Part 2
Later, when Susie's bright young man, dressed in a nobby Kuppenheimer suit, comes to win her heart with a box of Huyler's, Mama whom Papa still adores because her complexion is youthified with Pompeiian, will take Marian and little Jack upstairs and show her maternal tenderness by teaching them how to make Colgate's Dental Cream lie flat on a Pro-phy-lac-tic. They learn gladly, for they love Mama and wear garters and union suits just like hers.
Even more remarkable than the family devotion of these people is their supreme capability. They never do anything without brilliant success. Papa can, whenever he feels the inclination, build a launch, or become a magnetic speaker, or earn eighty dollars a week in his spare time, or evolve a thriving chicken farm from two eggs. When he goes fishing, you see him in the act of reeling in a six-pound trout; when he goes duck hunting, you see him casually bringing down a bird with each barrel; and when he plays billiards, you see him, in a backhand position and a Donchester shirt, executing a shot that would make the reputation of even a professional.
Look at him now, seated at his desk in his office, directing a great business, without the least worry or effort. See the respect on his employes' faces! At this very moment he is concluding a deal that involves millions. And yet how calm he is! All because he wears B. V. D.'s.
In short, the race of endorsers, produced by the eugenics of advertising, is not subject to the ills that ordinary flesh is heir to. They are the heroes of the present age, deified, like Greek Orion, in the realms of "space"--long-legged, serene, divinely handsome. We, poor mortals, humbly try to imitate them, and lay our wealth at their shrines, as did the Ancients at the altars of their gods. Our Ceres is Aunt Jemima; our Mercury is Phoebe Snow; our Adonis is the Arrow Collar youth; our Venus is the Physical Culture lady; and our Romulus and Remus are the Gold Dust Twins.
JOUEZ BALLE!
New and better ideas of child education are steadily making their way. Nearly every one now acknowledges that the school room should be primarily a place of entertainment, that the true vocation of the teacher is to amuse in an instructive manner, and that study is really a scientific form of play. Also, it is quite generally admitted that methods which involve mental effort on the part of the child are not to be tolerated.
So much progress has already been made. But now there has just appeared a book which bids fair to carry the educational advance as far ahead again. This book, entitled "A Baseball Primer of French," substitutes for the conventional pedantry of conjugations, syntax, etc., a vivid account in French of an imaginary world's series. Any boy who studies it will understand it instinctively; for if the foreign text prove obscure, he has only to read the English translation underneath.
The author, Speed Stevens--who, it may be remembered, was captain of his college nine,--shows a profound knowledge of baseball. Indeed, it is on account of his ability as athletic coach that he holds his position of instructor in French at Croton.
The following extract gives an inkling of the rare pedagogical value of the book:
Dans le dixième point, avec deux hommes
In the tenth period, with two men
sur bases et un sorti, Harburg éventa. Alors
on bases and one out, Harburg fanned. Then
Bill le Rosseur ramassa sa chauve-souris et
Bill the Walloper picked up his bat and
marcha à grands pas à l'assiette. Hank
strode to the plate. Hank
Harrigan, vrai à ses lauriers de plus grand
Harrigan, true to his laurels as the greatest
vivant tournoyeur sud-patte, partit avec un
living southpaw twirler, started off with a
tirer-dedans qui faisait zip-zip, entaillant une
zipping in-shoot, scoring a
frappe. Le suivant fut un bal. Dugan, au
strike. The next a ball. Dugan, on
premier, descendit avec son bras et vola la
first went down with his arm and stole
deuxième base, mais Brown fut mis en dehors
second base, but Brown was put out
au troisième. Alors la cruche mis en dessus
at third. Then the pitcher put over
un bal saliveux: frappe deux. Puis, vinrent
a spit-ball: strike two. Then came
encore deux bals. Le comte était maintenant
two more balls. The count was now
trois à deux, et les éventails s'asseyaient sans haleine.
three to two, and the fans sat breathless.
Bill assomma une longue mouche qui tomba
Bill knocked out a long fly which fell
volaille. Il suiva celle-ci avec une volaille
foul. He followed this with a pop
poppeuse, qui l'aurait fini n'eut été un
fly, that would have finished him,
manchon stupide de la part de l'attrappeur.
but for a stupid muff by the catcher.
Harrigan devenait grincé, et Cathaway,
Harrigan was becoming rattled, and Cathaway,
voiturant de la ligne de côté, lui criait, "Bras
coaching from the side-line, yelled at him, "Glass
de verre! Il monte! Il monte!" La
arm! He's going up! He's going up!" The
cruche envoya une goutte facile; Bill débarqua
pitcher sent an easy drop; Bill landed
là-dessus carrément, le menant par-dessus la
on it squarely, driving it over the
tête de l'arrête-court, loin dans le champ
short-stop's head, far into left
gauche. C'était un oiseau d'une frappe. Dugan
field. It was a bird of a hit. Dugan
entailla, et puis Bill, gaiement circlant les
scored, and then Bill, gaily circling the
sacs, glissa sauf chez soi, pendant que les
bags, slid safe home, as the
blanchisseurs allaient sauvages.
bleachers went wild.
THE ART OF PACKING
_With a Disquisition on the Science of Rooting for What You Have Packed_
A traveler is a person who escorts baggage. He may think he is taking a trip for business or pleasure, but, whether he be journeying from Brooklyn to Hoboken with one trunk, or touring Europe with a bevy of handbags, his real occupation consists in chaperoning impedimenta.
There is something almost touching about the way in which he looks after his little flock--seeing that they are properly tagged, counting them anxiously to be sure that none are missing, defending them from the cruelty of expressmen, pleading for them at the feet of customs inspectors. He has care for the humblest satchel. If it be lost he will set down three full suitcases and seek after it until he finds it.
Not that he is actually _fond_ of his luggage. But he has packed it and brought it with him, and therefore he is under obligation to it; is responsible for its well-being.
He knows in his heart that many of the clothes he has brought will never be worn, and that most of the books he has stowed away--dry looking volumes which he long ago decided he ought to read but which somehow he has never got 'round to--will not be opened. Nevertheless, he has these things with him, and it is his duty to cherish them and see them safely back home again.
As he unpacks his belongings at the first stop, he wonders what his state of mind could have been when he packed them. Why had he deemed his shaving brush _de trop_? And why, oh why, had he abandoned his faithful slippers? Had he imagined that two left-hand rubbers constituted a pair? Five hats and caps are all very nice, but why did he put in only four handkerchiefs? And even an array of fifty-seven neckties affords poor consolation for the total absence of socks. As for the bathing-suit, the morning tub would be the only place where he could use that, and even there it would hardly seem appropriate.
Anybody with the price of a ticket can travel from one city to another, but it takes a real genius to pack a trunk. The art must be practiced in its purity; there must be no mixing of the pancake (or roll-'em-up) style with the flapjack (or spread-'em-out-flat) style. Such eclecticism is pernicious.
Considered from another point of view, packing is a fascinating game. You put all sorts of objects in a trunk, the baggage man churns them thoroughly, and then you take them out again and try to guess what they are. You meet with a hundred different surprises. For instance, you never would have dreamed that a derby hat could turn inside out, or that a single suit could acquire ninety-three separate and distinct creases, or that a book could swallow a mirror and have indigestion from it, or that a bottle of ink inside seven wrappings could break and assert itself over a pile of shirts and a month's supply of collars.
But the great paradox of packing is that a trunk is always full when you close it and always three-quarters empty when you open it. The trunk that nothing but violent stamping will shut is the very trunk that, a few hours later, bounces your possessions about like beans in a rattle; so that when you lift the lid again you find them huddled forlornly in a corner, exhausted and battered from their shuttle-istics.
Another peculiarity is that nothing that you want is where you think it is. The garment that you clearly remember putting in the right-hand front corner of the top tray is sure to turn up at last in the opposite part of the bottom. Indeed, sooner will the Sphinx give up her secret than the trunk give up the thing you are looking for. To dig up _de profundis_ a shoehorn that you need is a more remarkable achievement than to unearth a new Pompeii.
Rooting is a science. Suppose, for instance, you wish to locate a pair of scissors without disturbing the general order. You begin by classifying the scissors in your mind, in order that you may calculate their position in the trunk. You consider them with reference to the following scheme of arrangement, which you recite as if you were an elevator boy in a department store:
1. _Main Tray._ Shirts, collars, hats, handkerchiefs, _and_ toilet articles.
2. _Mezzanine Tray._ Dress clothes, neckwear, art goods, _and_ bric-a-brac.
3. _Basement._ Shoes, hardware, suits, underwear, books, medicines, _and_ sporting goods.
Concluding, after due deliberation, that the scissors are equally appropriate to all of these, you start in on the main tray, sliding your palms around the edge as though you were easing ice-cream out of a mold.
No scissors.
You delve deeper, using the back of your hand as a plow-share.
No scissors.
Refusing to be baffled, you leave no garment unturned.
No scissors.
Growing a trifle impatient, you take out the main tray and tackle the mezzanine. This will be a simple matter, because it is so shallow that you have only to feel around the edges.
No scissors.
Perhaps they got shaken into the middle. You burrow there, making considerable work for the clothes-presser.
No scissors.
Now you are genuinely angry. You toss the mezzanine upon the arms of a chair. It is a rocking-chair, and it slides the tray gently forward and deposits it face downward on the floor.
Pretending to ignore this, you plunge both arms into the basement so violently that the lid unclicks and gives you a cowardly blow on the back of the head.
You rise up and vow that this your chattel shall flout you no longer. Seizing it fiercely, you turn it upside down--you dump its contents about the room.
No scissors!
Then there steals into your mind a vision of the above-mentioned cutlery lying on a chiffonier in a room hundreds of miles away--and the realization that they are probably lying there still.
AGRICULTURE INDOORS
The usual package of seeds has not arrived. Is the Hon. ----, my Representative in Congress, neglecting me? The uncertainty appals.
Year after year this eminent legislator has favored me with floral tributes in kernel form, so that I have come to think of them as my inalienable rights as a constituent. True, as is the case with the thousands of other voters in this urban district which he represents, I have no facilities for horticulture. Living in a New York apartment seven stories up and unequipped with arable soil (the nondescript substance which deposits on my window sills from outshaken mops above would scarcely qualify as loam), I have been at a loss as to what disposition to make of said seeds.
"My dear friend," writes the benevolent legislator, "I am inclosing a list issued by the Department of Agriculture showing bulletins available for free distribution, which contain very valuable information for all classes of readers." And he invites me to choose any six, by number, that he may promptly send them to me.
Only six! To select that limited allotment from so alluring a galaxy is difficult, not to say bewildering.
No. 73 catches my eye--"Fly Traps and Their Operation." I simply must have that one. It seems to promise an insight into the mysteries of oratory. Perhaps it may enable me the better to appreciate my M. C.
Nor can I hope to live a rounded life if I fail to assimilate No. 940, "Common White Grubs," and No. 920, "Milk Goats," and No. 788, "The Windbreak as a Farm Asset."
That makes four already; to which I must certainly add the kindly No. 1105, "Care of Mature Fowls," and the arrestingly realistic No. 1085, "Hog Lice and Hog Mange."
Thus my six choices are used up, and I am but at the threshold of this new world of knowledge that lies tantalizingly before me. What of No. 685, celebrating that splendidly uncompromising American growth, "The Native Persimmon," and the intriguingly cryptic Nos. 515 and 1143, revealing the secrets of "Vetches" and "Lespedeza as a Forage Crop"? Surely this coveted information should not be withheld from me.
Why should I be deprived of the privilege of reading aloud to my family No. 762, "False Cinch Bug--Measures for Control," and No. 1127, "Peanut Growing for Profit," and No. 948, "The Rag-Doll Seed Tester"? If such romances were available for every one there would be less senseless gadding about on the part of our young folks. Let the flapper fill her mind, not her flask, with No. 767, "Goose Raising," or No. 757, "Commercial Varieties of Alfalfa." And let her heed the warning against short skirts in No. 1135, "The Beef Calf."
It has been said that there is in America insufficient appreciation of architecture. Ah, true, my friends. Let the multitude con No. 438, "Hog Houses," and, as examples of chaste suppression of meaningless ornamentation, Nos. 966 and 682--"A Simple Hog-Breeding Crate" and "Simple Trap Nest for Poultry."
Included in this invaluable list are to be found not only the frankly practical but also the vividly dramatic. Offsetting such everyday but significant matters as No. 1189, "The Handling of Spinach for Shipment"; No. 1153, "Cowpea Utilization"; No. 1161, "Dodder," and No. 978, "Barnyard Manure in Eastern Pennsylvania," there are offered imagination stirring themes like No. 835, "How to Detect Outbreaks of Insects"; No. 874, "Swine Management," and No. 1003 (one that should be especially prized by the impecunious), "How to Control Billbugs."
Until I read this list I had no idea that spiritualism had entomological phases which Conan Doyle seems to have overlooked. Again and again there is mention of strange creatures and their psychic "controls": No. 1074, "The Bean Ladybird and Its Control"; No. 1060, "Harlequin Cabbage Bug and Its Control"; No. 897, "Fleas and Their Control," and No. 975 (presumably throwing light upon the immigration problem), "The Control of European Foulbrood."
More comprehensible to me are the following. Anent home life and pets: No. 1014, "Wintering Bees in Cellars"; No. 1104, "Book Lice," and No. 846, "Tobacco Beetle and How to Prevent Loss." (Does one keep the beetle on a leash, I wonder?) Bolshevism: No. 1054, "The Loco Weed." Chambers of Commerce, Get-Together Clubs, etc.: No. 993, "Cooperative Bull Associations." Prohibitionists: No. 1220, "Insect and Fungus Enemies of the Grape."
All in all, there are at least thirty bulletins which every citizen of this metropolis needs to make him an intelligent voter. And my M. C. allows me but six!
"My allotment being limited," he explains. But why should his allotment be thus limited? Since he grants that the bulletins are indispensable to my enlightenment, it is not for him to apologize, but to see that I am fully supplied with them. To protest that the Department of Agriculture cramps his largess is no excuse, for does not almighty Congress rule the Department of Agriculture and run it in the interests of the People and not for the sake of a lot of rubes? No; let him spur the department to greater efforts, press the presses to greater output.
When my little son looks up into my eyes and asks, "Daddy, tell me about the flat-headed apple tree borer," am I to answer him:
"Sorry, my boy, but Bulletin No. 1065 was denied me by a niggardly government?"
My M. C. will not have done his complete duty till every home in this city boasts a five-foot shelf of bulletins and the head of every family can gather his dear ones about the radiator in the evening with a cheery:
"Ah! now we take up No. 956, 'The Spotted Garden Slug.' Every one who pays strict attention gets a hollyhock seed."
Only then will the true function of government be realized.
* * * * *
Meanwhile....
The seeds have come!
SNOWY BOSOMS
At the risk of seeming churlish, a veritable outcast from society, I confess that I have no great fondness for snowy bosoms. I realize that they are generally considered beautiful, and that their virgin whiteness is the embodiment of unyielding purity; and yet I cannot but prefer the more comfortable _negligée_ shirt.
If only they could be soft-boiled. I would so appreciate a three-minute one. (I know it would sit better on the stomach.) The white could be firm enough to hold together, and yet not so much so as to require a knife to break into it.
Gala chemises that approached this ideal did appear several seasons ago. Their frontispieces were encrusted with a swarm of very young tucks, which rendered them quite docile. But these gentle, easy-going garments, with their pliant pleats and amenable button holes, could not survive. They were, alas, too soft. They lacked the stoicism of starch. They could not hold their own against the sterner-fibred armored breastworks.
And so we men of today when we go to perform our evening devotions to the ladies have upon us the same old white plague.
I might find some consolation in the fact that my aversion to it is shared by all laundries. Yes, the laundry is my avenger. With Machiavellian guile it invites shirts, seeks them, welcomes them, professes a yearning passion for them; and then subtly destroys them in secret. Commit an insufferable new stud-smasher to a laundry and note the fate that overtakes it. See what happens to its bold front. A week later it will be brought back to you with its spirit quite broken, and its tail between its sleeves, and held in subjection by a squad of menacing pins.
The moment you rend the veil of wax paper with which they have discreetly concealed its destitution, you are amazed to find how it has aged in one short week. It has become like the sear and yellow leaf. There are crow's feet at the corners of its buttonholes. It is so weak that they have had to send it on a paste-board stretcher to keep it from going all to pieces.
Your erstwhile festive buckler now looks more like the bosom of Abraham.
INTERIOR DESPERATION
It is easy nowadays to get advice on how to arrange your home. The Woman's Page in any newspaper will tell you just how your living-room ought to look, just how your hallway may be beautified, and just how your kitchen may be transformed into a scientific laboratory. Scores of books by experts on the subject undertake to instruct you how to change your home from a place to live in to a work of art.
Realizing that my abode needed a little toning-up along modern æsthetic lines, I consulted a book called "The Dwelling Beautiful," which I had been informed would give me just the help I needed. "It is not necessary that your furniture, rugs, hangings, and pictures be _expensive_," says the author, reassuringly. "The only essential is that they be beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other."
Pray, gentle writer, did you ever see my belongings? Did you ever see the marble-and-walnut parlor table that Aunt Jessamine gave me; or the streakily-stained Mission piano, with mottled glass panels and gew-gawy candle-brackets, that my wife won in the guessing contest and is therefore inordinately proud of; or the case of stuffed birds which Uncle Lemuel left me in his will? How am I to make these things "beautiful in themselves and in restful accord with each other?"
The truth is, none of our furnishings are gregarious. From the green rug whose acrid hue assaults every other color in the room, to the wonderfully and fearfully made "ornamental" lamp, each thing is what the advertisement writers would call "_different_." Rabid in their nonconformity, how am I to make a happy family of them?
The main feud is between our heirlooms and our wedding presents--the former being atrocities in oak, walnut and plush of the Victorian era, and the latter, present-day garishnesses; so that the general effect might be likened to a colon: one period on top of another.
The author of "The Dwelling Beautiful" would probably suggest that I get rid of some of these incumbrances. The lamentable fact is that I _can't_. My relatives would disown me. For my whole family connection--not to mention my wife's (about which much might be said)--takes upon itself to police my belongings. Every visit of a relative, even the casual call of my most distant cousin, means a critical inspection, a careful stock-taking of heirlooms and wedding presents.
A person who gives you anything as a wedding present never forgets it. His taste may be erratic, but his memory is inexorable. Because a thing happened to catch his fancy in an off-moment, it is anchored in your home forever. And the feeling of self-appreciation for his generosity, which he experiences whenever he beholds his gift in after years, prevents him from admitting, even to himself, that he was out of his mind when he bought it. Hence, you are doomed to be its perpetual curator, with the obligation to display it prominently, so that whenever he chooses to enter your house he may see it and claim it with his eye.
An heirloom is still worse. Each one that you have in your possession might have gone to somebody else, and that somebody else feels that he or she would have appreciated it more than you do. Nevertheless, for you to disburden yourself of a single heirloom by presenting it to the person who coveted it most, would be to precipitate a family crisis.
Take, for instance, that case of stuffed birds. Every time Uncle Lemuel's daughter sees it she tells me how much it always meant to her, and how the old house seems empty without it. Yet whenever I offer to make her a present of it she bursts into tears, and sobs that her dear father wanted me to have it, because I had once told him I liked birds, and that therefore she would be the last person in the world to deprive me of it.
So, along with all the rest of the harmony-killers, I am saddled for life with this ornithological incubus. It is true, as Cousin Ophelia says, that I like birds; but my fondness for them does not continue after they are defunct and stuffed; neither does it include _owls_, whether alive or dead, and there are no less than three owls in that cabinet--gloomy, dusty, evil-looking fowls, their big yellow glass eyes wide open and staring. I'll wager they had their eyes closed when Uncle Lemuel shot them. He never was much of a sport.