display advertisement: ‘Cut rates all this week at Dr. Carvem’s. Now is the time to get that appendix cut out. All operations marked down. Special bargains in tonsils.’

“No, sir. We have an exalted code of ethics in our profession, I am happy to say, dating from the time when I founded the practice of medicine. But if you are sure a few timely remarks from me will not be misinterpreted and regarded as an attempt on my part to get into the limelight, I am at your service to the extent of about a column and a half, offered for acceptance at your regular rates, to be run next reading matter.”

“I am certain, doctor,” I responded, “that the world will attribute no self-promoting motives to one enjoying your long and honorable reputation. Do you note many changes in the practice of medicine since the days when you were in the harness?”

“Well,” responded Hippocrates as he thoughtfully stroked his long beard, “there seem to be more different kinds of doctors nowadays than we had in 400 B. C. We didn’t know anything about specialists in our time. We were not merely general practitioners; we were universal practitioners.

“Suppose, for instance, a prosperous citizen of Athens had the gout, indigestion, corns, heart murmur, rheumatism, torpidity of the liver and clergyman’s sore throat—seven ailments in all. He sent for me and I treated all his diseases at the same time. While he had a combination of diseases, we knew any good doctor would understand the combination.

“I felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, and told him he was working too hard—just as one of your modern doctors would do. It always pleases a prosperous citizen to be told that he is working too hard—and we aim to please. If I thought he would like a trip somewhere, I recommended a run over to Rome during the Coliseum season. They used to have some mighty good shows at the Coliseum. If he preferred to take his vacation at home, then I recommended a trip for his wife. I told him not to eat so much and to take more exercise, and to cut out the worry, and then collected my fee of two drachmas, and went on to the next vic—I mean, the next patient.

“But take that same prosperous citizen today. How many specialists would he have to call in before he could consider his case properly attended to? Seven diseases, seven specialists, you say? Oh, more than that. First thing he’d have to send for the primary diagnostician, if he wished to do it in thoroughly up-to-date style. Well, the primary diagnostician would come in to find out, first, what was the matter with him. He looks the patient all over and takes flash-light pictures of his interior, makes a card index of all the things the matter with him and then calls in his stenographer and dictates a circular letter to a collection of specialists, asking them to drop around at their leisure and confirm his diagnoses. And do they proceed then to treat the patient? Not for a minute. They are the secondary diagnosticians. Each has his specialty and wouldn’t dream of encroaching on any other specialist’s territory. The gout man looks only for gout—and he finds what he is looking for. The indigestion expert does the same—and it can’t escape his eagle eye. It’s the same all down the line.

“When the seven secondary diagnosticians have finished their job the patient is presented with seven neatly-inscribed charts, showing the general plan and location of his various troubles—and seven courteously worded communications beginning with precisely the same words: ‘For professional services to date.’

“Now it’s time to call in the specialists who administer the treatment. Seven more of ’em. Why, nowadays the house of a rich man who’s got something the matter with his insides looks like the convention hall of the American Medical Association during a well-attended session. And that’s not all. You not only have to have a different doctor for each disease, but a whole lot of brand-new diseases we never heard of in my time have been invented. Back in the old days in Athens there were only about a dozen ailments a fellow could acquire. If he escaped these he never had to call in a doctor. But today, as any specialist will tell you, there are about fifty-seven varieties of throat trouble alone. You can have eighty-six different things the matter with your liver, while the various kinds of indigestion, plain and fancy, would fill a book. In our time, too, we did mighty little tinkering with the human frame with tools and things. We knew about the appendix, but we failed to perceive its commercial possibilities. We thought it had been put there for some wise purpose—but it didn’t occur to us that it might be a financial one. The price of a modern appendicitis operation would have supported one of our old Greek physicians in luxury for three years.

“It was the same with tonsils. We’d as soon have thought of cutting off a man’s tongue as taking out his tonsils. Every young doctor had to take an oath—the Hippocratic oath, I called it—that he would give everybody the benefit of his services without regard to money. Nowadays if doctors take the oath I presume a good many of them keep their fingers crossed. I agree that when a doctor is called out of his bed in the middle of the night, to treat an old fellow who is suffering from nothing except fatty degeneration of the pocketbook, it’s quite a temptation to relieve him of a substantial share of that trouble. Some folk think they aren’t getting full attention unless they are charged enough to make them feel it in the pocket nerve. Increased wages of workingmen are bound to enlarge the number of millionaire medicos.”

“So, you think, Doctor, the practice of medicine has become somewhat commercialized since your day?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. I did not wish to reflect on my successors. That would not be professional. I’m simply sorry that back in 400 B. C. we were not alive to our opportunities. Think of our allowing Croesus, the richest man that ever lived, to go around with his appendix intact! Why, I sat up with him all one night when he had acute inflammation of the imagination and thought he saw pink Egyptian crocodiles crawling up the window-shades, and only charged him two dollars!

“No, understand me. I’m not finding fault with the twentieth century doctors. I’m only envious of their opportunities. Your modern doctor dashes around town in his automobile and calls on twenty patients a day. I had an old ox team, non-self-starting, that couldn’t take the smallest hill on high and had a maximum speed on the level of two miles an hour. While I was attending a patient at one end of Athens a patient at the other end had time to get well without my assistance. That was discouraging to any young fellow just as his practice and professional beard were beginning to grow. And nowadays they tell me you have allopaths, and homeopaths and osteopaths—but you must remember that all paths lead to the grave.”

“Why is that last joke just like you, Doctor?” I interposed in self-defense.

“I give it up. Why is it?”

“Because it dates from at least 400 B. C.”

And the look Hippocrates gave in return made me thankful he wasn’t my family doctor. I knew he would rejoice to write me a prescription of ten grains of strychnine, three times a day, to be taken before meals.

VIII
METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS

It’s odd how often in interviewing the old-timers and ancient shades one’s preconceived ideas get a jolt. In my mind’s eye I had a vision of Methuselah, for instance, as an antediluvian figure with a Santa Claus beard and a general air of decrepitude. The door was opened in response to my ring by a smartly dressed, smooth-shaven individual, who certainly looked as if the burden of age sat lightly upon his shoulders.

“I should like to see Mr. Methuselah,” I said. “That is, if he is able to see callers today. If he’s having his nap, or not feeling very spry this morning, I can come again.”

“Come again? I guess not. You see me right now. I was going over to the Olympus Club to play a round of golf, but I’ll be glad to give you half an hour. Walk right in. What can I do for you?”

“My city editor wanted an interview on how to attain long life, but I must have got hold of the wrong Mr. Methuselah. I want the one who lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, the world’s champion oldest inhabitant. Surely you’re not—”

“I’ll say I am. I’m the only original, the guaranteed nine-times-centenarian and then some. I know what you expected to see: an old fossil with snowy whiskers and numerous wrinkles, walking with a couple of canes and dressed in a single garment like an old-fashioned nightshirt. You were prepared to have me give my reminiscences, to wheeze out, between painful breaths, that the old days were far better than anything we have now, to roast the younger generation, and wind up by attributing my longevity to abstaining from booze and the use of tobacco in any form. You were all ready to put down that I can read fine print without glasses and can remember events of nine hundred and fifty years ago as if they happened only yesterday. Oh, I know you newspaper fellows and I’ve read so many interviews with centenarians I could write one myself with my eyes shut. My advice to anybody who wants to live to be a hundred, to say nothing of nine hundred and sixty-nine, is, ‘Don’t.’ And as for reminiscences, my motto is, ‘Forget it.’ I haven’t any very happy recollections of my long-drawn-out stay on earth. Existence is pleasant, but it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing.

“Take our married life, for instance. At the start everybody said it was a regular love story. But even a love story that stretches out into a serial of over nine hundred chapters gets a trifle monotonous. You’ve never heard of Mrs. M. She wouldn’t tell her age even to get her name into the Bible. I remember when they first started taking the census. The census taker came to our house and camped out three years. Couldn’t get all the facts of our family any other way. And we had to board him all that time. Well, his wife’s sister belonged to the Daughters of Eve Foreign Missionary Society, the same one my wife did, and Mrs. M. said she just knew that if she gave her age, why, that mean old thing would know it within half an hour, and it would be all around town before the day was over. And she just wouldn’t give it. I gave him all the dope about the other members of the family, my great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren and the close relations on my wife’s side who’d been living with us for three hundred and fifty years (close was no name for it), but I balked when it came to the question of Mrs. M.’s age. The fact was, she was only about four hundred and twenty-five, or thereabouts, at the time, but you know how women are—so blamed sensitive about something that men are proud of—and so I told him to go and get the information from headquarters.

“Well, it happened to be a bad combination that day. It was wash-day, and the cook had just left, after being with us for a hundred and eighty years, and quite a number of the children had the measles and the whooping cough and one thing another, and Mrs. M. happened to have a mop in her hand at the time, and—But here I am reminiscing away and I said I wouldn’t. Let’s get back to business. What did you want me to talk about?”

“I’d like you to explain how you’ve kept so young-looking and feeling after all these years.”

“That’s easy. I’m just following the new policy of you folks down below and carrying it out to its logical extreme. The modern idea is to regard age as merely a state of mind. Simply refuse to grow old and you’ll find it’s easy enough to stay young. Is your hair getting gray? Never say dye. Is your hair falling out? Get it bobbed. Don’t try camouflaging your face, but keep young inside. Joshua has the right dope: let’s have some lifetime saving. Half a century ago a man was old at forty and a woman put on a cap and sat in the chimney corner when she turned thirty. A girl was an old maid at twenty-five. Today you think there’s something wrong with a grandmother who can’t jazz and nobody knows the meaning of ‘declining years.’ And nobody is too old to decline a cigarette or a dance. They used to say a man ought to retire at seventy. Now it’s hard to get him to retire at midnight, if there’s a good show left in town. Folks are just beginning to enjoy life at sixty.

“All I’ve done is to follow you folk’s example and refuse to be old at nine hundred and sixty-nine. If I can do it, everybody can. How does this jibe with my advice not to try to live to be a hundred, you may ask. That’s perfectly consistent. The way to live long is not to bother about it. I wouldn’t have been five hundred if I’d tried to keep up with the advice of all the insurance experts. I speak from experience. Take the ‘no breakfast’ cranks, for instance. I went without breakfast for one hundred and twenty-five years and I didn’t know what was the matter with me. Then I tried taking a couple of pounds of beefsteak and half a dozen baked potatoes before breakfast every morning, and I felt like a new man. Then, once at the beginning of a century—I forget which one—Mrs. M. got me to swear off on tobacco for a hundred years. We used to make our so-called good resolutions at the start of a century, not of a year, the way you do. The first hundred years may be the hardest, she said, but ‘see how much better you’ll feel.’ Well, I stuck it out about sixty years, and then the whole family came around and besought me on bended knee to go back to hitting the pipe. They said life in our once happy home was getting to resemble a bear garden or a peace conference or a free-for-all prize fight. Better to smoke than to fume. And so I got out the old pipe and smoked up for another six hundred years.

“I wish I’d kept a card index of all the health fads I’ve seen come and go. Once the vegetarians had their inning. Somebody said the secret of health was to eat nothing but onions. It would have been pretty hard to keep the secret. Then we were told to eat only fruit. And once all the cranks decided on an exclusive diet of nuts—sort of cannibalistic when you come to think of it. One winter they said we’d all be healthier with the minimum of underwear—the short and simple flannels of the poor. Another rule for living long was to almost freeze yourself every morning taking a cold bath—I remember one winter I qualified for a zero medal. I ate baled hay and fried sawdust and all sorts of breakfast foods for two or three centuries, under the impression that they were the elixirs of eternal youth, and then one day I found I was getting so weak and wobbly on my pins I cut ’em all out and went back to a good dose of real food, three times a day, to be taken at mealtime. I quit the fads and fancies, ate everything that came my way and let ’em fight it out among themselves. And I broke the world’s record for dodging the undertaker.

“But, as I remarked before, I can’t say I’d advise anybody to try to be even a single centenarian, to say nothing of scoring nine. Think of paying for nine hundred birthday presents your wife gave you, not to mention several thousand contributed by the children and grandchildren and other descendants. Why, one birthday I got ninety-three pairs of slippers, most of ’em, of course, a size too small—must have thought I was a centipede. Then there’s a good deal of competition among centenarians, and that leads to jealousy and hard feelings. For instance, I’d always predicted the weather by my rheumatiz (although I could never tell when there was going to be a storm at home). I got quite a reputation by it. And then an upstart centenarian over at Ararat, a young fellow only about three hundred years old, claimed it always rained when his corns hurt him—or the other way round—and took away about half my visitors. He boasted that he had a set of infallible corns, and every morning he’d get out a bulletin such as ‘Fair and warmer,’ or ‘Cold weather with snow.’ A regular fakir, he was. Honest folk just considered him one of those excess prophets. But he seemed to guess right about fifty per cent of the time, and when he was wrong people gave him credit for his good intentions. His whole stock in trade was his corns. Any good chiropodist could have reduced him to bankruptcy in five minutes. But he put up a bluff and got away with it and made folks think he was the real Oldest Inhabitant.”

“One more question, Mr. Methuselah: how do you account for the fact that folks lived so much longer in your time than they do nowadays?”

“Well, there were no automobiles and telephones and germ theories, and revenue officers and apartment houses and phonographs and piano-players and rolled hose and alarm clocks and table d’hôte dinners, for one thing, and for another, we didn’t try to compress five hundred years of living into a fifty years’ existence. We didn’t cover any more distance over the highway of life than you moderns do, but we took more time to do it in. We walked instead of ran, and picked flowers along the wayside and paused now and then to admire the scenery. And rich or poor, young or old, we got out of life exactly what you do—a living. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I promised to play nine holes with Noah before luncheon. How would you like to carry my golf sticks?”

I respectfully declined, pleading a previous engagement. I have played many rôles in my time, as a reporter, but I felt I must draw the line at caddying for Methuselah.

IX
JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING

On receiving the city editor’s assignment to interview the shade of Jesse James on the tipping custom, I carefully removed my watch, purse and scarfpin and left them in my desk, for even my brief experience with dwellers in the astral region had taught me that they haven’t greatly changed their habits and modes of living since their departure from earthly scenes, and I couldn’t afford to run any risk. But I soon found that I needn’t have taken the precaution, for in almost his first words the famous bandit and all-round bad man showed me that he had thoroughly reformed.

“Want me to talk about tipping, eh?” he growled. “Well, I throw up my hands. I’m through with the bandit business. I’m a has-been, a second-rater, and I don’t mind admittin’ it. I suppose you know that we shades go back to earth now and then to see how things are comin’ along, take a hand in ’em, too, if we feel like it. Sometimes we play one-night stands for the mejums. Captain Kidd had a job all last season at a kind of continuous performance seance in Boston. Took all sorts of parts, from Julius Cæsar to Andrew Jackson. One night he was materializin’ as John Bunyun, and he couldn’t find his chewin’ tobacco or something, and he kind o’ forgot himself and he used the particular brand of language that Bunyun didn’t and—well, that ended the Massachusetts engagement. We don’t all go in for performin’. Personally, I prefer just to go around the old places and mix in with the crowds and compare old times to these, but I’m not going back again for a while. My last trip was a little too much for me. I got a shock and I guess I need a good long rest.

“I’d heard considerable about this tipping business, pro and con, but I thought it just meant slippin’ the colored waiter a nickel if he happened to be extra spry and accommodatin’. That’s the way it used to be out in Missouri back in seventy-nine. But tipping today! Yours truly and his gang was called bandits, and train robbers, and highwaymen, and I don’t know what all, when we was carryin’ on our profitable little business of forty years ago, but we had nothing on the members of the Amalgamated Association of Tip Extractors of 1922. We were pikers, that’s all, plain, everyday pikers. We had no organization, no system, no nothing. It was just about the difference between running a peanut stand and a billion-dollar trust. I suppose if we were operatin’ today with our old gang we’d have a cash register and an addin’ machine and a private telephone exchange and a card index of past and prospective customers and a publicity department, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight. But, shucks! Even then we couldn’t compete with the great national hold-up game that’s going on all the time. On that last trip down below I was never so discouraged and humiliated in my life. I sat in a hotel restaurant and watched a head waiter at work. From the professional standpoint it was beautiful. Nothing could have been more artistic. But it made me feel blue, made me realize how I had neglected my opportunities. There he stood, no mask on his face, no gun in his hand, dressed in a swallowtail and biled shirt, takin’ toll so fast he hadn’t time to count it. Everybody gave up, without a murmur. And the next day, too, he was there at the same old stand, as if there wasn’t any such thing as a sheriff within fifty miles. No look-out men on guard, no disguise, no frisking the victims for concealed weapons. The folks just handin’ out the coin as meek as lambs. It was a revelation to me. In the old days we never stayed two days in the same place, nor two hours neither, believe me. But somebody said that head waiter had been on that same job for fifteen years. Fifteen years! I’d have owned the state of Missouri if they’d let me alone that long.

“It made me positively sick to see how the hold-up boys are getting away with it so easy these days, and a friend recommended an ocean trip. ‘Take a run over to Europe and back,’ he says. ‘You’ve never been to sea and it’ll do you good.’ The day I boarded the boat I asked a stranger who had the next cell to put me wise to this tipping business, because I wanted to do the right thing. ‘Five dollars to your stateroom steward,’ he said, ‘and five to the saloon steward.’ ‘I don’t drink any more,’ I said. ‘Saloon means dining room.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘And two-fifty to the deck steward and the same to the library steward. The smoke room steward will expect a couple of dollars and the boy who blacks your boots about one-fifty. Bath steward, two dollars. Card room steward, one dollar. And of course you’ll tip the barber and anyone else who does you a service.’

“Going into the washroom, the first sign I saw read: ‘Please tip the basin.’ And I walked right out and went to bed for two days. The waiter brought in all my meals—a dollar tip a meal. When I had recovered enough to sit on deck in one of them overgrown Morris chairs, I couldn’t get that tipping idea out of my head. A friend introduced me to a fat fellow in uniform. I didn’t catch the name, but automatically handed him fifty cents and then learned that he was the captain. The day we arrived at Liverpool the passengers were all drawn up on deck and so were the pirates—excuse me, I mean the crew. Then came the ringing words of command: ‘Present alms!’ And we handed over all the coin we had left. I only wished Captain Kidd had been there. He’d have learned something new about his old game.

“I confess I had thought some of going back into the hold-up business, just to keep my hand in, but never again now. Too much competition, and I’m too old to learn new ways. Good-bye, young man, and if you want to say a good word for an old man who never did you any harm, put this in your article:

“‘Jesse James may have had his faults, but he was different from some of the folks who are now carrying on the business—he never robbed the same man twice.’”

X
SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES

The thought of interviewing a gentlemanly genius like William Shakespeare after stacking up against such remote and formidable characters as Bluebeard, Brigham Young and Jesse James was most refreshing, though it took some nerve after all to tackle the world’s champion dramatic poet. I had feared he might be slightly disinclined to talk, not being familiar with the ways of modern journalism, but I was speedily set at ease on that point.

“Not talk for publication?” said the shade of Shakespeare, as he resumed his seat in his Morris chair upon my entrance, and tried to look like his pictures. “Not talk for publication? Did you ever know an actor, playwright or a poet who wouldn’t? And I’ve been all three, and a theatrical manager thrown in. It’s quite a while since I trod the boards, or walked the ties, but I’ve managed to keep fairly in touch with the times from frequent trips down below to oblige my mediumistic friends. There’s a great boom on just now. I could get an engagement every night in the week, and a pair of matinées, if I cared to perform. But there’s nothing in it. If they’d let me perform in my own plays it would be different. But there’s not much demand for them, it seems. All they’ll let me do is play the tambourine in a dark cabinet and scribble on slates and turn tables—just vaudeville I call it. And I see they’re beginning to censor my plays and cut out all references to booze on account of the new prohibition law. They made one of my actors quit giving the line: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Said it gave a wrong impression and tantalized men in the audience who thought the speaker was referring to his private stock down cellar. Well, all the world’s a stage—and the last time I was down I noticed most of the girls seemed to believe in making up for their parts. Talk about fresh paint!

“But you wished me to compare modern theatrical conditions with those of my day. This is an age of specialists, but as I have said, when I was on earth, ‘One man in his time plays many parts.’ I used to write a play, hire a company, rehearse it, take the leading part myself, sell tickets at the door, usher, beat the bass drum, fill the lamps and sweep out. I’ve died on the stage and two minutes later gone up into the top gallery to bounce a couple of rowdies. But we were all trained to versatility in those days. No women were allowed to act, you know. You can’t imagine how nice and peaceful it was in our companies. Nobody ever threatened to quit because the type of his name on the posters was an eighth of an inch smaller than somebody else’s. Nobody ever cried all over the stage because somebody made disparaging remarks about his complexion or said his teeth showed he was ten years older than he claimed. But there were disadvantages, too, from the absence of the girls. Men had to take feminine parts. And you take an Ophelia, for instance, who chews tobacco and is drunk half the time, and it’s hard to invest the part with the genuine pathos it demands. I remember one time I hired a tall, gawky youth to play the part of Desdemona. He was all right the first week, but after that his voice suddenly began changing, and it sounded like a phonograph record that’s had a fall and got twisted. A Desdemona with a deep bass voice that switches to a shrill soprano without warning and then back again to the husky rumbling in the space of thirty seconds is bound to incur adverse criticism.

“I once had a Lady Macbeth, too, who had a habit of smoking his pipe behind the scenes while waiting for his cue. And one time, when he got the call, he absent-mindedly forgot to put his pipe away. It is entirely contrary to tradition for Lady Macbeth to smoke a pipe in the sleep-walking scene, and I had to dispense with his services the next Saturday night. And barring absent-mindedness, he was the best Lady Macbeth I ever had, too. I suppose our performances were pretty bum. But there were no daily newspaper dramatic critics then, and we didn’t know how rotten we were. Ignorance was bliss, both for us and for our audiences. We were handicapped, also, by lack of scenery. Our property man had a sinecure. The only ‘set’ we had consisted of a couple of kitchen chairs and a tin pan—the latter for the thunder. We used the chairs for thrones or mossy banks or anything else that happened to be needed. The audience had to picture the rest of the scenery. There was no curtain and the orchestra consisted of one performer. That insured harmony in the orchestra. Our equipment was ahead of your modern companies in only one respect: that of costumes. We always had plenty of costumes, such as they were. The last time I was down below I attended a musical comedy performance, and I was pained to observe how badly handicapped the management was in the matter of costumes. There weren’t half enough to go around. And the thermometer was below zero, too. As I said, we always had enough costumes, because we used the same ones in every performance. Everybody, from Romeo to old King Lear, wore an antiquated red bathrobe and slippers. At least we managed to keep warm. Unlike your modern managers, we never had to hang out the ‘Standing room only’ sign. Nobody would have gone if he couldn’t get a seat. But I’ve been told that nowadays theater audiences will stand for anything. I can believe it after seeing some of your plays. As I have remarked in one of my own compositions, ‘Sweet are the uses of advertisements.’

“But to return to our discussion. The present generation has witnessed a wonderful addition to the dramatic art. I refer to the moving pictures. You thought I wouldn’t be for them? I am. I think they’re wonderful. I only wish we’d had them in my day. I’d have been able to retire about ten years sooner. You see, the highest salary I ever got was about twenty-five a week, and out of that I had to pay my board and traveling expenses—everything but hauling trunks to the hotel. Then I went into the producing game and did a little better. But even then, some Saturday nights, the ghost didn’t walk—except the one in Hamlet. I understand the average salary of a modern moving picture actor is a million dollars a year and accident insurance. Newcomers learning the business draw down nominal pay of five thou’ a week. Small my-lord-the-carriage-waits parts get only two thousand a week, and so on down to the supes and scene-shifters and deckhands struggling to support their families on a hundred or so a day. I figure that the salary of a first-class movie actor for one year would have supported in luxury all the actors of my day for their entire lifetimes. And they’d have saved money. In my day an actor was about the next thing to a professional pauper. Like the dentist, he eked out a hand-to-mouth existence, but unlike the dentist he didn’t often have the opportunity of filling an aching void—his stomach. Life was just one bill collector after another. When anybody was needed to play the rôle of the half-starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet there was no trouble finding a fellow who looked the part. There was always a rush of volunteers for the banquet scenes—if real food was provided. But I don’t begrudge your modern actors their prosperity. I only wish the stuff had been handed around a little earlier. That’s all.”

“Are you so enthusiastic over the movies, Mr. Shakespeare, that you like to have them produce your own plays? Or is that sacrilege?”

“I’d like to have my plays in the movies if they’d produce them properly. But what makes me sore is to have them leave out all the pep. When a play is transferred from the book or the stage to the movie, certain necessary changes should be made. The first requirement of the picture play is action. There’s no place for talk. Now, if they’re going to have my plays in the movies, I wish they’d popularize ’em. For instance, in my day there wasn’t an actor who knew how to throw a pie. Nobody could fire a pistol without ever taking aim—the way the movie actors do it. I hate to see my plays fail just for lack of a few pies and pistols, artistically handled. When one of my productions is put on the screen they engage some long-faced tragedian who’s immersed in great gobs of gloom all the time—some impressive individual with a St. Bernard voice that’s entirely wasted in the movies. What I say is: get somebody like Charlie Chaplin for Romeo and Mary Pickford for Juliet, Mary Carr or Nazimova for the nurse, and put some punch into it. Take Hamlet: imagine Ben Turpin and his fat side kick as grave diggers! What a rattling good duel Doug Fairbanks and Bill Hart could pull off with pistols at forty paces! If they’re going to have my plays in the movies, then have movie actors give them; that’s all I say. And make them real movie plays while they’re about it.”

“One question more, Mr. Shakespeare. You have described most graphically the seven ages of man. In view of femininity’s wonderful progress, could you not give me a parting message on the ages of woman?”

The great dramatist pondered deeply for a moment and then replied in an impressive tone. “Woman has only two ages nowadays,” he said with a sigh. “Her real one and the one she uses to vote.”

His air of finality showed me that our interview was at an end.

XI
ADAM CONDEMNS FEMININE FASHIONS

I had been assigned to interview Eve on the feminine fashions of 1922, but the maid said she was out, and so I had to fall back on old Adam instead. I approached the father of the race not without diffidence, feeling so painfully young and fearing he would not care to talk for publication, but his opening remarks set me entirely at ease.

“Not care to be quoted!” he exclaimed. “I’m mighty glad of the opportunity. I don’t have one so often, now that Eve stays home so much. You see, she calls only on people of the first families, and they’re not very numerous around here. The neighbors say she gives herself airs, and so they don’t call on her. It’s been a lasting source of grief that she’s ineligible to join the Daughters of anything. She arrived too early on the scene. It used to be awfully galling to her to hear the women all talking about their family trees and boasting of their ancestors, and swapping lies about what their great-great-grandfathers said to George Washington at the battle of San Juan Hill, or whatever it was, and giving an expurgated edition of what George Washington said to Lord Cornwallis, as handed down to posterity in the family records. Eve used to sit in a corner and weep while the Daughters of the Mexican Revolutions or the Granddaughters of Russian Independence (to be eligible for the latter you must have an ancestor who shot at least one grand duke, five assassinations making you an ace; and if your relative happened to pot a Czar your social position is assured forever) were spinning their yarns and trying to make each other jealous. But now she’s organized a new society, the Mothers of Humanity, and she’s president, secretary, treasurer and chairman of the committee on membership. She’s away this afternoon calling on Mrs. Methuselah and they’re trying to get up some scheme that will induce all the women they want to blackball to apply for membership.

“Yes, poor Eve has had a pretty hard time right from the start, and I don’t believe her descendants have appreciated what she did for them. I’ll say this for her: she’s been as true as steel, even if she hasn’t always kept her temper so well. It’s a fact that after that first little unpleasantness she always kept a broomstick handy for any peddler who might come along trying to sell ‘nice eating apples,’ but consider the provocation! There we were, nicely settled in the garden, no work, nothing to do but step out in the yard and help ourselves to all the fruit and vegetables in sight. All the trees and vines were of the self-cultivating variety. We’d never even heard of the high cost of living. No family to support. No neighbors to scrap with. No money, and no pockets to put it in if we had had, but, glorious thought! No bills to pay. We had our little disagreements, of course. The first day she arrived, Eve said I’d been doing the dishes the wrong way, letting ’em all go until the end of the month and then turning the hose on ’em out in the front yard; she insisted on washing ’em after every meal. But, as I said, who was there to know the difference? She had to learn the names of all the animals, and she was especially glad to hear about the bear, so that she could tell me what I was as-cross-as when I got the grip that first winter.

“Yes, life is real and wife is earnest, but, as I said, ours was very happy. The first quarrel? I don’t know that I remember just what it was about. I recall a dispute over Eve’s new bathing suit, which was intensified by my innocent remark that it was an exceedingly small thing to quarrel about, but I think our initial serious disagreement occurred when I respectfully declined to go into hysterics over Cain’s first tooth.

“And this reminds me: our first social event in Eden was little Cain’s inaugural bawl. I’m sure you’ll pardon me for getting that off my mind at this stage of the interview. If I tried that joke on Eve once I tried it fifty times, and every time I was met by the same blank stare. I’ve been waiting seven thousand years to tell it to somebody who would appreciate it. Thank you for smiling. I was the originator of the saying that women have no sense of humor. Man was made to mourn, and he never realizes it so keenly as when he hears a woman try to tell a funny story. I could talk to you all day about Eve, the only girl I ever loved—because there wasn’t any other. It didn’t take us long to get out of the Garden that time—principally because Eve didn’t have to wait to dress. Today it would be a different story. If clothes had been in vogue in the year one I suppose I might have waited two hours down in the front hall while Eve was getting ready and packing the trunks—and then probably I’d have had to go back two or three times for something she thought she’d forgotten after we got outside. Well, what I started to say was that little Eve bore up bravely under her misfortunes. She put up a splendid bluff. I’ll say that for her. Why, do you know, instead of sitting down and bewailing her hard fate after being put out of the Garden, she actually gave a coming out party! I certainly admired her nerve, one day, when I overheard her telling the new neighbors that Eden was all very well for young couples just starting housekeeping, but the neighborhood was getting so crowded and it was so near the zoo that we just really had to move. And then she remarked that she had never been able to get me to take enough exercise anyway and she thought gardening would now be just fine for me. It takes a woman to carry a thing off like that. Women are the world’s champion bluffers and yet we men think we know how to play poker. Why—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Adam, but I was asked to get an interview on feminine fashions of 1922, and whether you think they have changed for the better.”

“Oh, beg pardon, I’m sure. But when I get talking about Eve my tongue runs away with me. I suppose all married men are that way. It’s so delightful sometimes to have the chance of talking without feeling that you’re interrupting anybody. Feminine fashions, eh? Well, I’ve seen some changes in the last seven thousand years. I thought nothing could shock me any more, but I’ve had a few stiff jolts the last few months. I guess I’m not as strong as I used to be. Back in the old days, in the garden, fashions weren’t so much. That was before the trouble, but after we moved, plain, simple fig-leaves became passée, hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date. I read a book the other day entitled ‘How to Dress on Nothing a Year.’ That described our case exactly, in the early, happy, carefree days. There wasn’t a dressmaker in the world. If anybody had mentioned the word ‘modiste’ I’d have thought it was some new kind of animal I’d overlooked in taking the census. I wouldn’t have known what he meant. Ever have a sewing woman come to your house and stay a week at a time and always sit down with the family at table and be a damper on the conversation? Well, that’s one trouble we never experienced. Eve never came home from a walk in the woods and remarked carelessly that she’d just seen a hat downtown that could be bought for a song, and then it turned out that the song was ‘Old Hundred.’ Not for a minute. Nobody gave a hang in those days what others might be wearing as the latest style. We knew they might wear more, but they couldn’t well wear any less. When anybody wanted a Spring or Fall outfit, all he had to do was to go out in the woods and pick a new suit off a tree. If you were getting a bit shabby and resolved to dress better in the future, you just turned over a new leaf.

“Then came moving day, and what a change! First crack out of the box the girls all began clamoring for clothes, real clothes. I remember one hot day—the thermometer would have been registering about ninety-five, if there had been one—the girls all set up a howl for furs—furs, mind you, with the sun hot enough to boil a cold storage egg. I tried to reason with ’em. ‘You don’t mean furs,’ I said, ‘you mean bathing suits or peek-aboo waists or mosquito netting. This is summer, the hottest weather since the year one. The heat has affected your brains. Go take a swim in the Euphrates and cool off.’ But they insisted that they knew what they were talking about, and so there was nothing for it but I must shoulder my old club and go off and kill a bear and a couple of foxes and a mink and fit ’em all out with a set of furs to wear while most folks were busy trying to dodge sunstrokes. That was the start, I believe, of this modern movement of the girls, wrapping themselves up in ‘summer furs’ just as soon as the weather gets hot enough. That next winter Eve and the girls started going around in the snow and ice in low shoes and short, open-work stockings and wish-bone waists and pneumonia sleeves, and defying the doctors. And that’s the worst of it, that’s what makes me mad. The girls do defy every last rule of health when it comes to dress and get away with it. The strongest man that ever lived couldn’t do it without a call from the undertaker, but the girls seem to thrive on their foolishness.

“The fashions of 1922! Well, looking at them pro and con, without blinders or smoked glasses or anything at all, I may say that they have nothing on the fashions of the year one. And the fashions of the year one (I am merely stating the naked truth) had nothing on anybody. One word more, and I trust you are strong enough to stand it: It’s all right for the women to be eager rivals, but they ought to draw the line at trying to outstrip each other.”

The next thing I knew I was in the ambulance headed for the Olympus Homeopathic Hospital. Old Adam had done his worst.

XII
CAPTAIN KIDD ON TAG DAYS

“Yes, I have observed that your country is now experiencing one of those unprecedented waves of crime for which it is justly celebrated,” remarked Captain Kidd as he unsheathed a huge bowie knife and proceeded to cut off a man’s dose of particularly black eating tobacco. “For a nation that’s been so busy makin’ the world safe for democracy you don’t seem to be doing much to make it unsafe for the gunmen and stick-up artists. A few months ago everybody was talkin’ about the ‘uplift.’ And now they’re trying to dodge the hold-ups. I was down below the other night. Had a date at a Philadelphia seance. And the moment I appeared the whole audience started bombarding me with questions about the location of my buried treasure. I didn’t tell ’em, of course, but I did give ’em some good advice for the present emergency. I told ’em that any man who carried more than carfare and lunch money in his pockets these days, and nights, was a fool. And I also suggested that anybody who buried his treasure in a sand bank instead of a savings bank or a safe deposit vault was entitled to admission to the nearest home for the feeble-minded without an entrance examination.

“I went out for a walk down Chestnut Street and in going four blocks had my pocket picked three times. The fellow who was supposed to be looking after that other block must have been off his beat. I got scared and wanted to hustle back up here, but to oblige the medium I stayed over until the next day. I took another walk, down Market street this time, and found it was a tag day. There were female hold-up artists at every corner. I turned over what the pick-pockets had missed the night before and made my escape. Terra firma is no place these days for a reformed pirate. It reminds him too painfully of the many good bets he overlooked.

“Sometimes, especially after I’ve been readin’ of the activities of your cabaret waiters, bootleggers and Pullman porters, I can’t help thinkin’ that history has been too hard on us plain, unornamental pirates. We had to pick up a livin’ best we could. We didn’t have our tools and equipment provided for us. We had to furnish our own cutlasses and pistols, while your modern waiters and porters have their trays and whisk-brooms anyhow supplied free of charge. There wasn’t an unwritten law, either, that anybody who didn’t cough up freely was a piker, and we had the greatest difficulty sometimes in getting a victim to produce. Folks found all sorts of mean little schemes for hiding away their valuables. That’s why we had to invent the ingenious device known as ‘walking the plank’ to make ’em give till it hurt. But nowadays it’s amazing to me to see the way the people hand over without even a pistol clapped at their heads. They’re meek as lambs. The pirate business would have been a lot less wearing on the nerves if the public had co-operated then the way it does now.

“Holding up a shipload of passengers used to be a complicated, annoying business. First, we’d run up the black flag with the skull and crossbones on it. Then we’d fire a round shot across the vessel’s bows to bring her to. We’d paint our faces sometimes to make ourselves look as horrible as possible, and taking a pistol in each hand and a cutlass in our teeth, board the ship and line up the passengers and crew in a row. By the time we’d gone through their pockets and searched the cabin and lugged out the strong box we’d put in an eight-hour day, straight time. Hard, exhausting work, and all because people hadn’t been properly trained in those days to hand over quickly and gracefully so that we could get on to the next job.

“If I were flying the Jolly Roger today on my old pirate ship, with my crew of hard-boiled sinners around me, possibly we’d find merchant and passenger ships pestering us to come and take their money away from them. I’d be taking a quiet snooze in my cabin, maybe, when the bosn’s mate would wake me up and say: ‘Cap’n, a vessel on the starboard bow has just signalled for us to stand by and it will send over a boatload of treasure.’ And we’d have to get a cash register and a card index of customers and a press agent, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight, as Jesse James suggests, and an ad writer to put a piece in saying: ‘Why go elsewhere to be robbed? Come to old reliable Captain Kidd & Co., Inc., and be immediately relieved.’ But at that I don’t suppose with my old-fashioned ideas I’d be able to compete with your up-to-date hold-up games.

“I guess the best plan, if I were ever able to resume business, would be to start a ‘drive’ or hold a tag day. From the way the public gives up, I don’t know but a drive for a $100,000 fund to establish a home for worn-out pirates would bring in a lot of coin. First thing I’d get up a dinner for my executive committee of one hundred. You can’t start anything without a lot of eating these days. Then we’d have a daily luncheon to receive reports from the captains of the various teams, winding up with a mass meeting where we’d take up a collection and announce the result of the house-to-house canvass. Still, a general tag day might bring in more money. I’d have pretty girls at all the street corners to pin a miniature artificial lemon on every contributor to the Captain Kidd Refuge for Reformed Robbers. What do you think?”

“There are many excellent causes, Captain, that have adopted these devices to raise money and I hope you don’t intend to reflect upon them.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. But don’t you think yourself that the idea has been worked a little hard? It’s all right for the public to give to the things it knows about, but I was thinking it was becoming such an easy mark I might as well have my share. What I object to is being set down in history as the world’s champion pirate and all around bad man, when the fact is I was naturally the most peaceable individual you ever met. The trouble is, I was born about a hundred years too soon. If I were in business today I wouldn’t be a pirate; I’d be a head waiter in a New York hotel, with a foreign accent but able to understand all languages. Money talks. Probably I’d have served an apprenticeship at the place where they check your hat and coat.

“If I wasn’t a head waiter I’d be a steward on an ocean ship. Perhaps I’d feel more at home on the sea anyway. I was talking to my old friend, Jesse James, the other day and he said the difference between him and the modern professional tip extractor was that he never robbed the same man twice. But I suppose his successors believe that anybody who is worth doing at all is worth doing well. One of these days the American people will probably adopt a new Declaration of Independence against foreign waiters and resolve to give the enemy no quarter—and no half dollar either. They’ll change the old naval hero’s slogan to ‘Don’t give up the tip.’ ‘Millions for good meals, but not one cent for tribute.’ ‘All things come to him who waits.’ Well, I’m sorry for the waiter if he ever gets all that’s coming to him. Ta, ta! young man.”

And as he hobbled off to splice the main brace I could hear the old fellow muttering to himself: “And they used to call me a pirate!”

XIII
ALFRED THE GREAT TRIES TO FIND PROSPEROUS KING

“You want me to talk about modern monarchs!” Alfred the Great responded with a trace of irritation. “Why don’t you ask me to talk about the snakes in Ireland or the best method of preserving hen’s teeth? Why not interview me on the habits of the dodo? How about a little chat concerning that common domestic animal, the long-toed diplodocus, or that popular indoor pet, the megatherium? Let’s discuss that numerous class of estimable citizens, the mound builders. Let’s—”

“I beg pardon, your Majesty,” I hastened to interrupt, “but I had no intention of offending. I know kings are very few and far between these days, but I thought your views on the two or three who have managed to survive would be most interesting to the present generation. You yourself were such a mighty monarch, so generally respected for your honesty and ability and bravery and regal appearance, that I am sure—”

“There, there, say no more,” he replied with condescending affability, “I am just a trifle sensitive, I suppose, on the subject. When I see so many of my brothers sacrificed to the onrushing tide of democracy, naturally it makes me a bit sad.

“It’s just a month,” continued King Alfred, as he lighted his long meerschaum and settled down comfortably in his armchair, which was fashioned like a throne, “it’s just a month since I took my first trip down below to see how the earth had been getting along in my absence of a thousand years plus. And I am frank to confess I found some changes. I went down under the auspices of a spiritualist who wanted me to tell a woman’s club how to make griddle cakes. I suppose you’ve read about the time I let the cakes burn in the farmer’s cottage and the housewife bawled me out when she came back. It’s in every school reader. Well, the next day I called in my chief cook and had him show me how to make griddle cakes that would melt in your mouth. There’s no trick at all to it, really. The only thing is you must keep your mind on it. That time in the cottage I got to thinking about a new way to fight the Danes, and the first thing I knew there was a smell like burning rubber and the old dame rushed in and called me down. I’d have ordered her off to instant execution, but just then our side needed all the votes it could get, and I didn’t know whether her husband would thank me or be annoyed.

“Sometimes you can make a hit with a husband by giving his wife a ten-year sentence in jail, and again it makes him peevish—particularly if he has to do his own housework. So I spared her that time. Where was I? Oh, yes, as I was saying, I went down to tell the club how to make griddle cakes. After I’d filled that date I decided to take a little trip around the capitols of Europe and call on my cousins, the kings and queens. You know every king is supposed to be at least a cousin of every other one—that’s why we have such strained relations so often in royal circles. Well, I decided first to project my astral body up to Moscow, the ancient capitol of Russia. I’d never traveled that far during my previous existence on earth, because I couldn’t spare the time—our wars were a continuous performance. Arrived at the palace, I walked right up to the front door and was going in when a big fellow, roughly clad, his countenance concealed beneath a tangled growth of whiskers, barred my passage.

“‘Who do you want to see?’ he inquired gruffly.

“‘Whom do I want to see?’ I said, ‘Why—’

“‘No, who, not whom,’ he returned. ‘Anybody who uses good grammar is bourgeois and an enemy of the Commune. Down with fool laws and rules. This is the land where all speak and do as they choose.’

“‘But you’re not letting me speak as I choose,’ I retorted. ‘How’s that for consistency?’ He said anyone who was a Bolshevik, whatever that was, didn’t have to be consistent. Consistency was a jewel. Jewelry was wealth. The Bolsheviki were opposed to wealth and private property in any form. I was about to force my way past this lunatic when a number of other rough-looking persons, armed with guns and bayonets, rushed out of the palace and surrounded me.

“‘I want to see the king!’ I exclaimed. And immediately by their faces, or as much of them as I could see peeping out from beneath the whiskers—I saw that something was wrong.

“‘He wants to see the Czar,’ they shouted, and then laughed in a way that made my blood run cold. ‘There are no more kings. They’ve been abolished.’ And one huge fellow, drawing a long knife out of his belt, shook it menacingly under my nose and began to cross-examine me. It took me about one-fifth of a second to make up my mind to be about the most enthusiastic revolutionist and all-around king hater that ever was born. ‘What did you want to see the Czar for, eh?” he asked. ‘I want to kill him,’ I replied. And a chorus of cheers rent the air. But it was an exceedingly narrow escape. I learned later that the Czar was no more, that the country was being ruled by a little band of lunatics calling themselves Bolsheviki, and that it was a crime even to utter the word king unless a strong adjective was put before it.

“I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I didn’t wait to investigate. I decided to get back to civilization by the shortest route, and so I projected my astral body over to Poland. To save time, I’ll just say that Poland was as benighted as Russia. No king. Then I hopped over to Jugo-Slovakia, I believe you call it. Same thing there. On I sped over the kingless countries of the Balkans and up to Budapest. A big sign on the front door of the palace: ‘Beggars, Peddlers and Kings Not Admitted to This Building.’ I moved on. I went hopefully to Vienna. Picking up a newspaper, I read these headlines: ‘Open Season for Aristocrats Begins. In First Day’s Shooting Twenty-nine Counts and Forty-three Barons Bagged. Slaying Parties Now Favorite Winter Sport. Special Prize Offered by Government to First Person to Kill King.’ Two minutes later I was on my aerial way to Berlin. Here, at least, I was sure I should find royal autocracy firmly entrenched. But as I went up the palace walk one glance told me that Germany, too, had cast off her royal rulers. Sitting on the front steps in his shirtsleeves, smoking a corncob pipe, was a slouchy, unshaven citizen whom I mistook for the janitor. In the old days you know no such uncouth specimen of humanity would have been permitted within half a mile of the palace. And who do you think he turned out to be? The President of the German Republic. A harness-maker, or cobbler, or something of the sort. I learned that, as in Russia, the very name of king was tabooed. Just a day or two before a prominent author had been executed for absent-mindedly remarking that he was fond of collecting his royalties. In a German deck of cards instead of having a king they have two knaves. So I lit out for France. Here I found they hadn’t had a king for many years. I inquired anxiously about my old kingdom, England. ‘Oh, they have something over there they call a king,’ I was told. ‘You might cross the Channel and have a chat with him. It would cheer him up.’

“I decided to act on the hint. I didn’t see many changes in London. I thought I recognized some familiar faces among the cab horses. I got an audience with King George by pretending to be the business agent of the Pavers’ and Rammers’ Union. Labor is all-powerful in England today (where is it not?) and George sent word to walk right in the minute he got my card. He was wearing that morning the fool dress uniform of an Honorary Vice-President in the Royal Hibernian Highlanders, Ltd. As soon as we were alone in his private office and I disclosed my identity, he fell on my neck and wept, and called me Uncle Alf. It was very affecting. ‘You’re the only king left that I can talk confidentially to,’ he said, ‘and you’re not really alive. It used to be that almost every country in Europe had its king and royal family. Everybody with a drop of royal blood in his veins was on the public payroll. It kept me busy exchanging birthday greetings with my fellow monarchs. I got a stack of letters from them every day. Today the annual convention of the European Kings’ Mutual Benefit Association could hold its meetings in a telephone booth. Where have they all gone? Some are dead and others wish they were.

“‘There’s not much to choose between the mighty dead and the mighty near dead,’ King George continued. ‘Cousin Mohammed, the last I heard of him, was running an elevator in a Swiss hotel. Cousin Ferdinand was an old clothes man in Naples. Cousin Ludwig had got a job as janitor of an apartment house—determined to be an autocrat to the end. Cousin Wilhelm was engaged in writing his auto-obituary and reading a book on ‘St. Helena As a Health Resort.’ Cousin Charles got upset and left for good. All the retired kings I know are retiring indeed. About the quickest way to unpopularity these days is to proclaim the divine right of kings. Even my oldest boy feels it, poor Wails. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ The man who wrote that knew what he was talking about. It makes the poorest nightcap on record. I’ll s’y.

“‘I feel comparatively safe myself,’ he went on, ‘because I’m not and never have been a real king. I draw the salary and hold the title and wear tailor-made uniforms without doing the work. I have no real authority. Why, I can’t dictate to anybody except the court stenographer—when she’s not too busy scrutinizing her nose. Shall I tell you who’s the real boss of Buckingham Palace? (Whisper) The wife. I can’t even spend my own money as I choose. Freedom of the ‘shes’ and all that sort of thing. Also, there’s an Hereditary Keeper of the Royal Purse, and whenever I want any coin I have to apply to him. You’ve heard of the ‘king’s touch’? Well, that’s it. George is the ruler of England, all right, but his first name is Lloyd, not King.’

“‘And is there any genuine autocrat left on earth?’ I asked King George. ‘Anybody to carry on the traditions of the old absolute monarchs?’

“‘Just one,’ he replied, ‘and he’s not called a king. His title is President. His name is—’

“‘George! George!’ a shrill voice interrupted his Majesty. ‘Did you get that pound of sugar I sent you for?’

“‘I told you I wasn’t an absolute monarch,’ George said, as he motioned me to depart while the departing was good. But I wonder whom he meant when he said there was only one world autocrat left?”

As I took my leave I could not even hazard a guess.

XIV
OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION

The city editor’s assignment read: “Interview Old King Cole if sober (I mean the king, not you) and get his photo and pictures of the pipe, the bowl and the three fiddlers, if possible, for a nice layout. Stir him up on prohibition.”

I found His Majesty at his home at the corner of Rye and Bourbon Avenues, planet of Jupiter, next door to Bacchus and across the street from Gambrinus. I entered his presence not without trepidation, for I had never interviewed a real king before, although I am personally acquainted with several apartment house janitors and the policeman on our beat. But I needn’t have feared, for he received me with the utmost urbanity. Dressed in a purple robe, he was sitting in a chair of state and looked every foot a king. I just had time to note his typical poker face, suffused with a royal flush, when he gave me greeting.

“Sit down and have something,” he exclaimed. “What’ll it be? Tea, lemonade, beerine or just a drink from the old town pump? Here’s a new soft bottled beverage that’s having quite a run with the boys. It’s made of ginger, red pepper, turpentine, cocaine, yeast and chewing tobacco. Here’s another drink the boys call the ‘lame mule,’ because it hasn’t any kick. Ha, ha! Would you like to have some more of my jokes?”

“In just a few minutes, Your Majesty, but business before pleasure. I have been asked to interview you on the subject of prohibition, but I had no idea that booze was under the ban up here.”

“Oh, yes, we had to follow the fashion. Queen Cole, as you may not know, has been president of the West Jupiter W. C. T. U. for years, and when America did the Sahara act, why there was nothing to it but we must give prohibition a whirl too. But I dunno. I kind of think we’ll be back on the old basis again some day.

“Sometimes, however, I can’t help wondering what’ll be the next great reform. Abolishing tobacco, prob’ly. The fellows who never succeeded in learning to smoke are getting busy already, I see. If I called for my bowl today I wouldn’t get it, and I suppose along about week after next, if I call for my pipe, somebody will tell me that all tobacco is prohibited except Wheeling tobies containing less than half of one per cent of the real thing. I can still call for my fiddlers three, but the next thing I know they’ll be locking me up for running a cabaret without a license and a cover charge.

“You never can tell where those measly reformers will break out next. One of these mornings you’ll pick up the paper and read: ‘Association for the Prohibition of Lemon Pie Introduces Bill in Congress. Alarming Increase in Indigestion Attributed to Seductive Delicacy. New Law Provides for Right of Search of Pantries.’ There’d be a lot of kicks, but what’s the use? Folk would go around wearing buttons inscribed: ‘No Pie, No Work.’ Orators would point out that the workingman must have his pie. Schoolboys would go on strike. New England farmers would protest that their breakfasts had been spoiled. But the pie amendment would be slipped in some appropriation bill as a joker, and then good-bye pie.

“That would be only a starter. The scheme to have the government prescribe what you shall eat and drink and smoke is only beginning to get up speed. Every domestic menu will have to be O. K’d by the Secretary of the Interior. There will be laws to make everybody go to bed at ten and get up at six, to prohibit the wearing of blue neckties with red whiskers, to compel the printing of all baseball reports in English, and to force pedestrians to wear license numbers, front and rear, and give three loud honks on approaching congested cross-walks.

“You’ll have to get up in the morning by the official whistle, eat breakfast according to the food controller, ride to work in a government street car, work so many hours, play a round of golf on the public links, don a Bureau of Health mask to kiss your wife when you get home, eat another government meal, sit on the front porch and smoke a tobaccoless cigar, fight the mosquitos awhile—remembering the anti-profanity amendment to the old Federal Constitution—and then go to bed when the curfew sounds, being careful not to transgress the state anti-snoring law. That’s what you’re coming to.

“‘Old King Cole was a merry old soul.’ Ah, my boy, I’m afraid the emphasis is going to be on the ‘was.’ I try to keep up the bluff that I’m enjoying myself; it’s a tough task. Take away my pipe, and my bowl, and my fiddlers three, and you can have my job as king. A king will have no more fun than a commoner. But here comes the Queen. Sh! Sh! Not a word of this to Her Majesty.

“Yes, my dear, this young man and I have just been having a chat about the delights and benefits of prohibition. As I was saying, what a glorious thing it is to think that husbands who used to hang around bar-rooms after office hours will now spend their evenings at home, sitting by the fireside reading Woodrow Wilson’s ‘History of the American People’ in nine volumes, net, and drinking hot lemonade. Must you go so soon? Well, good-bye. And listen: if you must print what I said, perhaps you’d better not use my name. Just say ‘one of our most prominent citizens,’ or something. Farewell.”

And as I stepped into the cockpit of my ethereal airplane I reflected that some kings, after all, are no different from other men.

XV
KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES

“King Henry the Eighth wants to see you,” said the city editor as I reported for duty. “Says he doesn’t think we’re giving him a square deal. We’ve printed interviews with Solomon and Bluebeard and Brigham Young, all much-married men, and let them make their explanations to put them in a better light with posterity, but for some reason he can’t understand we’ve passed him up. Better see what the old boy has to say.”

“Yes,” said His Majesty, as he motioned me graciously to a seat in his reception room, “I thought it only due to myself to make a statement for publication, particularly since you have been interviewing some of my noted—er—er—competitors, or perhaps I should say fellow-sufferers, and setting them right with the public. Not that I consider them exactly in my class, of course. Unlike Solomon and Bro. Young, I did not believe in what I might call numerically-simultaneous matrimony, nor like Mr. Bluebeard did I think a man justified, whatever the provocation, in resorting to the most extreme measures himself and taking the law into his own hands. Let everything be done strictly according to law, was my motto. I defy anyone, in the case of my wives, to find the coroner’s verdict defective. I am not saying there is not such a thing as justifiable uxoricide. But I can’t understand how a man could get up his nerve to do it. Certainly, speaking for myself, after being bossed by the first five, I’m sure I didn’t feel like raising my finger, or even my voice, against Mrs. Henry Tudor VI. If they lost their heads I do not think the whole blame should rightly rest on me. It takes two to make a quarrel. There were faults on both sides—especially theirs. History records the—that is—rather sudden shufflings-off of my several spouses, but it doesn’t tell the real reasons therefor. Sometimes it seems to me that the history of my case must have been written either by old bachelors or by members of the women’s rights association. Certainly if experienced married men had done the job they wouldn’t have left out all the extenuating circumstances.”

“As what, Your Majesty?”

“Well, did you ever see any reference in history to the annual earthquake at St. James’ Palace known as the Fall house-cleaning cataclasm? Of course you haven’t. And yet we husbands were afflicted with the same epidemics in those days, that seem so far away, as you are now.”

“I never thought of it before, Your Majesty. With the canning and house-cleaning seasons over, a modern married man begins to realize just how the soldiers felt the day the armistice was signed.”

“Precisely. Even though he knows the trouble is bound to recur when the germs get in the air again next Fall. But the man who has been married to only a limited extent can’t begin to sympathize with a case like mine. The first few wives are the hardest.

“Take this matter of house-cleaning. Every wife has her own system, her exclusive, copyrighted plan of offensive campaign which differs from everybody else’s. My first wife, for example, believed in moving all the furniture out of the dining room into the hall on the very first day of the attack and then served all meals for two days in the form of a stand-up free lunch in the butler’s pantry. The regular hall furniture was moved into the parlor to make room for the dining room furniture. Consequently the place was so cluttered up there was nowhere to sit down. But of course all husbands, even when house-cleaning is not prevalent, have to stand a good deal. My second wife, as soon as she was inaugurated in office as secretary of the interior and speaker of my house, reversed all the precedents of her predecessor. When the house-cleaning epidemic arrived she collected all the furniture in the palace and piled it up in the dining room. On fine days during the upheaval I got a hand-out on the back porch and on wet days I ate in the cellar. I had just become fairly accustomed to this domestic arrangement when Wife III, Series A, appeared on the scene with some entirely different and equally ingenious scheme for turning the house downside up. So it went, each new domestic administration having its own peculiar policies, not only with reference to house-cleaning but to all forms of domestic discipline. I was willing enough to obey—I realized that is the first duty of soldiers and husbands—but I had work keeping track of the orders. I perceived then why so many married men were volunteering for my new army to fight in France: they wanted to get where there would not be quite so much discipline.

“As I was saying, I got mixed on my orders and was constantly making mistakes. Wives so often fail to realize that accidents will happen to the best regulated husbands. For instance, Wife No. 1 had a rule that I must be in by eleven o’clock, but might stay out till twelve if I could tell just where I’d been. Wife No. 2 changed the hour to ten and No. 3, if I recall correctly, fixed it at ten-thirty. It’s not strange if occasionally along late in the evening I got a trifle mixed as to which administration was in office at that precise moment and consequently strayed a bit from the prescribed schedule. I could not always be sure whether I was supposed to be running on eastern or central standard time. As a result the first unvarying greeting that met my ears on my arrival home was apt to assume the sharply interrogatory form. I always answered whenever I could distinctly remember. At least I did my best. Matrimony is paved with good intentions.

“There were other disadvantages, also—connected with what I now perceive to have been my mistaken matrimonial policy—which may not occur to persons of more limited experience. For instance, how many realize that I was virtually at the mercy of a soviet of my wives’ relations? When a wife happened to shuffle off did her relatives immediately conclude that they were no longer my connections by marriage? They did not. They still considered themselves close relations—even closer, when I sought to borrow money from them. After a few matrimonial administrations I had enough ‘in-laws’ to fill a convention hall. Indeed, they did form a sort of mutual benefit association and used to meet and pass resolutions of condemnation on me and condolence with the new incumbent every time I happened to change wives. Sore, of course, because they weren’t invited to the wedding. But I had to draw the line somewhere. In those days, as now, they used to term it ‘solemnizing’ a marriage, although that word ‘obey’ in the ceremony was a joke. And half the time I felt just like a sort of comic supplement. In all my voyaging on the seven seas of matrimony I can recollect very few times when I was allowed to do any of the steering. Looking back, life seems to have been just one wife after another. Why did I do it? Well, I read in the newspapers the other day a supposedly sensational story of a Boston man who got married while under the influence of hypnotism, but I couldn’t see that the case contained any unusual feature.”

“Speaking of matrimony, Your Majesty (as you have just been doing so extensively), have you any advice to offer? What do you consider the lucky month for marriage?”

“Young man,” replied the king in solemn tones as he arose to bid me adieu, “I don’t know anything about that. But I can tell you this: there are at least six unlucky ones. That is as far as I experimented.”

And though I possessed only one-sixth of his matrimonial experience, I shook the aged monarch’s hand in silent sympathy before tiptoeing from his pathetic presence.

XVI
DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS

As the trim figure in a neatly fitted sack suit arose to greet me with an odd mixture in his manner of ancient courtesy and the modern “glad hand,” my face must have betrayed my surprise at his unexpected appearance for he exclaimed: “Astonished, eh? Most earth folk are. Seem to expect to see the shade of Don Quixote de la Mancha togged out in his old cast-iron clothes and helmet with a sword for a walking stick. They fail to make allowance for the fact that we shades progress, just like you people down below. We try to be as up-to-date as possible. I suppose you thought, too, you were going to interview a harmless lunatic and listen amusedly to his rambling conversation and perhaps have the fun of joshing him a bit. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve got over my delusions, or illusions or whatever they were. And shall I tell you what cured me? Why, watching the antics and performances of some of you down on earth. My motto is thoroughness. I want to do every job up in the most complete style. I will either be the champion, the record-holder, the biggest in the bunch or else nothing at all. I may once have been in a fair way to becoming the world’s most inspired idiot and champion all-round, catch-as-catch-can professional ‘regulator,’ but I’m now a has-been, a second-rater. There’s too much competition. I’m ashamed of myself. I throw up my hands and quit. Do you understand me?”

“Well, not entirely, Don Quixote. What modern competitors or successors have you got?”

“Do you have to ask that?” he replied. “Why, I can get materialized and take a run below and in five minutes see more fellows crazier than I ever was than I can count. Or I can just stay up here and read the newspapers. I was reading only this morning of a bill that’s going to be introduced in the Maine Legislature to prohibit women from wearing high-heeled shoes. They used to call me a fool reformer, but I never was quite so idiotic as to try to reform women’s dress in the slightest particular. Trying to dictate feminine fashions would be just about as sensible as attempting to sweep back the ocean. The next thing they know somebody will be trying to tack an amendment on to the Constitution forbidding women to wear furs in summer and low shoes and open-work waists in winter. I see one writer calls the anti-high-heels measure ‘Quixotic.’ That shows all he knows about me. I was accused of being slightly off at one time, but nobody ever charged me with utter imbecility. And I see that some other professional set-’em-all-rights are going to put the ban on tobacco—if they can. They’ll have some hard sledding. But I was glad to observe that a judge had the sense to turn down an application for a charter from an anti-tobacco association. The society’s announced object was to make the growing, manufacture, sale and use of tobacco illegal. I held my breath until I found what the judge did.

“And what did the judge do? Opening a fresh box of Havanas, he carefully selected a long, slender, chocolate-colored panatela, with a red and gold waistband, cut off the end with his gold-mounted clipper, fished a match out of his vest pocket, struck it on the ink-stand, applied the blaze to the end of the cigar, blew a fragrant cloud of incense to the ceiling in worship of the spirit of justice and perfect impartiality, gave a great big sigh of measureless content, and then proceeded to write an opinion on the subject that did my heart good to read. In dignified, judicial terms he affectionately advised the anti-tobacconists to go soak their venerable heads; he reminded them that the most admirable and wholly beneficial occupation of the human species is minding its own business; and intimated that so long as the court should continue to enjoy unimpaired intellectual vigor and be in full possession of all its faculties, it would never authorize a movement to regulate the personal conduct of rational adult beings by organized idiocy.

“It was an elegant set-back for the chronic busybodies, but I haven’t much hope it will be permanent. Mark my words, those fellows are only getting ready to break out in some new place. If they can’t prohibit tobacco they’ll attack chewing gum or ice cream soda. One of these days I expect to pick up the paper and read: ‘New Sundae Law Proposed. Association Opposed to Ice Cream Soda in Any Form Applies for Charter.’ I may have made a few mistakes that time when I was supposed to be a little off my balance, but I never made the same mistake twice. I tilted at those old windmills, as they turned out to be, but I didn’t respond to an encore. Some of your modern reformers are continually butting their heads against stone walls, and if their heads weren’t so thick they couldn’t get away with it.

“Folks laugh at that account of my exploits and adventures, but they don’t stop to notice that there are lots of fellows running around loose who are ten times funnier than Don Quixote ever was. For instance, I understand you have a good many Congressmen-at-large. There are societies already comprising some fifty-seven and one-half varieties of butters-in, advocating all kinds of reforms, including the prohibiting of flowers from growing on Sunday. The first thing we know they’ll be having each new Congress decide whether men shall wear their hair pompadour or brushed down (if they have any), rule on the question of visible suspenders in summer and settle the length of moustaches, coats, sermons, stockings, lawns, skirts, soft drinks and hatpins. And of course there’ll be a law compelling all persons to wear long faces.

“Now, I may have been a bit erratic at one time, but I never got up a Society for the Prevention of Public Enjoyment. The trouble with lots of your reformers is, that not satisfied with being ‘off’ themselves, they want to drive other folks crazy. They’re doing it. Take that proposed state anti-snoring law out in Oklahoma. It’s going to declare any person a public nuisance who keeps other folks awake at night with solos by his nasal organ. But nobody dreams of interfering with the scoundrel who dashes along the street in his automobile at two A. M. with his muffler cut-out. I see you’re surprised at my keeping tab on things down below. There’s a reason. It gratifies me to realize that if I were back on earth I should have no trouble procuring a certificate of perfect sanity after the way so many folks are behaving. I see one man was paid $300,000 for pounding another man who got $200,000 for letting him do it. And the very persons who contributed to that fund kick the loudest about the high cost of living. And yet they used to call me unsound! Puck said a mouthful when he remarked: ‘What fools these mortals be.’ The world is a place of perpetual change, and yet lots of women continue cheerfully to give up two dollars a curl for a ‘permanent’ Marcel wave. Foolish men are less concerned with how many miles they can get out of a gallon than with how many smiles they can get out of a quart.

“But what showed me more clearly than anything else whither you earth folks are drifting was a sign, on my last trip, outside a butcher’s: ‘Tongue, 48 cents a pound; brains, 33 cents.’ If tongue is getting to be worth so much more than brains, then I’m glad I shuffled off when I did.”

And as I volplaned back to earth I wondered also why our topsy-turvy world ever considered Don Quixote loco.

XVII
PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM

All the way to King Pharaoh’s house I kept wondering how I should enter the presence of decayed royalty. More modern monarchs, I knew from my reportorial experience, were frequently regular fellows whom it was perfectly safe to offer to shake hands with and perhaps, after a brief acquaintance, to slap on the back and ask for the loan of a cigarette or the “makin’s.” But the thought of conversing with a four-thousand-year-old personage who had retired from the king business, yet retained his former notions of dignity and grandeur, filled me with awe. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when in response to my ring at the front door it slowly opened about half an inch, as if someone were trying to peek out and size up the visitor, and then a moment later it was thrown back and a commanding figure, who I knew from his pictures was none other than Pharaoh himself, stood in the doorway with a smile of welcome.

“Come right in,” he exclaimed. “I was afraid at first you might be a walking delegate of the Dish-Breakers’ Union.” And there stood the erstwhile mighty monarch clad in a long blue-checked apron, the kind that pins up over the shoulders with a couple of thing-a-ma-jigs and comes ’way down below the belt. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and he had the general appearance of a cross between a chauffeur who had been digging in the garden and a butler who had taken an automobile apart and was now trying to put the pieces back again.

“Your Majesty,” I began, with a low obeisance, but that was as far as I got with my speech of introduction.

“Come right out in the kitchen,” he interrupted affably, “and we can have a chat while I’m doing up my dishes. I understand you want to interview me on the servant problem. You’ve come to the right shop. I can talk feelingly on the subject. In the course of forty-five centuries of experience I’ve hit all the high spots, from the time when I had fifteen hundred cooks and chambermaids in the house and six hundred charioteers in the royal garage down to the cruel present, when I’m reduced to doing my own work. The servant problem! I’ve solved it. I could send you out of here so chock full of information about it that you couldn’t walk straight. Have a smoke? Mrs. Pharaoh objects to my smoking a pipe and washing the china at the same time (she complained at dinner of a decided flavor of nicotine in the soup) but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t light up while I’m finishing the job. Then, after I manicure the knives and forks, massage the sink, and take a brief and exhilarating spin around the dining room with my new six-cylinder carpet sweeper, I’ll have nothing to do but fix the oatmeal for tomorrow morning, in the jackpot or whatever you call it, put it on to boil and I’ll be at your service.

“Yes, it may seem to you like considerable of a comedown,” said his former majesty when we were comfortably settled in armchairs in the library, “but during the last few days, since I let the sole remaining servant go, I’ve been experiencing the first real peace I’ve known in just four thousand five hundred and sixty-two years. Quite a long time when you come to think of it. You ask me to define the servant problem and then comment upon it. Let me tell you some of our recent troubles with ‘domestic assistants.’ That’s what they want to be called nowadays. Oh, yes, we have servants up here. This isn’t exactly heaven, you know. Somebody has said that voyaging on the sea of matrimony is all right until the cook wants to be captain. Well, our cooks have all wanted to be commanders-in-chief with the pay, pretty near, of active admirals. And among them they’ve mighty near wrecked the ship. The next to the last we got, No. 19, promised to be the light of our existence. The light went out one night and never came back. Her testimonials said she was a very good cook. They must have been referring exclusively to her moral character. Her successor was described as ‘a perfect treasure’, but, according to the proverb, ‘Riches take wings,’ and she was no exception. In her case, however, it was just as well. She claimed to have cooked ten years for John D. Rockefeller. And it did not occur to us until later that Mr. Rockefeller is a chronic sufferer from dyspepsia.

“This wasn’t home any more. It was getting to be a one-night lodging house for ‘domestic assistants.’ You mustn’t call ’em servants, you know, not since they’ve organized. And they certainly are sticklers for union rules, union hours, union wages. Why, our last laundress (excuse me, I should say ‘garment ablutionist’), refused to wash any except union underwear. Fact! And now I hear they’re agitating for the three-shift or platoon system, like the firemen, each set on duty eight hours. Well, the other day we reached a crisis when Cook 20 served notice that she’d quit unless we built an addition to the garage to accommodate her runabout, and threw in an extra allowance for gasoline. I decided to fire the whole bunch: the ‘upstairs girl’ (whom I’d often consigned to the lower regions), the waitress (who believed all things ought to come to her while waiting), and the cook (who was always getting everybody else into hot water, but wouldn’t put her own hands in). So I made a clean sweep (something we could never get any of the servants to do) and I’ve been walking delegate of the Husbands’ Labor Union, and ‘kitchen police’ myself, ever since. And it’s been as peaceful and quiet around here as the Sahara Desert. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since the day the business agent of the Children of Israel Pyramid Builders’ Union fell off the top of Cheops and they had to dig him out of the sand with a derrick.

“There are various ways of solving the so-called servant problem. Speaking from an experience of roughly four thousand years, I should say the best way is to do your own work. It is a lot less work in the long run. But if you are determined to have servants, then you must adopt the modern viewpoint, treat ’em like the high-priced specialists that they are and fix up a regular schedule providing that the mistress shall have at least one evening out a week and the use of the parlor on the nights the maids aren’t entertaining. Our last cook had ‘Wednesday’ engraved on her visiting cards (it was her receiving day), and when her cousin was released from the penitentiary after serving six months for petty larceny (he stole a Ford), she gave him a coming-out party that kept the neighborhood awake until three o’clock in the morning. I read somewhere the other day that under the modern system employers and servants are to treat each other as equals—but I don’t believe the servants will do it. They’re getting too proud for that. We made the experiment of having the cook sit with us at the dining table, but it didn’t work out very well. We were kept so busy waiting on her that we didn’t get half enough to eat and she criticized the way in which I took my soup. A better plan would be to have all the family eat at the second table.

“But speaking of servant troubles back in Egypt a few thousand years ago—those were the happy days. Suppose one of the palace cooks threatened to quit because she could get two kopecks more a week and every Sunday out from a lady on the next street. We just told her to pack up without waiting to get dinner; there were about forty-nine more cooks in the kitchen. We had so many at one time that it took six to fry an egg. There was one disadvantage, we had the worst soup I ever tasted—too many cooks, you know—but there were lots of benefits from always having plenty of help. It’s true the kitchen on Saturday night looked like a convention of the Policemen’s Mutual Benefit Association, with all the cops calling on the girls, but it made us feel quite safe from burglars. The modern housewife is handicapped because she can’t exert her authority. If she has several servants she’s afraid to fire one because the rest might quit. And if she has only one she can’t fire her because she doesn’t know where she’d get another. Even administering a mild reprimand nowadays means that you’ll have to do your own washing. It’s rather different from the times when I was king and had a list of penalties hung up in the kitchen as a warning. Tough pie-crust meant three months in jail and the cook who burnt the toast was thrown to the crocodiles. I had three servants standing behind my chair at dinner—and nowadays servants won’t stand for anything. They trembled at my slightest frown—nowadays they give me the shake. Every time I passed they’d salaam and chant: ‘Preserve our gracious ruler.’ Today they’d be shouting: ‘Can the king!’

“And so I say times haven’t merely changed; they’re turned upside down. And the folk we used to call servants are on top. What are we to do? Why, if we want to be free and independent and rich and enjoy ourselves, we’ll beat ’em at their own game, we’ll join the Bread Molders’ Union or become kitchen chemists or garment ablutionists or general domestic aides-de-camp—the real successors of royalty. There are only two ways to solve the servant problem: do your own work or go out and do somebody’s else’s. I tell you—beg pardon, I smell something burning in the kitchen.”

Out we dashed, to find the helpless oatmeal suffering a martyr’s fate. Pharaoh contemplated the ruin for a moment and it inspired his parting word:

“Good-bye, young man, and perhaps if more people did their own work for a while they would learn, after all, to have some sympathy for servants. We can’t get along without ’em. The servant girl may be a perpetual conundrum, but civilization isn’t ready to give her up.”

XVIII
NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ

I shuddered as the city editor announced my assignment. True, I had tackled departed desperadoes and undesirable citizens whom I feared about as much in the spirit as in the flesh, but they were different. None of these could be such a formidable customer to interview as an ex-emperor who was notorious for his callous cruelties.

But duty is duty, and I donned my bullet-proof vest, put a revolver in my hip-pocket with a bottle of non-spirituous nerve tonic which a kind physician prescribed for me, and sallied forth to my waiting plane.

Five minutes later I was sitting calmly in the presence of the former imperial tyrant. The ordeal of introduction I had so much dreaded proved to be nothing. I had found the ex-emperor as approachable as a presidential candidate two months before the convention and as willing to talk for publication as a grand opera star who’s just lost another $10,000 necklace.

Could this be the old monster I had read about, I wondered, as overflowing with welcome he invited me to make myself thoroughly at home.

“What do you want me to talk about?” he asked. “Modern music and musicians? Delighted. Then you still regard me as an expert? I am gratified to hear it. I had feared that some slanderous stories that were circulated might have prejudiced you earth folk against me.

“Perhaps a few words of explanation might not be amiss. You have heard, no doubt, about the time when, as the popular phrase has it, I fiddled while Rome burned? The opposition made a good deal of that circumstance at the next election. They said I ought to have got out and hustled with the firemen, regardless of the fact that I did not belong to their union. Every man to his trade, I say. The firemen played on the flames and I played on the violin.

“Possibly, on looking back now that it is all over, I might have made a happier selection of the composition I performed on that occasion. It was entitled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ a forerunner of a popular piece which I believe is not entirely unknown in your own country today. But that was a mere bit of thoughtlessness.

“The extent of that conflagration, also, has been much exaggerated. It was confined to a few old garages in the suburbs upon which, oddly enough, I had taken out insurance only a couple of days before. One of those remarkable coincidences which do occasionally occur in real life.

“My political enemies tried to make a good deal out of it, but I am glad to say they were unable to prove anything. My candidates for the Forum were elected by the largest majorities on record. And if that isn’t vindication, what is?”

“Very interesting, Mr. Nero. But how did you come to take up music as a study and attain such remarkable proficiency?”

“I took up music in the first place as a remedy for baldness. I was troubled considerably with falling hair and dandruff and I had observed that all professional musicians were endowed with flowing locks. I looked into the subject. I talked to the court barber and to several performers on the violin, clarionet and bass drum, with names ending in ‘off’ and ‘sky,’ who had lately come to Rome from other countries. One musician informed me that five years before he had been so bald that flies trying to skate over the shiny surface would fall and break their legs, but he was now wearing his hair in a Dutch pompadour. He was a skilled performer on the classic lyre.

“I cannot say that the study and performance of music had a similar effect in my case, no appreciable change being noted in the hirsute adornment of my dome of thought, though my wife’s mother did refer to my musical efforts as hair-raising—but there were other compensations. As a result of my daily practicing on the violin—or rather nightly, my hours being from about one to three A. M. as a rule—the price of real estate in the neighborhood dropped twenty-five per cent, and I was able to buy in some very desirable properties I had long had my eye on—for a song. (No pun intended.) It was about this time that some one originated the saying concerning making Rome howl.

“I also played at the Rome Asylum for the Insane every Saturday afternoon, and they were just crazy to hear me. One Friday night five of the inmates committed suicide and my political opponents, as usual, tried to make capital of the occurrence.

“But these little things did not interfere with my purpose to become a finished musician—even though unkind critics said they wished I had finished. And speaking of criticisms, there were some that hurt me to the quick though I suppose history does not regard me as an especially sensitive creature. One of my favorite compositions was entitled ‘Through All Eternity.’ I presume you are acquainted with it. It is still popular.

“I asked a young woman one day if she would like to hear me play ‘Through All Eternity,’ and she replied that that would be her idea of—well, I don’t like to say it, but you doubtless recall the classic definition of war as promulgated by one of your most conspicuous generals. It was a cruel saying.

“But you wished for my opinions on modern music and musicians. I don’t know that I am qualified to judge; not if what I heard the other night is music nowadays. A couple of the boys who were being materialized by a friend of Sir Oliver Lodge inveigled me into going along and attending what the advertisements said was a concert.

“As the first number on the programme, it was announced the orchestra would give an imitation of ‘jazz,’ whatever that is. There was a crash like a pantry shelf full of dishes coming down, followed by a noise that was a combination of a battle and a boiler shop. I thought the roof would fall in next, and I was just preparing to slide out when the man next to me remarked reassuringly: ‘The agony is over.’

“There wasn’t a musical note or a hint of harmony in the whole slam-bang from start to finish. A couple of kids with hammers and an old tin-pan could have achieved the same effect. People paid two dollars and a half a seat to hear that, when they could hire a small boy to run a stick along a picket fence for ten cents. They called that music, and yet the neighbors used to kick when I played ‘Way Down Upon the Tiber River’ and ‘There’s No Place Like Rome’ on my violin at three o’clock in the morning.

“Then a young woman with a low dress and high voice came out and screamed like a patient at a painless dentist’s. One of the papers next morning said she had a sweet voice, but ‘lacked execution.’ She wouldn’t have lacked it very long if she’d lived when I was Emperor. The final number on the programme was a performance on the ukelele by a pair of harmless looking youths whose appearance belied their real natures.

“I have read in my ‘Pocket Chesterfield’ that a gentleman is one who never inflicts needless pain or suffering on others. They were not gentlemen. In my day we occasionally used racks and thumb-screws and other instruments of necessary torture, but we knew nothing about ukeleles. They had not been invented. Has your country no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences? But it is unnecessary to ask.

“Yet you moderns have one advantage over us ancients when it comes to music, and I am willing to admit it: the phonograph. It is much more satisfactory than any human singer or player, because you can shut it off without hurting its feelings. It has a patent stop—something the tenor or soprano lacks. If you get up at a concert and request the soloist in the middle of a song kindly to cease as her effort is making you exceedingly nervous, you are simply reserving a seat for yourself in the patrol wagon.

“But at home with the phonograph all you’ve got to do is to push the little lever and it quits. You can enjoy its concerts without having to put on a clean white shirt and an open-face vest and a dinner coat. You can wear the same clothes you did at breakfast or sit around in an old bathrobe with your collar off and listen to Mary Garden gargle. If you did that at the grand opera house it would be sure to excite remark.

“And now you must excuse me, young man. I’ve promised to play tonight at the Mount Olympus firemen’s ball and I must have a little time to rehearse my piece—‘I’m a Roman in the Gloamin’.’ Perhaps you know it? By the way, are you a musician yourself? But you must be. Everybody is, more or less.”

“No, sir. I can’t play anything.”

“Oh, you must be mistaken. Are you married?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then to preserve the domestic harmony, you must be used to playing second fiddle.”

As I staggered down the stairs I felt that I had richly earned a Nero—I mean a hero, medal.

XIX
LORD BACON MUSES ON CIPHERS

“I’ll tell you one bet you’ve overlooked in your ramblings around with shades,” remarked the city editor, “and that’s the chance to get the right answer to that Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. I was reminded of it last night when I happened across that old story of the woman who said to her husband: ‘When I get to heaven I’m going to ask Shakespeare if he really wrote those plays.’ ‘But suppose Shakespeare isn’t there?’ returned her husband. ‘Then you can ask him,’ she replied. Have you heard any of the spooks discussing the question?”

“I’ve never even heard it mentioned,” I responded. “You may remember I had a chat with Mr. Shakespeare himself some time ago on the subject of the movies, but there was something in his attitude that kept me from asking what might have been embarrassing questions. And besides, as is quite common with these shades of the mighty, when they once get started talking it’s pretty hard to get a word in edgewise. I believe it would be better to tackle Lord Bacon and see what he has to say about it. If he has a grievance he’s a lot more likely to talk than the man who’s generally accepted as the author of Shakespeare’s works.”

I approached the eminent Lord Chancellor, jurist and philosopher with considerable trepidation, but like all the truly great his modesty and affability quickly put me at my ease.

“You wish to know who was the real author of the works attributed to Shakespeare, eh?” he replied, with a smile of amusement. “So they’re beginning to raise the question down on earth, are they? I thought those ciphers might puzzle ’em for a few hundred years yet. Well, and who do they think wrote ’em?”

“Some persons say you did, Lord Bacon, and others attribute the authorship to the Earl of Dudley and other of your contemporaries. A Detroit man got permission to dig in the bed of the river Wye for the head of the Earl, which was supposed to be buried there, together with a box of manuscripts that would prove him to be the real Shakespeare.”

“Hum, hum,” mused his lordship. “I guess somebody else lost his head that time. Well, all you tell me is extremely interesting, I’m sure. And I presume even Will Shakespeare has his partisans, too, who insist still that the uneducated village lad from Stratford who used to hold horses in front of the London theaters for a living—and then served his term as a ‘chaser’ on the stage during the supper hour in vaudeville—that this strolling actor was actually the author of the immortal plays bearing his name?”

“Oh, yes, your lordship, Shakespeare would probably win by a large majority, if the matter were left to a popular vote.”

“Excuse me if I smile. The thought is highly amusing. I don’t believe I am quite ready, as yet, to present any formal claim to the authorship, but if I were free to speak I could— But, pshaw! What’s the difference? There are plenty of similar cases of masquerading authors in even later English literature which no mortal has yet discovered. By the way, has any question been raised, to date, about the so-called Dickens novels? There hasn’t? Everybody takes it for granted that they were written by Charles Dickens, the young, untrained reporter, who never had any education after he was twelve years of age, who worked in a blacking factory when he was ten? Well, well. You surprise me. Has nobody found any ciphers yet in his work? Not a one? Well, then look out for a sensation one of these days. Ciphers have always been my hobby, but long before I found any cryptic corroboration for my theory in Dickens’ works I was pretty sure who really wrote them. Can you think of a certain great statesman, like myself, but who flourished in the Victorian era, a dignified, austere personage who might not like to be known as the author of humorous works, but who might have got Dickens to lend his name for the purpose? You can’t? Try again. Well, I’ll make a suggestion: William E. Gladstone. Don’t smile. Wait until you hear the proofs. Gladstone had a contemporary and rival, Disraeli, who published novels under a pen name. Later Disraeli used his own name and the fact did not help his reputation as a statesman. Each of the principal so-called Dickens novels deals with some great proposed reform, such as the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the improvement of penal institutions and poor-houses, removal of delays in the law, the cutting of red tape in government offices, the wiping-out of the wretched Yorkshire schools.

“Gladstone was a born reformer. For a long time I was pretty sure that Dickens could not have written these books, but I never associated them with Gladstone until one day I happened to hit upon a cipher—as conclusive a one, I think, as any that have been discovered in the works of Shakespeare. Just before this I heard of the finding of the manuscript of a letter written by Gladstone to his firm of publishers, relating to the use of the name ‘Murdstone’ as one of the chief characters in ‘David Copperfield.’ After writing a number of novels Gladstone evidently felt that he would like to leave some more obvious clue to their real authorship than a cipher, and apparently his intention had been to call this character ‘Mirthstone,’ a sort of pun upon his own name. But his publishers must have objected to the device as too transparent, for we find him replying: ‘Very well. Then Murdstone let it be.’ Another clue was afforded by the name of the ‘literary man with a wooden leg’ in ‘Our Mutual Friend,’—Silas Wegg. Here we have the initials in full in their regular order, ‘W. E. G.’

“And now,” continued Lord Bacon, “we come to the real cipher, buried in the first of his longer stories, the ‘Pickwick Papers.’ I call it the Ivy Green Cipher. Why this poem of three stanzas was inserted in this book has long puzzled students of Dickens. The ostensible excuse for its introduction was its recitation at an evening party at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, by the aged clergyman of the place, name not given, who posed as its author. But the poem has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the story. Just write these first five lines, as I dictate, will you?

‘Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green,
That creepeth o’er ruins old,
Of right choice food are his meals I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed—’

“Now, kindly take your pencil and write down the first letter of the first line’s last word, the second letter of the second line’s last word, the third letter of the third line’s third word from the last (a not uncommon variant in ciphers of this character) and the fourth letter of the fourth line’s last word. Those four letters, in this order, spell GLAD. Now glance along the next line for the word that would form the second syllable of a proper name. The next to the last word is STONE. And there you have the conclusive clue to the authorship of the Dickens novels!”

“That seems to be a clincher, your lordship,” I said, “and I am sure your theory will create a sensation down below when the earth-dwellers hear of it. But will you not tell me whether you are the author of ‘Hamlet’ and the other immortal plays?”

“You may remember,” he replied with an enigmatic smile, “Sir Walter Scott’s answer to the lady who asked whether he wrote the ‘Waverly Novels,’ when they were appearing anonymously? ‘I did not write them,’ he rejoined, ‘but if I did I would not tell you.’ Some very curious circumstances were connected with the writing of the works called Shakespeare’s, and one day the world may learn of them. What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would still cost twenty-four dollars a dozen on Fifth Avenue.”

Then his lordship bowed me into my waiting astral plane.

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Table of Contents

- LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

- I BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES

- II QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED

- III JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY
- IV JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING
- V KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP
- VI BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE
- VII HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS
- VIII METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS
- IX JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING
- X SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES
- XI ADAM CONDEMNS FEMININE FASHIONS
- XII CAPTAIN KIDD ON TAG DAYS

- XIII ALFRED THE GREAT TRIES TO FIND PROSPEROUS KING

- XIV OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION

- XV KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES

- XVI DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS

- XVII PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM
- XVIII NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ
- XIX LORD BACON MUSES ON CIPHERS
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE