Stephen Leacock

“ Jinks and Blinks were coming down the steps of the club, and as they came they were speaking with some vehemence on their favourite topic.
“I tell you,” Jinks was saying, “war is a great thing. We needed it, Blinks. We were all getting too soft, too scared of suffering and pain. We wilt at a bayonet charge, we shudder at the thought of wounds. Bah!” he continued, “what does it matter if a few hundred thousands of human beings are cut to pieces. ”

“ Other newly discovered poets have had, apparently, some. Mr. Spudd has had, evidently, none. We lay stress on this point. Without it we claim it is impossible to understand his work.
What we particularly like about Ram Spudd, and we do not say this because we discovered him but because we believe it and must say it, is that he belongs not to one school but to all of them. As a nature poet we doubt very much if he has his equal; as a psychologist, we are sure he has not. As a clear lucid thinker he is undoubtedly in the first rank; while as a mystic he is a long way in front of it. ”

“ If he relaxes his vigilance for a moment he’ll be torpedoed as he sits, and sent flying, whiskey and soda and all, through the roof of the club, while Jinks dives into the basement.
Indeed it has come about of late, I don’t know just how, that Jinks has more or less got command of the sea. A sort of tacit understanding has been reached that Blinks, whichever army he happens at the moment to command, is invincible on land. But Jinks, whether as a submarine or a battleship, controls the sea. No doubt this grew up in the natural evolution of their conversation. It makes things easier for both. ”

“ The first English newspaper in history was going to press. Those who in later ages,—editors, printers, and workers—have participated in the same scene, can form some idea of the hopes and fears, the doubts and the difficulties, with which the first newspaper was ushered into the world.
Master Brenton Caxton turned upon the last speaker the undisturbed look of the eye that sees far across the present into the years to come.
“Nay, Edward,” he said, “you have laboured over much in the past and see not into the future. You think this chamber too great for our purpose? ”

“ I said, “poor Podge didn’t realise that he was going to die.”
“Ah, that’s just it,” resumed Mr. Doomer with something like sternness, “a man OUGHT to realise it. Every man ought to feel that at any moment,—one can’t tell when,—day or night,—he may be called upon to meet his,”—Mr. Doomer paused here as if seeking a phrase—“to meet his Financial Obligations, face to face. At any time, sir, he may be hurried before the Judge,—or rather his estate may be,—before the Judge of the probate court. It is a solemn thought, sir. ”

“ We first blindfolded ourselves and then, standing with our feet in warm water and having one hand tied behind our back, we groped among the papers on our desk before us and selected for our purpose whatever specimens first came to hand.
As we have said, or did we say it, it is perhaps as a nature poet that Ram Spudd excels. Others of our modern school have carried the observation of natural objects to a high degree of very nice precision, but with Mr. Spudd the observation of nature becomes an almost scientific process. Nothing escapes him. The green of the grass he detects as in an instant. ”

“ His wife turned to him again with the same unfailing tact.
“Take your asparagus to the billiard-room,” she said, “and eat it there.”
“Does he know, too?” asked de Vere.
“Mr. Overgold?” she said carelessly. “I suppose he does. Eh apres, mon ami?”
French? Another mystery! Where and how had she learned it? de Vere asked himself. Not in France, certainly.
“I fear that you are very young, amico mio,” Dorothea went on carelessly. “After all, what is there wrong in it, piccolo pochito? To a man’s mind perhaps—but to a woman, love is love.” ”

“ Sellyer laid his hand on a pile of new books, apparently as numerous as the huge pile of Golden Dreams.
“Among the Monkeys,” he repeated, almost caressingly.
“It seems rather expensive,” said the lady.
“Oh, very much so—a most expensive book,” the manager repeated in a tone of enthusiasm. “You see, Mrs. Rasselyer, it’s the illustrations, actual photographs”—he ran the leaves over in his fingers—“of actual monkeys, taken with the camera—and the paper, you notice—in fact, madam, the book costs, the mere manufacture of it, nine dollars and ninety cents—of course we make no profit on it. ”

“ Here Ellesworth drank a sip of tea and then said quietly, “Could you make it ten till Saturday at twelve?”
I looked at him more closely. I noticed now his frayed cuffs and the dinginess of his over-brushed clothes. Not even the magnetism of his spectacles could conceal it. Perhaps I had been forgetting something, whether the Bulgarian element or not.
I compromised at ten dollars till Saturday.
“The Slav,” said Ellesworth, as he pocketed the money, “is peculiar. He never forgets.” ”

“ The steps of the club were slippery with the evening’s rain,—not so slippery as the frozen lakes of East Prussia or the hills where Jinks and Blinks had been campaigning all winter, but slippery enough for a stout man whose nation has neglected his training. ”

“ But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like it.
So it was that even so up-to-date a manager as Mr. Sellyer tolerated my presence in a back corner of his store: and so it was that I had an opportunity of noting something of his methods with his real customers—methods so successful, I may say, that he is rightly looked upon by all the publishing business as one of the mainstays of literature in America. ”

“ Here will I make another maxim for our newspaper. All men we cannot please, for in pleasing one belike we run counter to another. Let us set our hand to write always without fear. Let us seek favour with none. Always in our news sheet we will seek to speak dutifully and with all reverence of the King his Majesty: let us also speak with all respect and commendation of His Majesty’s great prelates and nobles, for are they not the exalted of the land? ”

“ On a bright morning in June along a path gay with the opening efflorescence of the hibiscus and entangled here and there with the wild blossoms of the convolvulus,—two magnitudes might have been seen approaching one another. The one magnitude who held a tennis-racket in his hand, carried himself with a beautiful erectness and moved with a firmness such as would have led Professor Murray to exclaim in despair—Let it be granted that A. B. (for such was our hero’s name) is a straight line. ”

“ One day they commanded huge armies of Russians, and there was one week when Blinks and Jinks at the head of vast levies of Cossacks threatened to overrun the whole of Western Europe. It was dreadful to watch them burning churches and monasteries and to see Jinks throw whole convents full of white robed nuns into the flames like so much waste paper.
For a time I feared they would obliterate civilization itself. Then suddenly Blinks decided that Jinks’ Cossacks were no good, not properly trained. ”

“ From the customs wharf de Vere is driven in a taxi to the Belmont. Here he engages a room; here, too, he sleeps; here also, though cautiously at first, he eats. All this is so admirably described that only those who have driven in a taxi to an hotel and slept there can hope to appreciate it.
Limits of space also forbid our describing in full de Vere’s vain quest in New York of the beautiful creature whom he had met on the steamer and whom he had lost from sight in the aigrette department of the customs house. A thousand times he cursed his folly in not having asked her name. ”

“ He lived on it.
“Well, then, cut out all this fool business of diet and drugs and nitrogen. Don’t bother about anything of the sort. Forget it. Eat everything you want to, just when you want it. Drink all you like. Smoke all you can—and you’ll feel a new man in a week.”
“Say, do you think so!” he panted, his eyes filled with a new light.
“I know it,” I answered. And as I left him I shook hands with a warm feeling about my heart of being a benefactor to the human race.
Next day, sure enough, Podge’s usual chair at the club was empty. ”

“ He extended the bonds to de Vere.
“Do you want them,” he said, “or shall I throw them away?”
“Give them to me,” said de Vere quietly; “they are not worth the throwing.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Overgold, speaking half to himself, as he replaced the bonds in his desk. “It is a burden that I must carry alone. I have no right to ask any one to share it. But come,” he continued, “I fear I am sadly lacking in the duties of international hospitality. I am forgetting what I owe to Anglo-American courtesy. I am neglecting the new obligations of our common Indo-Chinese policy. My motor is at the door. ”

“ For it seems to me that if our paper speaketh first this and then that but hath no fixed certainty of truth, sooner or later will all its talk seem vain, and no man will heed it. But if it speak always the truth, then sooner or later shall all come to believe it and say of any happening, ‘It standeth written in the paper, therefore it is so.’ And here I charge you all that have any part in this new venture,” continued Master Brenton, looking about the room at the listening faces and speaking with great seriousness, “let us lay it to our hearts that our maxim shall be truth and truth alone. ”

“ Nicholas shook his head.
“‘Tis a poor plan, Master Brenton,” he said, “the folk wish news, give them the news. The more thou givest them, the better pleased they are and thus doth the news sheet move from hand to hand till it may be said (if I too may coin a phrase) to increase vastly its ‘circulation’—”
“In sooth,” said Master Brenton, looking at Nicholas with a quiet expression that was not exempt from a certain slyness, “there I do hold thou art in the wrong, even as a matter of craft or policie. ”

“ The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. ”

“ Is life, after all, merely a series of immaterial phenomena, self-developing and based solely on sensation and reaction, or is it something else?”
He paused for a moment to sign a cheque for $10,000 and throw it out of the window, and then went on, speaking still with the terse brevity of a man of business.
“Is sensation everywhere or is there perception too? On what grounds, if any, may the hypothesis of a self-explanatory consciousness be rejected? In how far are we warranted in supposing that innate ideas are inconsistent with pure materialism?”
De Vere listened, fascinated. ”

“ Here for the first time in history was being laid down that fine, fearless creed that has made the independent press what it is.
Meantime Caxton continued to glance his eye over the news sheet, murmuring his comments on what he saw,—“Ah! vastly fine, Master Nicholas,—this of the sailing of His Majesty’s ships for Spain,—and this, too, of the Doge of Venice, his death, ‘tis brave reading and maketh a fair discourse. ”

“ I can get you shares now at five dollars. They’ll go to five hundred when we put them on the market,—and I can run you in for a block of stock for promotion services as well. All you have to do is to give me right now a hundred dollars,—cash or your cheque,—and I can arrange the whole thing for you.”
I smiled.
“My dear Ellesworth,” I said, “I hope you won’t mind if I give you a little bit of good advice. Why not drop all this idea of quick money? There’s nothing in it. The business world has grown too shrewd for it. Take an ordinary decent job and stick to it. ”

“ Any man can at least think solemnly of the Inheritance Tax, and reflect whether by a contract inter vivos drawn in blank he may not obtain redemption; any man if he thinks death is near may at least divest himself of his purely speculative securities and trust himself entirely to those gold bearing bonds of the great industrial corporations whose value will not readily diminish or pass away.” Mr. Doomer was speaking with something like religious rapture. ”

“ Every bird note, every bee call, is familiar to his trained ear. Perhaps we cannot do better than quote the opening lines of a singularly beautiful sample of Ram Spudd’s genius which seems to us the last word in nature poetry. ”

“ After all, what is is, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” said de Vere, half convinced in spite of himself.
“Or at any rate,” said Dorothea, “nothing can at the same time both be and not be. But come,” she broke off, gaily dipping a macaroon in a glass of creme de menthe and offering it to him with a pretty gesture of camaraderie, “don’t let’s be gloomy any more. I want to take you with me to the matinee.”
“Is he coming?” asked de Vere, pointing at Mr. Overgold’s empty chair. ”

“ I separate or distinguish in any degree the men of Ulster from the men of Tipperary, and the heart of Belfast from the heart of Dublin.” (Loud cheers.)
Mr. Redmond (springing forward) . “And I’ll say this: Not I, nor any man of Ireland, Dublin, Belfast, or Connaught will ever set our hands or names to any bill that shall separate Ireland in any degree from the rest of the Empire. Work out, if you like, a new scheme of government. If the financial clauses are intricate, get one of your treasury clerks to solve them. ”

“ I gasped.
“Yes, sir, even the hand baggage. Opened it all, or a lot of it anyway, and scribbled chalk marks over it. Yes, and worse than that,—I saw them take two fellows and sling them clear off the train,—they slung them right out on to the platform.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Heaven knows,” said Parkins,—“they said they had no tickets. In war time you know, when they’re mobilizing, they won’t let a soul ride on a train without a ticket.” ”

“ I said, “thank you,” and he left me.
“That was Ellesworth, wasn’t it?” said a friend of mine who was near me. “Poor devil. I knew him slightly,—always full of some new and wild idea of making money. He was talking to me the other day of the possibility of cornering all the huckleberry crop and making refined sugar. Isn’t it amazing what fool ideas fellows like him are always putting up to business men?”
We both laughed.
After that I didn’t see Ellesworth for some weeks.
Then I met him in the club again. How he paid his fees there I do not know. ”