Part 1

BIZARRE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SCRAMBLED EGGS

BIZARRE

By

LAWTON MACKALL

With 26 Drawings By LAUREN STOUT

NEW YORK

LIEBER & LEWIS

1922

Copyright 1922 By LIEBER & LEWIS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_To my favorite poet_

VIRGINIA WOODS MACKALL

_The author thanks_ LIFE, JUDGE, THE CENTURY, THE QUILL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE LITERARY REVIEW, _and_ THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE _for kind permission to include in this volume certain contributions to those publications. He hopes he has remembered to ask such permission in each case._

PREFACE

As good form requires that an author mention in his preface the persons to whom he is chiefly indebted, I take this opportunity of stating that during the preparation of this book I became appreciably indebted to Dr. Warren S. Holder, my dentist, Mr. William Vroom, my tailor, Mr. M. Tesshow, my stationer and tobacconist, and Messrs. Acker, Merrall & Condit, my grocers.

Although these gentlemen neither "corrected the proofs" of my book nor "saw it through the press," nor allowed me access to rare documents and family letters, nor treated me to intimate accounts of their fathers and great uncles as they knew them; though they did none of these customary things, nevertheless I became decidedly their debtor--and still am.

Indeed, without their stimulus this book might never have been written.

L. M.

_ENCLOSED PLEASE FIND_

WHAT-NOTS

Unsolicited Personal Adornments

Shelf Culture

Portable Pigeonholes

Simile

The Beatified Race

Jouez Balle

The Art of Packing

Agriculture Indoors

Snowy Bosoms

Interior Desperation

The Writing on the Screen

Musique Glacée

The Care of the Husband

Terminology of Tardiness

Oppressors of the Meek

Putting Pedagogy Across

Coaching From the Sidelines

Fast and Loose

Primrose Pathology

Fightier Than the Sword

Enlightment

Holiday Misgivings

All, All Are Gone

My Museum

On Chairs--and off

MINIMS

The Night of the Fleece

Black Jitney

Light Breakfast

The Man Opposite

Lucy the Literary Agent

The Creeping Fingers

The Man With the Hose

JANGLES

Those Symphony Concert Programs

How to Know the Instruments

Notes on Pianos

The Life Drama of a Musical Critic

The Survival of the Fattest

WHAT-NOTS

UNSOLICITED PERSONAL ADORNMENTS

Have you ever, on returning home from a round of calls, discovered upon your coat a large, obtrusive spot?

Stricken with horror, you wonder how long it has been there. Did you have this adjunct when you appeared before your wealthy aunt? That severe female has never quite approved of you, and now this will finish you as far as she is concerned. Did you exhibit yourself thus disgraced at the Brumleighs'? You recollect that the maid eyed you queerly when she opened the door, and that Mrs. B. had frequent recourse to her lorgnettes. Then, too, both the Greens and the Worthingtons seemed a little stiffer than usual.

How did you acquire it, anyhow? It looks and feels like ice cream of a very rich quality; ice cream that has drippled merrily in leaps and bounds. But you had no ice cream today. Neither did you talk to anyone who was having ice cream.

Perhaps you have been struck by ice cream, just as people are struck by lightning. The weather does such peculiar things nowadays.

I have a gray suit that is a constant prey to spots. Its frail color--a sickly, betwixt-and-between shade, chosen in haste and repented of at leisure--puts it utterly at their mercy. And they flock to it.

Things sticky and glutinous pounce avidly upon it; nor is its seat reserved from paints and varnishes. Sauces afflict it. Oils take advantage of its helplessness. Grass bedizens it with garish green.

I try my best to protect it--but what can I do? What am I against so many? While I am rescuing my left elbow from the machinations of a passing dish, I unwittingly suffer my right cuff to be enticed by the gravy in my plate. As I walk discreetly in the middle of the sidewalk, an automobile out in the street salutes me with a volley of mud.

And the most notable spots happen mysteriously. They appear out of the air, as it were, like the pictures that frost makes on window panes. I submit the phenomenon of their strange origin to the scientific world as an instance of spontaneous generation.

This spotability of my gray suit is surpassed only by the achievements of my blue serge. (I shall not here discuss my English tweeds, nor my Scotch cheviots, nor the braided cutaway and the lounge suit that I had made for me in Bond Street, for fear the reader might divine that I never possessed those garments.) This suit is not a victim to spots--it deliberately invites them. It is a connoisseur, a discriminating collector.

Scorning such vulgarities as paint and pitch, it seeks the exotic, the outré--amazing stickinesses, bewildering viscosities, undreamed of goos.

Although delighting in intricacy of design and delicate nuances of shading, it prefers durability to all other qualities. Some of its antiques--particularly a brownish white one, resembling an octopus, over the front pocket--have stood the test of time and clothes brushes.

On three occasions this remarkable collection has been almost entirely destroyed by benzine, but each time the principal specimens have survived intact. These cleanings divide the history of the suit into four epochs.

Spots of the fourth (or present) epoch are of small consequence; spots of the third and second epochs are more interesting; while spots which antedate the first great deluge are quite rare. Among these last are the octopus and other gems of the collection.

Once, when I had become exceedingly irked at having to go about clad in pseudo-tapestry, I handed the suit over to a desperado of a ladies' and gents' tailor--a man who had the reputation of being capable of getting anything out of anything or anybody--and besought him to raze the frescoes.

He attacked them after the manner customary to cleaners; that is to say, he drove out the spots with smells. Only, he used smells that were nothing short of brutal. The rout was complete.

When he brought the suit to my room on Saturday night, I could hardly believe my eyes. Being forced, however, to believe my nose, I hastily opened the window. I could understand why the spots had departed. I even felt sorry for them.

Not daring to put the suit away, for fear of contaminating the rest of my apparel, I hung it over the back of a chair by the window.

But the incoming breeze, instead of carrying the aroma away, wafted it directly toward me. It was certainly strong. It fairly assaulted the nostrils. One good whiff of that vicious chemical was almost enough to make you dizzy.

It treated me as if I were a spot.

I picked up a book and tried to read, but could not concentrate my attention.

The spot-destroyer was continually interrupting. My head was spinning so that I could hardly see.

I realized that the life of a spot was not a happy one.

Thinking that smoking might help, I was about to light a cigarette when I remembered reading in the papers of people who struck matches in fume-filled rooms and then were blown blocks and blocks without knowing what hit them. So I gave that up, and sat a while dejected.

Then another scary thought came into my mind. What if I should be asphyxiated? I pictured myself being found dead in bed, having been extinct for hours and hours, and the mournfulness of it broke me all up.

Overcome with emotion and spot-destroyer, I gathered a few things into a suitcase and went out to spend the night at a hotel.

When I returned to my room on the following evening the aroma had gone, and the rays of the setting sun, illuminating the old blue suit as it hung there on the back of the chair, showed me a host of familiar faces--particularly that of an especially offensive brownish-white octopus over the pocket. They had come back every one; not a design was missing.

SHELF CULTURE

"A man of education and refinement like you needs books befitting your culture--your place in the world," said my visitor. He spoke as though he were a revered friend of the family. But actually he was not just that. I had never seen him before. He was honoring me with a call at my room on Freshman Row.

I had come to college to get in touch with Belles-Lettres, and, lo, Belles-Lettres were seeking me out! Recognition had come far sooner than I had hoped.

To appreciate what I felt, you must know that Belles-Lettres' ambassador was no ordinary person. He had the clothes of a clubman, the benignity of a clergyman, and the dignity of an undertaker. There was scholarliness in the droop of the pinch glasses on his aquiline nose and as he talked he kept lifting his curiously arched eyebrows in a manner that fascinated the beholder.

From the subject of my culture in its broader aspects he progressed by easy gradations to my culture in its relation to the works of Hawthorne and Irving, the two authors indispensable to a man of discerning taste, the authors whose writings constituted the logical nucleus of the well-bred student's library. He was happy to be able to tell me of the rare opportunity that now lay in my grasp of acquiring the immortal and exhilarating works of _both_ these masters at one and the same time--in one and the same set.

The urgency of my need for Hawthorne and Irving being thus established beyond the shadow of a hesitance, the only thing for me to decide fairly and squarely was whether they should come to me in blue half-morocco or in red buckram. The splendid showing that either set would make in my bookcase was attested by the accordion-plaited binding sample which at the proper moment he produced and unfolded. Nearly a yard of titled book-backs!

I signed on the dotted line and accepted his congratulations, while he accepted my two dollar deposit.

About a week later the box arrived. Eagerly I lifted forth the magic volumes which were to put me on a new intellectual plane. Somehow the bindings seemed to need breaking in. They creaked and cracked at the hinges and the pages clung together in little groups clannishly. The gluing of the backs was queer, yet casual. The "hand" that had tinted the "elegant colored frontispieces" was evidently a heavy one.

No matter: Hawthorne and Irving were mine. I had been taken into the higher circles of culture.

That very evening I plunged into "Mosses from an Old Manse." I stuck at it. Each day I balanced my morning's Shredded Wheat with Hawthorne Mosses at night, till the entire volume had been systematically consumed. Then, having created my new literary universe, I rested.

Today no one can stump me on Mosses. Mention the Old Manse to me and my whole manner changes. My face lights up with intelligence. My eyes sparkle. My nostrils dilate like those of an old fire engine horse at the clang of an alarm gong. Yes, right this minute I can give you moss for moss.

If only I had gone on and read all the other volumes of the set.... Who knows? I might now be dean of a college or a second Dr. Frank Crane. Alas, I continued to rest on my Mosses, arguing sophistically with my conscience that these books, the nucleus of my ultimate library, were precious possessions not necessarily for immediate perusal. Time-defying classics like Hawthorne and Irving would keep and be equally enjoyable years hence, if not more so; in fact, it would be almost extravagant to use them all up in the beginning. So it was tacitly decided that we three--Nathaniel, Washington, and I (the first two in red buckram, the latter in invisible yet palpable Freshman green)--should grow old together.

The fourth member of our little group, he who had introduced us, had dropped out. I neither saw nor heard from him again. It would seem that he worked like lightning, striking in the same place only once. Not so his firm, however. They struck me by mail each month with awful iteration.

But before a year had passed there descended upon me another emissary of intellectualism. This personage expounded to me the doctrine of the De Luxe. I learned that an edition of any author, no matter how reputable that author may be, was mere dross if published for the public at large. Only as a subscriber, possessing a numbered set of a limited edition, could one obtain the quintessence of literature. _Fiat de lux._ Let there be e-lite.

The fact that this prophet of almost-vellum exclusiveness was physically a fat and florid Irishman whom a wiser man than I might have mistaken for a saloon keeper in his Sunday clothes, did not hamper his spirit. Enthrallingly yet confidentially he discoursed on Selected Literature for the Serene Few. I could be one of those Serene Few.

I could. I did. I signed.

In his display room, to which this rotund spider lured me, I examined, enraptured, sets of all the leading _de luxe_ writers. There was Pepys with pasted labels, Smollett and Fielding with special illustrations, twelve volumes of the World's Best Oratory, a bobtailed set of Stevenson, the inevitable Plutarch in fool morocco that was very like shellacked paper, and many more. But the _magnum opus_ of them all was a green buckram affair in thirty tall tomes calling itself "The Bibliophile Library of Literature, Art and Rare Manuscripts." To emphasize the word Art in the title there was, as an adjunct, a three-foot portfolio of reproductions from paintings. Here was something that cast Hawthorne and Irving into the shade. It was world-wide, wonderful. (Later I came to know it as the "Hash"!)

As in a trance, I said yes to the "Bibliophile Library," to the Great Orations, to the much-shorter R. L. S. Later I took on a few more.

My finances grew groggy. Indeed, Europe's difficulties over paying her war indebtedness are as naught in comparison. Then at last the miracle happened: the book concern mislaid their record of my indiscretions--and all scowls ceased.

For three years. Then rediscovery. Collectors, collectors, collectors--not the sort that A. Edward Newton writes about. They came faster than I could insult them. Litigation. Cash compromise. Formal return of books.

Such is the story of "My Life With Great Authors; or, The Horrors of Dunning Street."

But I shall not allow it to "take its place among the successful biographies and intimate journals of the season." Distinctly not. It is for the _élite_ alone. It is to be published on sugar-cured oilskin, the edition to be limited to two numbered copies--one for me and one for the ashcan.

PORTABLE PIGEONHOLES

Aside from a few unimportant physical distinctions, the chief difference between man and woman is that his pockets are in his clothes, whereas her solitary one dangles fitfully from her hand. Man is girded about with these little repositories for the safekeeping of his belongings; while woman, less interested in conservation than in cosmetics, holds her booty ever accessible, so as to be able at any moment to dispose of $3.98 or powder her nose. The ding of her husband's cash register and the click of her dangle bag mark the systole and diastole of married life.

Man delights in multiplicity of pockets. He must have clusters of them, layers of them, pockets within pockets. Otherwise his search for anything he has hidden on his person would be uninterestingly simple. Fancy, for example, the monotony of traveling, if, at the call "All tickets, please!" there were but a single pocket to excavate. And how difficult it would be, when riding on a street car, for one to put up an appearance of searching madly for his purse while he allowed his companion to pay the fare.

The instinct for stowing away things in pockets, manifested in childhood by a proneness for smuggling home from parties such contraband as strawberry tarts and layer-cake with soft icing, continues throughout life. But as one grows older the reason for these caches is less and less obvious. The delectable but adhesive loot in the boy's pocket is soon separated (as much as possible) from the lining, and devoured in rapture; but the dry accumulations of the middle-aged man, such as useless ticket stubs, old newspaper clippings, business cards thrust upon him by salesmen or accepted absentmindedly when handed to him on the street, unposted letters which he promised three days ago to drop into the first mail box--all these lie buried and forgotten until resurrected on suit-pressing day. He secretes them with the infatuation of a dog interring bones. Only, unlike the sagacious hound, instead of getting rid of them by this process, he merely turns them into encumbrances.

A pocket that has long suffered from congestion will sometimes take matters into its own hands and empty itself. Without bothering to give any warning of its intention, it acquires a hole in one corner and then quietly disposes of its contents. In this way small but useful change departs, in company with your latch-key, via your trouser leg. And your unfortunate fountain pen, let down suddenly as though by the springing of a trapdoor, falls clear to the bottom of the inside of your waist coat, where it lies prostrate, gasping out its last spurt of ink.

There is a treacherous kind of pocket, inhabiting a vertical slit in the side of an overcoat, that simulates openness when it is actually closed; so that the unwary owner, imagining himself to be putting a thing into a safe nook, is really poking it through a hole and dropping it upon the ground.

The average tailor has an unpleasant sense of humor. He allows you fifteen pockets, and then proceeds to fit your suit so closely that not a single one of them can be used. Unless you take the precaution of stuffing each pocket with cotton batting when he tries the suit on you, he will systematically take in all seams and buttons, in such a way that a post-card inserted in the breast-pocket would be sufficient wadding to throw the entire coat out of shape. (Perhaps he goes on the assumption that when you have paid his bill you won't have anything left to put there.) Every pocket is a latent distortion--put something into it and you have a swelling, a tumor. Utilize your hip pocket as an oasis and you have a bustle.

These cares and tribulations are, as we stated at the beginning of this treatise, the lot of man alone. For woman, while accepting the responsibility of the vote, has thus far avoided the responsibility of the pocket--preferring to let her husband be a walking warehouse for two. It is her method of maintaining him in subjection. If she, too, were bepocketed, she could not keep him on the jump picking up things she has dropped and trotting back for things she has left behind. Nor, if she were not in the habit of making him dutifully store her gloves, fan, handkerchief, etc., on his person, could she put him in the wrong by taking him to task for forgetting to return them.

No, woman is too wise. She talks very blandly about equality, but so far the only representative of her sex to wear a real pocket is the female kangaroo.

SIMILE

Mortimer was as bold as orange-and-pink hosiery, and Simile was as elusive as a cake of castile soap. When, at the appointed hour, he repaired to her house, as punctual as a bill collector, she tried, like a street-car conductor, to put him off.

But his mind, like the face of a cutie, was made up. Becoming as eloquent as a man in a telephone booth which you are waiting to use, he said: "Simile, I love you!"

Her lips quivered like a ford, but the look in her eyes was as far away as Brooklyn.

"Ah, marry me" he pleaded, his voice sounding as hollow as a campaign pledge, "--or I shall be as wretched as porous custard."

He edged nearer to her, till he was almost as close as the air in the subway. He gazed anxiously at her face, the way a person in a taxicab gazes at the face of the meter. Her skin was smooth as a confidence man and clear as boarding-house soup. He put his arm about her slender waist, which was slim as a librarian's salary.

Yielding suddenly, like a treacherous garter, she murmured, in a voice as soft as stale crackers, while tears rushed to her eyes like shoppers to a bargain counter, "I am yours". And she clung to him like barbed wire.

A thrill of joy went through Mortimer like a highwayman. "Ah!" he cried. "Then I am as happy as a coincidence!"

THE BEATIFIED RACE

It is wrong to assert that our fiction magazines have lost their power to inspire, to uplift. High romance and whole-hearted cheerfulness have not deserted them. These qualities have merely migrated to the advertising pages. The morbid, unpleasant fiction is only a short interlude between the innocent joys of Nabiscos and fireless cookers, and the wholesomeness of Mellin's Food. After sin and adulteration comes 99-44/100 per cent pure.

The people in the advertisements help us to forget those in the stories. These pictured endorsers display a generosity that I have not met with elsewhere. They offer me, a total stranger to them, the most delicious refreshments, costly gifts in silverware, whole suites of furniture; they make me aware of "long-felt" wants; they volunteer to teach me Spanish or osteopathy or plumbing in ten lessons; they propose to send me immediately a portable house in many pieces, or a new lease of life in many doses. They take a most personal interest in me, enquiring sympathetically, "Are you bilious?"

Here, I confess, I sometimes feel embarrassed. When my old family doctor asks me, in the privacy of his office, questions of this sort, I am prepared to answer them; but when, as I am turning over the pages of a magazine at a public news-stand, someone bobs out from behind a respectful soap advertisement and accosts me brusquely with, "How is your liver?" or "Are you bowlegged?"--I feel positively uncomfortable.

This forwardness, due to the bad influence of the fiction characters, is, I regret to say, a trait of some of the women. (How sad it is that editors should wilfully allow them to be contaminated! I have seen a little Campbell Soup girl of quite a tender age, placed on the same page with a heroine whose only topic of conversation was _unmoral love_.) Luxuriant creatures, as unabashed as they are beautiful, invite my approval of their stays, and make disclosures of the most sensational kind. All of this may be in accordance with the modern ideas of frankness, may be part of the sex-education campaign--but somehow I can't get used to it. I am still old-fashioned enough to believe that woman's place is in the home, especially when she is undressing.

However, while the behavior of these people toward me is occasionally a bit disconcerting, their deportment toward each other is uniformly admirable. In their own sphere they lead model lives.

Their family devotion, for example, is a treat to behold. Just see Mama and Papa and Susie and Marian and little Jack, all seated around the dining-table! From their happy smiles it is easy to tell that they love each other and Jell-O. After dinner, dear kind Papa will not bury himself in the evening paper, as selfish, inconsiderate papas do--he will give Mama and the good, rosy-cheeked children each a stick of Spearmint. Then all the family will gather 'round the fire in peaceful attitudes and listen to the phonograph, which protects the atmosphere of their home; and Susie will sit on the arm of Papa's chair and fondly compare their Holeproofs.