John Kendrick Bangs

“ The Bernard Shaw lady is a delight to the heart and soul in his Bernard Shaw moods. The George Ade lady is a source of unalloyed bliss in a George Ade mood, but they don't reverse readily, and in most cases they can't reverse at all. Then there are other equally baffling complications along other lines. A man may be crazy about poetry, and he falls in love, as he supposes, with a dainty little creature in gold-rimmed eyeglasses, who writes the most exquisite lyrics, simply because he thinks at the moment that those lyrics are going to make his life just one sweet song after another. ”

“ I was as flat as a joke of Caesar's after its four thousandth semiannual appearance in London Punch, and in respect to thickness I was pressed so thin that you could have rolled me around your umbrella, and still been able to get the cover on."
"You never were very deep, anyhow," suggested the Bibliomaniac.
"Whence the wonder of it grows," said the Idiot. "Normally I am fathomless compared to the thin, waferlike quality of my improfundity as I flickered to the floor after that dreadful pressure was removed."
"How about women getting crushed?" demanded the Landlady defiantly. ”

“ The Landlady laughed a long, loud, silvery laugh, with just a little touch of derision in it.
"O you men, you men!" she ejaculated. "You call yourselves the stronger sex, and plume yourselves on your superior physical endurance, and yet when it comes to a test, where are you?"
"Under the table, Madame, under the table," sighed the Idiot. "I for one frankly admit the soft impeachment." [Pg 52]
"Yes," said the Landlady, "but I'll warrant you never found a woman under the table. ”

“ I see steel-riveted contraptions, marked down from a dollar fifty-seven to ninety-eight cents, which have all the lithe, lissom grace of a Helen of Troy, the which I am led to infer the women of to-day purchase and insert themselves into, gaining thereby not only a marvelous symmetry of figure hitherto unknown to them, but that same security against the bufferings of a rude outside world as well, which a gilt-edged bond must feel when it finds itself locked up behind the armor-plated walls of a Safe Deposit Company. ”

“ The tesselated pave of your safe deposit companies and banks will look like the floor of an ocean steamship pier on the arrival of a big liner, only instead of being snowed under by a mass of shirts, trousers, Paris-made revelations in chiffons, silks, and brocades, necklaces, tiaras, pearl ropes, snipped aigrettes, and snowy drifts of indescribable, but in these free days no longer unmentionable, lingerie, it will be piled high with steel bonds, New Haven deferred dividends, sinking fund debenture certificates, government five eighths per cent. ”

“ Oh, it's a fine mess we smart Alexanders of the hour have got ourselves into in our effort to establish a pipe line between the plutocratic pocketbook and the United States Treasury. We all hypnotized ourselves into the pleasing belief that the income tax was going to be a jolly little club with which to hit old Brother Plute on the head, and make him fork over, while we Nixicrats sat on the fence and grinned. ”

“ We can be just as strong on evolution as we always have been on revolution if we only try. The first thing would be for us to recognize that in his fullest development up to date the real American is a composite of everything that is best in all other nations. Take my humble self for instance." [Pg 7]
"What, again?" groaned the Bibliomaniac. "Really, Mr. Idiot, you are worse than the measles. You can take that only once, but you—why, we've had you so often that it sometimes seems as if life were just one idiotic thing after another." ”

“ I quaff this pony of maple syrup to the health of the sanitariums of the land—but just the same, for the tired business man, and his name is not only Smith, but Legion, there should be some other kind of an institution where this coddling process is frowned upon."
"Why not devote that massive brain of yours to the working out of the idea?" suggested the Bibliomaniac. "The great trouble with you, Mr. Idiot, is that you are prolific in thinking out things that ought to be done, but there you stop. How to do them you never tell us. Why don't you give us a constructive notion once in awhile?" ”

“ Later in life, perhaps, there will come a war to teach us how to assault an entrenched enemy, and occasionally, perhaps around election time, we may find ourselves mixed up in some kind of a free fight on the streets, but all of these things are as child's play compared to an assault upon a bargain table by one who has never practiced the necessary maneuvers. ”

“ His lip quivers when he talks, and his hand is the center of a seismic disturbance that turns his autograph into a cross between a dress pattern and a futurist conception of a straight line in the cold gray dawn of the morning after. He has prolonged fits of weeping, and when it comes to making up his mind on any definite course of action he vacillates between two possibilities until it is too late, and then decides wrong. ”

“ I could not possibly bring myself to love only one pair of blue eyes to the utter exclusion of black, brown, or gray; nor can I be sure that if in some moment of weakness I were to tie up irrevocably to a pair of black eyes, somewhere, some day, with the moon just right, and certain psychological conditions wholly propitious, a pair of coruscating brown beads, set beneath two roguish eyebrows, would labor in vain to win a curve of interest from my ascetic upper lip. To put it in the brief form of a cable dispatch, rather than in magazine language at fifteen cents a word, I love 'em all! ”

“ All men stand equal in the eyes of the law when it comes to the show-down. There is no discrimination in favor of the rich in this business, and the inconvenience of having a minion of authority prying into your private affairs is as much a privilege of yours as it is of Uncle John's, or good old Brother Scramble, the Egg King. Uncle Sam is going to put his eye on every man-jack of us and find out whether we are any good or not, and if so, for how much. ”

“ It is merely evidence of the irresistible attraction of one person for another. It's like sampling a box of candy—you may find the sample extremely pleasing and gobble it up ferociously, but if you were to gobble up the whole box with equal voracity it might prove hateful to you. ”

“ We women, weak and defenseless though we be, go through that sort of thing day after day from youth to age, and we never even think of complaining, much less giving up the fight the way you did. Once a woman gets her eye on a bargain, my dear Mr. Idiot, and really wants it, it would take a hundred and fifty maelstroms such as you have described to keep her from getting it. ”

“ Whitechoker's barrel of sermons—will be compelled to disgorge their uttermost content in order to satisfy the government sleuths that we who dwell in this Palace of Truth, Joy, and Waffles, have not a controlling interest in Standard Oil hidden away lest we be compelled to pay our due to the treasury."
"You don't mean to say that the law so provides, do you?" said the Bibliomaniac.
"Not yet," said the Idiot, "but it will—it's bound to come. In the very nature of the beast it is inevitable. There never was a tax yet that found a warm spot awaiting it in the hearts of its countrymen. ”

“ Life runs along with the lilt of a patter song—and then, to indulge in a joke worthy of the palmiest days of London Punch, he comes out of Patter-Song! There dawns a day when he is full chock-a-block up to his neck with poetry, and the inner man craves the re-enforcement of the kind of flapjacks his mother used to make. ”

“ You do not dare think on the morrow, what ye shall eat, and wherewithal shall ye be clothed, because no man liveth who can purchase the necessities of life with rejection slips—those checks on the Banks of Ambition, payable in the editors' regrets."
"By George," blurted the Poet feelingly, "you're dead right about that, old man. If editors' regrets were legal tender, I could pay off the national debt."
"Precisely," said the Idiot. "And it is just here, my dear friend, that the U. S. Telephonic Aid Society rushes to your assistance. ”

“ They turn me at once into a suffering hero. As I lie listlessly in my steamer-chair they pass me by on tip-toe, or pause and inquire into the progress of my aches and show a great deal more interest in my condition than they do in bridge or votes for women. ”

“ If [Pg 23] the one durable joy in life, the joy that neither crocks nor fades, association with the fair sex, a diversion which age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite variety, is something an Immortal must get along without, it's me for the tall timbers of fameless existence. I rejoice that I am but a plain, common-garden, everyday mortal thing, ready for shipment, f. o. b., for the last terminal station on the road to that well-known Irish settlement, O'Blivion."
"I didn't know that you were such an admirer of the fair sex, Mr. Idiot," said the Doctor. ”

“ Pedagog," said the Idiot. "It's just as bad for the woman as for the man—sometimes a little worse, for there is no denying that women are after all more chameleonic, capable of a greater variety of emotions than men are. A man may find several women in one—in fact, he generally does. It is her frequent unlikeness to herself that constitutes the chief charm of some women. Take my friend Spinks' wife, for instance. ”

“ Pedagog," said the Idiot. "We're perfectly safe here. It is no temptation to a doctor to sow the germs of disorder among people like ourselves who have reduced getting free medical advice to a system." ”

“ The human mind with all its diabolical ingenuity has never yet [Pg 80] been able to devise a tax that somebody somewhere—nay, that most people everywhere—did not try to dodge, and to catch the dodgers the government is compelled to view everybody with suspicion, and treat hoi polloi from top to bottom as if they were nothing more nor less than a lot of unregenerate pickpockets, horse-thieves, and pastmasters in the gentle art of mendacity. ”

“ Pedagog. "You implied that women are armed when they go shopping, while men are not."
"Well, aren't they?" asked the Idiot. "Every blessed daughter of Eve in that mêlée yesterday was armed, one might almost say, to the teeth. There wasn't one in the whole ninety-seven thousand of them that didn't have at least two hatpins thrust through the middle of her head with their sharp-pointed ends sticking out an inch and a half beyond her dear little ears; and every time a head was turned in any direction blood was shed automatically. ”

“ For example, if a man marries a woman who is deeply interested in Ibsen and Bernard Shaw abroad, and deep thinkers like William J. Bryan and Thomas Riley Marshall at home, she no doubt makes him ecstatically happy in those solemn moments when his mind wishes to grapple understandingly with the infinite. ”

“ What?"
"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as psychlists."
"That's all right," said the Idiot. [Pg 87] "That's all I really want. If I can be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."
"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance." ”

“ He assured me that he himself had reached a point in his career where there was hardly a vermiform appendix left in sight, and where five years ago he was chopping down not less than four of these a day for six days of the week at a thousand dollars per, it was now a lucky time for him when he got his pruning knife off the hook once a month."
"That vermiform appendix craze was all a fad anyhow," said the Bibliomaniac sourly. "Like the tango, and bridge, and golf, and slumming, and all the rest [Pg 103] of those things that Society takes up, and then drops all of a sudden like a hot stick. ”

“ In my case, I confess that I am so deeply interested in the whole box of tricks that it is the sample I fight shy of, and I have remained single all these years because my heart is no miserable [Pg 25] little one-horse-power affair that beats only for one single individual, but a ninety-million horse-power dynamo that whirls madly around day and night, on time and overtime, on behalf of all. ”

“ You know that, and I know that, but Uncle Sam doesn't know it, and you've got to satisfy him that you are not a plutocrat trying to pass yourself off as a member of one of those respectable middle-class financial families in which this land is so pleasingly rich. You've got to lay a statement of your financial condition before the government whether your income is ninety-seven cents a minute or forty-seven thousand dollars an hour. Nobody is exempt from that nuisance. ”

“ I have found my opportunity lying before me in the daily newspapers, and I am about to start a new enterprise which is not only going to pull a large and elegant series of chestnuts out of the fire for me but for all my subscribers as well. ”

“ It will not be a good thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an army of unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made up as it will be of highly intelligent [Pg 108] but desperately hungry men, face to face with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medical diploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the whole range of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussic acid and cyanide of potassium.
"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with a grin at the Doctor. ”

“ Now, I should say that it is by their fruits that ye shall know them."
"A highly original remark," observed the Idiot, with a grin.
"That aside," said the Doctor, coolly, "let's take up, for purposes of discussion, a few standards. In music, Wagner was an Immortal, and produced his great trilogy. In poetry, Milton was an Immortal, and produced 'Paradise Lost.' In the drama, Shakespeare [Pg 40] was an Immortal, and produced 'Hamlet', and, coming down to our own time, let us grant the obvious fact that Edison is headed toward immortality because of his wizardry in electricity." ”

“ With one National Congress, and forty-eight separate State Legislatures working twenty-four hours a day, turning out fifty-seven new varieties of law every fifteen minutes, all so phrased that no human mind can translate them into simple English, there's enough trouble constantly on hand to keep twenty million lawyers busy for thirty million years, telling us not what we can't do, but what few things there are left under the canopy that a man of religious inclinations can do without danger of arrest! ”