Part 3

Be that as it may, these lugubrious specimens are on my hands. I kept them in the living-room till I couldn't stand them there any longer. (Strangers would ask me how I happened to take up taxidermy.) Then I removed them to the dining-room, where they promptly took away my appetite. Transferred subsequently to the nursery, they caused Mamma's Pet to go into convulsions of terror. I offered the cook an increase in wages if she would take the cursed things into _her_ room; she threatened to leave. I made a pathetic appeal to my wife to take them into hers; she reminded me coolly that Uncle Lemuel was _my_ uncle. Now they are in _my_ room, in the corner where I used to keep my favorite chair.

But something tells me that they may not endure there forever. I am a mild-dispositioned man, long-suffering, and tractable; but that cabinet of birds is too much.

Some day you may see clouds of smoke pouring out of my windows and fire-engines pulling up at my door. If you do, don't feel sorry for me or censure me. A burning need will be satisfied. It will be a case of sponsored combustion.

THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN

Being interested in human nature in all its manifestations, I have lately made a study of handwriting as it is shown in the moving pictures. I undertook this research because I had been given to understand that chirography, when scientifically analyzed, revealed every nuance of human character; and because the personages in moving-pictures, being intensely dramatic, could not fail to have striking individualities as penmen.

Let me give some of the interesting examples which I found. Here, for instance, is a confidential communication from a great financier to one of his associates:

Dear Buggenheim,

Buy 30,000 shares of B V D immediately We must foil Stockfeller if it takes our last million

J P Mormon

Observe in what a firm, steady hand this is written. It shows that the great financier can be cool even in a crisis. No wonder he is successful. He always looks ahead; he never crosses a T until he comes to it. Clear-visioned he is; his I's have their specks on straight. Such a man will go far without being missed.

The next specimen is a letter written by the dashing young hero to the heroine. It reads:

Dear Bosnia

I love you madly. Your father despises me because I am poor but honest. Elope with me at midnight in my racing machine.

Beverly

Stanch and dependable. His passion is intense, yet he is too loyal to betray it. Note the uncompromising uprightness of his L's. You just can't help trusting him, because, as he says, he hasn't any money.

Here is a letter penned by a wayward wife. Fraught with tense emotion, it is indeed a moving human document. She writes:

Dear Bertram:

I am leaving you tonight for ever. Try to understand--and forgive me. My hand trembles so that I can scarcely write. I hope you will be happy. Goodbye!

Arnica.

What a wealth of sorrow this handwriting displays! Poor, unfortunate woman, tearful and yet volatile! Her M's are bowed with grief, and yet they have an arch look. Out of touching deference to her first love she makes a desperate effort to be neat; she is not willing that her husband's last memento of her should be a sloppy one. Even when about to commit a sin, she still retains that refinement of nature which he has always reverenced, that indescribable feminine delicacy which was wont to reveal itself in such little acts as shrinking visibly at the touch of unclean overshoes.

There are innumerable other examples which might be cited, handwritings of every conceivable kind; but the endless variety of them would merely tend to bewilder. Therefore I shall give only two more and without extended comment; for, indeed, their characteristics jut out quite protuberantly.

The little six-year-old child raises her face wistfully from her piece of angel food and scrawls:

Dear Daddy:

Mama and me wish you would come home.

Melba.

Truly a revelation of the artistic nature. In contrast to this, let us examine what Jimmie the Dope, escaped convict, scribbles to his confederate:

Steve:

Be there wit yer tools at one o'clock tonight ready to do the job. But look out fer that Italian named Isaac McTavish, he's a "stool-pigeon"

Jimmie.

This particular specimen has a tragic interest for us. It demonstrates the failure of our modern institutions. Here is a man forced by society into a felon's trade who was capable of earning an honest living as an instructor in penmanship.

MUSIQUE GLACÉE

Of all strivers after the Ideal none have so kindly a method as the architects responsible for those pleasing structures termed French pastry. Whatever they create is delicate, delectable, imbued with sweetness. Putting aside the thought of future fame, these gentle artificers devote their labor to works as perishable as they are exquisite: meringues, sculptured in ambrosial stucco, that melt to nothing; roseate cakelets of which the crimson splendor endures no longer than a sunset; kisses that are all too brief; tarts which, frail as flowers, succumb quickly to hunger in the dessert. These crust craftsmen pour forth richness as song-birds do, creating rapture for but a precious moment. If ordinary architecture is "frozen music," then surely this Gallic refinement of it is "_musique glacée_."

There are many styles, ranging from Perpendicular Gothic to Powdered Rococo--so many, in fact, that one could scarcely hope to masticate them all at a single sitting. (Two or three is the most I have ever been able to account for.) Yet each style, if found in its purity, merits attention as an embodiment of good taste. For even the humblest cream puff, despite the looseness of its design and the unpretentiousness of its exterior, has an interior well worth investigating.

Perhaps the most important landmark in all the realm of pastry is the tradition-hallowed and chocolate-roofed éclair, whose long nave affords sanctuary for whipped cream or custard. (Not necessarily _chocolate_-roofed, however: the eaves may be tinged instead with a soft patina of _café au lait_.) This mellow-hued pile, eminently edible, is cherished by multitudes of devotees.

Another structure beautiful in ruin is the massive patty that serves as donjon-keep for oysters. Upon its crumbling ramparts parsley has found root, and encircling its fissured base is a broad moat of gravy. Gaunt, sugarless; no oyster can hope to escape.

An equally notable tower is the stately white charlotte russe. Its impenetrable wall of cardboard, re-enforced inside with a doughty thickness of cake, rises sheer from the glacis of the plate and terminates in crenelated battlements over the edge of which hang masses of cream, ready for the invader. Upon the topmost pinnacle is posted a sentinel cherry.

Of contrastingly mild aspect are the various crisp terraces--those luxuriant Hanging Gardens, where fruits of every sort are spread out in gorgeous profusion: rows of gold-gleaming apricots; neat hedges of orange plugs; happy pears and orderly better-halves of peaches; a bed of sugar-fed strawberries, each tucked in snugly; grapes chaliced in fluted pie crust; jocund apple chips and banana checkers, cuddled cosily slice against slice. Truly a paradise in pastry!

And there are a host of other fair shapes: the pantheon-like Kossuth cake, beneath the low dome of which is a votive offering of cream; the amazing custard skyscraper, with its innumerable floors, no walls, and gaily iced roof; the Byzantine _baba au rhum_, inlaid with tutti-frutti mosaics and steeped in subtle enchantment; and countless others--fanes, kiosks, minarets, pavilions, reliquaries of jam--baffling description or digestion.

Frail, ephemeral, created with no thought of permanence; and yet we should hardly enjoy them more if they were built of everlasting marble. The craftsmen who design them, scorning personal glory, do not sign their works. For theirs is the true æsthetic spirit, so rare in this commercial age. Their handiwork faithfully bears out the precept "Tart for Tart's Sake."

THE CARE OF THE HUSBAND

The average young wife is regrettably inexperienced in the matter of husbands. Unless it has been her fortune to have a wise mother or a divorce, she is likely to be quite ignorant of how to care for and train the "big stranger" who comes into her life. Therefore these precepts of friendly counsel may not seem to the matrimonial novice altogether amiss. The advice I would give is simple (in the fullest sense of the word); so that after the young wife has had a few husbands, she can dispense with it, if not sooner.

_Feeding._--This is the most important problem a wife has to face. The husband must be made to feel that he is well fed. Otherwise he will not be contented and docile.

During the first week after marriage, when he is still quite infantile and tender to the point of mushiness, he may be fed from the hand or spoon. This method will be found especially satisfactory in cases where the husband shows symptoms of sickly sentimentality.

Throughout the entire first month he will be so demanding of care, so bewildered by the strange new world in which he finds himself, as to be barely able to maintain sanity; in short, he will be so soso that she will have to prepare all the food herself, or at least make him think she does.

But later a change of diet will be found necessary. He will demand scientifically prepared foods. If the change is managed in the right way, it can be accomplished with only slight upset to his disposition. Simply alter the feeding formula so that the total quantity is lessened and the proportion of sugar and burnt materials is increased. It will soon take effect. In a day or two he will say, with a worried look, "Darling, I'm afraid the cooking is too much for you." And you know what he really means. After that the transition to avowedly professional cooking will be quite painless.

_Outings and Play._--During the first few months the husband will not need many outings. He will be happy and contented if allowed to romp about the house. Such toys as hammers, picture wire, curtain rods, etc., will keep him occupied.

Later, however, there will come a period of restlessness. Then you must take him out more and more, and let him run and play with other husbands--after you have made sure, of course, that they are good, well-behaved husbands. The companionship of these innocent sports will tend to make him one himself.

When, as time goes by, he reaches the stage where he begins to take notice, the wife must be very careful, for he is highly impressionable. At this time a wife will do well to look out for her husband herself, instead of entrusting him to some empty-headed girl, whom she may not really know at all. If he needs amusement let her divert him with brightly-colored silks and baubles which she wears and he pays for. Let her take him to see the pretty theater, and show him the beautiful mountains and the big blue ocean, and tell him fairy stories about economy, and teach him to draw nice big cheques in his little cheque book.

Discipline cannot begin too early. The husband must be taught that he can only have the things that his wife decides are best for him, and that no protesting on his part will do any good. If he proves fretful, chide him by threatening to go live with your mother. If, after that, he is still unruly, threaten to have your mother come live with you.

In this way he will soon learn to mind. Indeed, before long you will be able to show him off before company with the assurance that he will behave just as you have trained him to; and you will have the satisfaction of hearing your friends declare he does you credit.

_Awakening his mind._--This is one of the chief duties and responsibilities of wifehood. It cannot be shirked. For while no husband is expected to know anything at marriage (the fact that he got married attests that), he is expected a year or so later to look intelligent when the lady next to him at dinner discusses Coué and Scriabine, and to know that Gauguin is not something to be got from a bootlegger. For him not to know these things would be a reflection on his home training, or, in other words, his wife. She will be considered negligent unless she has instilled into his rudimentary mind a smattering of whatever is accounted smart. For every wife is judged by the way she brings up her husband.

Note.--If in the above treatise I have borrowed from the learned doctors who have written concerning the Care of the Baby, I am sorry; for I see no prospect of ever being able to pay them back. Even this small note of mine will be discounted.

TERMINOLOGY OF TARDINESS

Our late demented newspapers are in a plight. They are no longer afflicted with a shortage of paper, but they are still cramped by a dearth of names for their afternoon editions. All the stand-by titles have been exhausted. By midday the "Home Edition," "Night Edition," and "Special Extra" have come and gone, and there is still the whole afternoon with nothing left to tempt the tired business man but various grades of "Finals." New nomenclature is needed, names that will stir the imagination and summon the cents.

Desirous of doing what I can toward alleviating this distressing situation, I venture to suggest the following schedule:

8 A. M.--Late Edition--_One star_

9 A. M.--Extremely Late Edition--_Two stars_

10 A. M.--Inexcusably Late Edition--_Three stars_

11 A. M.--Hopelessly Late Edition--_One constellation_

12 M.--Midnight Edition--_Two constellations_

1 P. M.--Tomorrow Morning Edition--_Group of planets_

2 P. M.--Tomorrow Afternoon Edition--_Complete solar system_

3 P. M.--Day-After-Tomorrow Edition--_Comet_

4 P. M.--Next-Week Edition--_Large comet_

5 P. M.--Next-Month Edition--_Unusually large comet_

6 P. M.--Next-Year Edition--_Complete zodiac_

7 P. M.--Special Doomsday Extra--_Milky way and nebulae_

OPPRESSORS OF THE MEEK

I am not afraid of bloated bondholders. I suspect that they are just humans like myself, only that they have money.

But I am afraid of their servants. _They_ are not human. No one ever saw them eat or sleep or smile.

My millionaire host may overlook the fact that I am using the salad-fork for the fish; not so his English butler. This austere personage takes note of my error in silence, and, when the salad course arrives, steals up behind me like Nemesis, and lays by my plate the fork that correct form demands. I feel chastened.

His eye is always upon me. I can't even take a sip of water without his calling attention to it by stealthily refilling my glass.

If he didn't watch me so closely when I am helping myself, I wouldn't be so nervous. As it is, my hand trembles under his grueling stare. Just at the critical moment when my tongful of asparagus, conveyed like a hot coal, is poised in mid-air between the serving-dish and my plate, I flinch, and there is a green-and-white avalanche. I make a frantic slap at it as it falls, and by good luck it lands on the plate. To be sure, some of the stalks are craning their necks perilously over the edge, but that is a small matter compared with what might have happened. I rake them into the middle of the plate, sit gasping at the thought of my narrow escape.

There is an awkward pause. The bon mot I was about to utter apropos of an opera I had never heard has left my mind entirely. I can't think of anything to say. Finally, in desperation, I remark idiotically to the dowager at my left, "I love asparagus; don't you?"

The next time he passes a dish, I lose my nerve. I lift my hand to help myself, and then, as I catch his eye, draw back, shaking my head. No, I won't take any chances.

After that I keep to a strict diet, eating only the things that appear on my plate when it is put down in front of me. If the plate arrives naked and empty, naked and empty it remains, even though the course consist of my favorite delicacy. I suffer the pangs of Tantalus.

Alligator-pear salad--more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold--is offered to me. I covet it. Everything gastronomic in my nature craves it, but cowardly fear restrains me (it looks slippery), and I refuse it. I could almost weep.

As the dinner proceeds and my modified hunger-strike continues, I begin to regain confidence. I feel that my abstemiousness, implying as it does a jaded palate and an aristocratic indigestion, is highly fashionable. I fancy that in refusing ambrosia I am showing a godlike superiority.

I expand with self-assurance. Just watch me startle these plutocrats with my scorn of their costly food. I'll make myself the lion of the evening.

"May I help you to shortcake, sir?" asks a low, ironically respectful voice.

My pride collapses. The butler has seen through me to the cowardice in my heart. From his lofty pinnacle he stoops to succor me. But I rebel.

"I'll help myself, thank you," I retort, for I am on my mettle now, and boldly prize off a towering segment of the dessert. Would _I_ let a menial reveal to the whole table that I was afraid to help myself? Never! Why, I'd sooner--

Dizzily the creamy thing totters, keels over, and falls with a sickening flop, a mushy sound, as of the impact of a wet sponge. Juicy red berries gambol hither and thither.

For a moment the shortcake lies helplessly on its side like a jellyfish that the tide has left. But only for a moment; for a wrecking-crew, made up of the butler and his assistant, comes hurrying on the scene. With emergency plate and scraper they remove the debris, while I turn purple and clutch at my collar for air. Then, after a mortifying amount of crumb-gleaning and cream-mopping, they spread a napkin before me in the presence of my swell friends, as if to shield the cloth from further depredations. I draw back to allow them to put it there, and in so doing squash a hidden strawberry against my waistcoat. As a final humiliation, a fresh piece of shortcake is brought to me _already on a plate_.

If there is anything more formidable than an English butler, it is an English valet. Somebody else's valet, I mean; for I suppose that if a person had one long enough, he could get so that he wouldn't be afraid of him. But as for a perfectly strange English valet!

"Your key, please, sir," demands Hawkins upon my arrival at my friend's summer palace. He bows slightly.

"What key?" I ask uneasily.

"The key to your traveling-bag, sir."

I am just stopping overnight on my way home from a house party in the woods, and all my spare raiment is soiled and bedraggled.

"So I can unpack your things, sir," threatens the Great Mogul.

"Never mind, thank you," I stammer. "I've lost the key."

"Very good, sir," he replies and goes.

But not permanently. When I return to my room at midnight, elated over having trounced my host in countless games of billiards, I am met at the door by my oppressor. In his hand is a small object.

"I fetched a locksmith out from the city, sir, and 'ad 'im make this for you, sir. It fits quite correctly, sir."

And one glance about the room--from the snaggle-tooth comb on the dresser to the frayed pajamas the mussiness of which no festive laying out can hide--makes me aware of my utter ignominy.

Since when I have confined my week-end visiting exclusively to lumber camps.

PUTTING PEDAGOGY ACROSS

There is much well-meaning propaganda in progress for the preservation of professors. Alumni are appealed to, bankers are buttonholed, and in every college club the diagram showing the Big Game play by play has been replaced by a dial showing how many millions have been garnered to date for the fund; all this in order that the saying "Live and learn" may be reversible as "Be learned and yet live."

Wouldn't it be more humane (instead of giving the professors money, to which they are not accustomed) to teach them how to "sell" themselves? Today every one is paid according to how completely the public or the plutocrats are "sold" on him. Only salesmanship can save the scholars.

The time is ripe for some gilt-edged grad such as Morton K. Mung, President of the Newark Noodle Corporation, to announce, when stalked by the subscription squad: "No, gentlemen of the Adopt a Professor Committee, your suggestion that by donating seven cents a day I keep an instructor in paleontology from starvation, or be godfather to an authority on Sanscrit at eight cents, strikes me as impractical. With the cost of living rising again, next year they will want nine and ten cents--and you see the position that would put us in.

"No, gentlemen, I'll do better. I'll solve this situation once for all by loaning my general sales manager, Mr. Blat, to dear old Weehawken for two months, and he will give the members of the Faculty the same tutoring course he gives the men we send out on the road. Within a year after they leave his hands these same profs you've mentioned will be writing 'Success Through Sanscrit' and 'How I made My Pile with Paleontology' for the _American Magazine_."

At the conclusion of this loyal speech the committee would give a long cheer and depart checkless but with a new vision.

And, sure enough, the pale pedagogues would emerge from Mr. Blat's snappy seminar simply exuding system. They would possess the Power to Meet Men, the Personality that Wins. Laboratory recluses would burst forth primed to impress with Bigger Biology--Contains More Bunk.

The Sanscrit savant, formerly threadbare, but now a nifty dresser, would immediately hop a train for New York and breeze into the office of Hugh G. Wads, senior member of Wads & Wads and Chairman of the Trustees of Weehawken University.

"Good morning, Mr. Wads," he would say aggressively. "I've come here this morning to talk Vedas."

"Vedas? I don't get you. Never heard of such a stock. It isn't listed on the big board, and if it's traded in on the Curb, the dealings must be pretty small. Besides, I thought you were a professor at Weehawken."

"Right. I am a professor, if you choose to put it that way. Technically, though, I'm a promoter, and my proposition is VEDAS (Trade mark copyrighted 2000 B. C.)."

"Vedas? I still don't get you."

"Ah, that is precisely why I am here. I was sure you would want to know--Cigar?--Well, Vedas are the wisdom songs of India. Mellowed by forty centuries in the parchment. One hundred per cent Hindu. Classy yet conservative; noble yet nobby. You know what caste is among the Brahmins?--well, that's how exclusive these are!"

"Indeed."

"Yes, and I'm offering them for immediate delivery to students."

"But how does this concern me?"

"I was just getting to that. This is a proposition which requires considerable capital for its development. At the present time only seven students have asked for Vedas, yet I have estimated that the supply of Vedas now mellowing out in India is enough for at least 180,000 students. Which means that if we created the demand--why, think of the business we could do! When you come right down to it, a Veda, when presented in the right way, can be as catchy as a Kewpie."

"Hm. How much money would you need to start with?"

"Fifty thousand dollars. Besides my salary, which would be $15,000 outright, plus a bonus of one and one-half cents per Veda per student, there would be the cost of advertising in the college catalogue, the conducting of a circularizing campaign to a selected list of student prospects and the publication of a promotion organ to be entitled 'India Ink.' Then, too, of course, I would have to have a commission on gross tuition receipts and text book sales and an ample expense account for entertaining in the class-room and in my home. Now will you kindly put your name here on the dotted line?"

"Before I guarantee you all this money, tell me one thing. What is the real value of these Vedas?"