Part 12

We were sitting in the office the other day--a real sizzler, too!--with the door locked for protection and most of our clothes piled up on the extra chair. Oh, it's all right. We had arranged with the office-boy to ring a bell when he saw anyone coming towards our door, so we could put some of them on again.

Well, we had hastily scrambled into our coat and an expression of alert dignity when a fat man was ushered in. He is a friend of ours who had dropped in to show us a nice new Palm-Beach suit he had bought for ten dollars and a quarter the day before--heaven alone knows what the quarter was for! In fact, at the first glance we wondered what the ten dollars was for.

To be perfectly frank--always an interesting and perilous endeavor--we took a scunner against that suit. In the first place it was so darn baggy; and then the color! It hung on him in folds like an elephant's skin--a light tan elephant who had been crossed in love. We wouldn't wear a suit like that--not, if we had to go around in our pyjamas. But naturally we didn't tell him so--there is such a thing as tact. We said all we could for the suit. We remarked that there seemed to be a good deal of cloth in it for the money, and it would be a nice invisible shade for sitting around the beach in the evening. Even the sand-flies would hardly be able to find him.

If we had let the matter rest right there, we would have been all right. He wasn't flattered exactly, but he was satisfied. Unfortunately, in our desire for information, we asked him if the waiters in the better-class restaurants made any objection to serving him.

You should have heard that fat man talk--that is, when he ceased to foam and his rage became articulate. What he said about us and our clothes we would hate to admit in the police court, let alone print in cold type here. He wound up with the statement that the only reason we hadn't been sun-struck before now was because there was nothing in our noodle for the sun to strike. And this was flattering compared to some of the things that went before.

Finally we were forced to remind him that he was exhausting what little air there was in our office. As a matter of fact, we don't know of anything that will exhaust the air of an ordinary room so quickly on a hot day as a fat man in one of those pale, porous suits.

The immediate chill that ensued in our conversation was very grateful to us. It was the first chill we had had in days, and we were looking for chills. Night after night we kept hoping some burglar would break into the house, or a good gruesome ghost start strolling around, so we could have a few authentic chills chasing one another up and down our spinal column. But no luck! You couldn't hire a burglar in such weather--not if you doubled the regular rates of the Burglars' Union. And as for ghosts--well, they found it cooler, no doubt, even in the place where the naughty ones are sent.

By way of finishing with the subject of summer clothes, we may as well confess that we bought a mohair suit once. It was very nice stuff, a little shiny, but quite cool. All went well till we were caught in a shower. Then that suit did things we had never before thought possible for anything but a snake or a contortionist. It tied itself into incredible knots. The trousers climbed up one leg, and twisted frantically in an endeavor to break the other. The tails of the coat curled up, presumably with a view to getting around our neck and strangling us. It took a couple of our friends to pry the suit off and restore our circulation. We never felt the same towards it afterwards.

So much for the heat-suggestions about clothes. And the advice they give you in the matter of food is almost as bad--nothing but milk and eggs and salads. Spoon-feed and garden truck! Fine stuff to expect a man to do his work on. Not that we are so set on working that we eat solely with that end in view. But one must hold one's job, if one is obliged to have such a thing at all. And holding a job implies, so far as we are concerned, a certain number of steaks and slices of roast-beef-rare.

"Ah, but, my friend," says the heat-suggester, "you must not over-exert yourself. You must repose, especially during the heat of the day. You may do a little work in the early morning and again in the evening. But from eleven to four--nay, nay, 't is very unwise." And then he proceeds to dwell at length on that beautiful Southern custom of the siesta.

It is a beautiful custom all right. Far be it from us to deny it. For years we have been dreaming of nice little siestas out in the grape-arbor with a bubble-pipe and a couple of senoritas singing Spanish love-songs to the silvery tinkling of the mandolins. We realize that the bubble-pipe is not especially Spanish, but it is cool and that is the principal thing.

We have never dwelt on this ambition to the Managing Editor. We do not believe he possesses a romantic imagination--not sufficiently romantic, at any rate. But what do hot-weather tipsters care about managing editors?--pish-tush and less! What do they care for jobs, or even positions? They simply refuse to take them into account. All they ever stop to consider is temperature.

In the same way they take no stock of human infirmities and foibles. They ruthlessly cut out all the pleasures of life, innocent or otherwise--especially otherwise, as you might expect, but the innocent ones, too. For instance, you mustn't smoke. That raises your blood-pressure! We presume that having one's blood-pressure raised is a very serious thing, something like having one's taxes raised. Anyway, we are warned against it.

The same applies to drink--only much more so. God bless us, yes! Of course, when we say "drink," the reference is to fluid of a sociable and cheering character, not to iced tea or well-water or such other insipid means of internal refrigeration. But then the Prohibitionists have cut drink off, too--and much more effectually, alas!--so the warnings of the health-cranks find us unresigned but acquiescent. We may even be soothed by their assurances that "booze" is bad for us in the summer, though personally we have never found much consolation in reflections of this nature.

The thing is done, however--at least, for the present, whatever hopes one may entertain for referendums in the future--and we must accept our thirsty destiny. So farewell the jovial Collins and the smooth and voluptuous Gin Fizz, whether silver or golden. No longer must we soar on the bounding High Ball to celestial regions where the heat-waves cease from troubling and the mercury is at rest. The pungent and appetizing Cocktail is not for us, nor the enticing Rickey. Even the mild and genial Shandy-gaff must we shun, for it contains Beer, and the name of Beer is anathema in anything but negligible percentages.

Their merry reign is over, and all their kingdom is given up to plebeian beverages like Sarsaparilla and Soda-Pop. But those of us who are royalists at heart will still continue to look forward to a restoration of the old regime. They have gone, but their memory is green in our hearts--green with sprigs of mint.

*Back to Nature in a Limousine*

There has been in recent years a good deal of talk about "going back to nature"--perhaps we should make that a capital "N." Even some of the highest-class magazines have been devoting to it so much space that we begin to suspect the advertisers must have asked to be put next to extra-pure reading matter. It is true that most of it was written at so much a line or an inch or a column by chaps living in hall-bedrooms, but it is none the less an indication of a genuine back-to-the-land movement. We know for we have taken part in it ourself.

Last summer we went back to the land for a week-end. As a result of our experience we wish to state that we now approve of the land as an institution. But you have to go back to it right. Everything depends on that.

Years and years ago when we were younger and foolisher than we will ever be again, we trust--as a matter of fact, we were fresh out of college, very fresh--we went back to the land. The experience embittered our nature for years. We made the mistake of going back to work on the land. Never, never do that. That way misanthropy lies.

Brutally heedless of our "B.A." and our other scholastic honors, big, coarse farmers bullied us around from four o'clock in the morning till ten at night. The rest of the time was our own. We went out at dewy dawn and hitched two or three imbecile horses to a rusty old plough, and spent the day tearing irregular gashes in the scenery till it looked like a crochet pattern, and till our head swam and our knees wobbled.

When we tottered in at twilight, an old and broken man, we had to go and chase home several festive cows who did the Maxixe and Tango and several other dances quite unknown to human beings at that time--they are still unknown to all but dancing professors. It usually took an hour at least to shoo them into the barn and hog-tie them so they wouldn't kick us through the pail, or the pail through us--they didn't care which.

We were supposed to be doing this for our health. We had never been robust, though always very sound as to appetite, and the family said the fresh air and joyous work of the fields would do us so much good, poor boy. It nearly did us for good and all. When we got home to mother after a year of it, with callouses on our hands and on our soul, the house-dog sat up and howled in anguish of mind, and the town-undertaker licked his lips and measured our length and breadth--there wasn't much breadth--with his eye. We could see him wondering whether the family would stand for solid silver handles or just the plain oxidized kind.

For years afterwards the mere mention of the word "farm" would cause us to tremble from head to foot and perspire clammily at every pore. We couldn't look at a cow without wanting to heave a brick at her, or a hired man without a sudden desire to go over and shake his honest hand and murmur a few words of sympathy.

So when a wealthy friend of ours--we make a point of picking 'em rich--called us up last summer and suggested that we should go out to his "little place in the country" for the week-end, we feared the worst. We realized in a moment that his hired man had quit or had died of over-exertion, and that he was trying to work us in as a substitute--for our keep. But we couldn't think of any decent excuse to give, so we yielded a dismal consent.

"You mustn't expect too much," he warned us, "it's the simple life, you know--no fol-de-rols, but just good plain farm fare."

Our heart sank at the words. Not that we have ever been so stuck on fol-de-rols. We don't mind an occasional fol-de-rol--a fol-de-rol for two, say, with a quart of "extra dry" in a tin pail of ice alongside. But we have never hankered for them as a steady diet. At the same time the warning sounded ominous. Plain farm fare!--we could see the platter of pork and cabbage and the slab of marmoreal pie.

He called for us--or rather, we stood on the street-corner and he picked us up in a ten-thousand-dollar limousine, lined in grey silk, with a big bouquet of roses concealing the chauffeur from the gaze of the occupants.

This cheered us up somewhat, but we had a feeling that our doom was merely postponed. We had a notion that we were being lured. We had heard of people who had been made "white slaves" that way. And if a farm-hand is not a white slave, we would like to know who has any better right to the title. Not that he is so very white, but....

With the engine purring softly and the cushions heaving voluptuously, we swiftly glided--or should it be "glid" or "glode?"--out past the last suburban lot, meaning about thirty miles. It was a beautiful pastoral region, occupied mostly by golf-clubs and villas. Long rows of peonies and Canterbury-bells and flowering shrubs were the nearest approach to farming we could see--these and a few cows of the domestic-pet variety.

Our host was very chatty all the way, and his talk was of the beauties of the simple life and the general rottenness of civilization as evidenced by stock-exchanges and clubs and all-night restaurants.

"Luxury and indolence," he assured us over and over again, "are eating the heart out of modern society. We are all living too fast and too high. We have too much money--that's what's wrong with people in our class."

We said he was quite right and that too much money was certainly the cause of gout and divorce and all the other ills to which we were heir. We spoke with as much conviction as we could, while we listened to the merry clinking in our right-hand trouser-pocket of the six dollars and eighty-odd cents which we had received that morning along with the I.O.U's in our pay-envelope.

"Look at what we eat," said our host, "and look at what we drink!"

Of course, our host was one of the lucky ones who still have some drink to look at. He could therefore afford to adopt a somewhat deprecating attitude on the subject of beverages.

Suddenly the limousine whirled off the high-road and shot along a beautiful private driveway under swaying elm-trees. We were on the farm! Wildly we gazed about for the fields of grain, the hog-lot and the cow-pasture, the big red barn, and, and all the other familiar stage-properties of our agricultural tragedy of years before. But we saw none of these things.

Instead our eye rested on well-groomed apple-orchards and cherry-groves, on clumps of pines and Japanese summer-houses, on strawberry-patches and vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens may seem to the reader to suggest farming. But the "kitchen-garden" on a real farm is merely a frowsy patch where "table truck" is grown. This particular vegetable garden was the work of a landscape artist. Judging by the amount of toil which had been put into designing it and weeding it and picking bugs off it, every potato or carrot would cost about forty cents each.

The big car swung on a wide curve, and "round the cape of a sudden came the Lake!" Browning!--we know. We do that sort of thing now and then just to show that we are a literary editor in the half of the week that we don't spend farming with our friends among the idle rich.

There was good old Lake Ontario shimmering in the glimmering sunlight, or glimmering in the shimmering sunlight--it works either way. And there was the thirty-thousand-dollar farmhouse nestling in the midst of ten acres of lawn. There, too, was the farmer's wife on the steps to welcome us--she was clad in a simple little importation from the Rue de la Paix. It was a lovely rural scene.

"Well, and what do you think of the farm?" asked our host.

Farm! Good Lord! Our thoughts leaped back to the real farms we had known, and in a broken voice we tried to tell him that this was the sort of farm we had dreamed of but never worked on. This was farming as it should be--farming de luxe.

We began farm-life that very afternoon on the grounds of the adjacent golf-club, where we planted several balls in various parts of the landscape and couldn't find them again. There would be a very decent little grove of rubber-plants on that course in a year or so, if they would let us play there a few times.

Then we went back to the farm for dinner and had a sample of the farm-fare. It was a simple repast of seven or eight courses. One of the farm-hands, a butler, waited on table. Most of the food was of the sort that we try to conceal on the menu-card from a lady, in case she should order it and we would have to leave our watch with the waiter.

In the midst of the meal there was a solemn pause. We felt dimly that some marvel of the culinary art was about to appear. In came the butler with an air of importance and a silver dish containing six or seven anaemic radishes.

"Grown on the place!" said our host in the tone of a man who expects to astonish. He glanced with pride at his wife and she glanced back in affectionate joy at him. Theirs was the delight with which young parents exhibit their first-born.

We nibbled a little piece out of one, while they leaned back and waited confidently for our words of almost incredulous admiration. We are a bad liar as a rule--persistent, that is, but unsuccessful--but we would have cut off our right hand rather than disappoint that good man and that dear lady, so charming both of them in their simple faith. It had taken fifty or sixty thousand dollars and several years of thought and labor to produce those poor runts of radishes. So we forgot all the lessons of truthfulness that we had learned at our mother's knee--perhaps we should say, while laid across our mother's knee--and swore that they were the finest radishes we had ever tasted, and that no joy in life was equal to eating the vegetables grown on one's own door-step, so to speak.

"You're right, my boy, you're right," beamed our host. "The only truly happy and independent man on earth is the farmer."

The next day they showed us over the farm. We saw the aristocratic cows, whose ancestry went back as far as that of the kings of Ireland. Their milk, at a low estimate, must have cost about as much as a vintage wine.

We were particularly interested in the hens. They all belonged to the royal families of hendom. Most of them had been exhibited and had won ribbons or medals or whatever it is they give hens. They certainly were beautiful in a poultry way, but they seemed cold and proud. Our host said they didn't lay very well. We suggested it might be for the same reason as prevents people in the smart set from having any children.

"No, I don't think it's that," said our host very earnestly. "I believe it's because they haven't enough to interest them. I read in a poultry book the other day that hens must be kept bright and cheerful."

We recommended comic selections on a gramaphone. We also asked him if he had ever tried reading our articles to these haughty fowl. We felt that might draw a cluck or two of amusement out of them. But he treated our remarks with the silent contempt they no doubt deserved. We would like to tell a lot about life on that farm--about the trip in our host's big motor-boat, and the dance in the evening, and the horse-back rides on high-stepping horses that chinned themselves at every step and were always going up when we were coming down. We would like to tell also about the tennis and the billiards and the canoeing.

We would like to do all this, but we haven't the heart. Some real farmer might read this article, and go right out to his barn, and fasten a bit of rope between his neck and a beam, and kick the box over. Our only hope is that if one should happen to see this, he will merely grunt to "maw" that we are another of "them dern slick liars in the city," and refuse to believe a word of it. We don't wish to spoil his life.

*Stringencies and How to Stringe in Them*

It is extraordinary and also somewhat disconcerting how prayers are sometimes answered. When we were a little boy we were often warned by pious relatives of the perils of too much wealth--usually when we displayed a pagan desire for pocket money. Local pulpiteers also added their authority to this doctrine, reinforcing it with excerpts from Holy Writ. As a result our young soul was filled with horror at the thought of millionaires and camels trying to crawl through the eyes of needles. And, being a very earnest-minded little boy, we prayed that we might never be rich.

This prayer has been answered. We are not rich. Moreover, present indications are that we will never be rich. Whether or not our character has been benefited by the chronic depression which has been the outstanding feature of our financial career, we are in no position, and are far too modest, anyway, to state. There are times, however, when we would like to test our moral fibre by exposing it to the seductions of wealth. We might even like to succumb once or twice, or three or four times or oftener, just to show that we are one of those supermen who can "take it or leave it alone." But these opportunities for moral "swank" have been denied us.

We prayed for poverty and we got it. We have prayed for a lot of other things in our time, which we haven't got. But the celestial Committee on Prayers certainly O.K'd that poverty-petition of ours. They gave it to us "good and plenty," in the vulgar idiom. Of course, there is no use at this late date in explaining to the Powers that we were only praying against becoming a millionaire--half a million would more than satisfy our modest requirements. The thing is settled. As a result we have become mighty careful what we pray for. There is always a chance that we might get it.

This introduction is by way of letting the reader know that stringencies, such as the one through which we have all been passing ever since peace started, are no new thing with us. We are quite undismayed by the present state of the markets of the world. We are facing the situation with unruffled brow and the assured air which bespeaks long experience. We know how to deal with stringencies. We have tackled many of them. In fact, we have reason to regard ourself as one of the best little stringe-ists in this part of the country; and we are prepared to stringe with anyone of our financial weight for a reasonable purse and a modest side-bet.

There was that time, for instance, Friend Reader, that we went broke in 'Frisco, many, many miles from home and mother and the bed in the spare room. In a week we were acquainted with every free-lunch counter and ten-cent restaurant in the City of the Golden Gate. As a result of the acquaintance we developed a horror of "boiled beef Spanish," which has remained with us to the present day. And we ended up on a dairy ranch--thirty per and our keep! But let us draw the veil--we hate to think of the way we used to talk to those cows.

Stringent experience such as ours is a very valuable thing at a time like this, and we feel that it is in the nature of a public duty for us to lay before our readers--the whole five of them--the ripe results of our painfully acquired wisdom. Of course, we may be compelled to make revelations of a personal nature; but we don't mind. We can stand it. We have no social position that we need be worried to lose.

The trouble with the general public is that so few people know how to tackle a stringency. They are impulsive and unscientific. They go at it in a precipitate, not to say temerarious, manner.

Take, for instance, all those eager little housewives who rushed right out on the news of the declaration of war and tried to corner all the flour the grocer had, and all the bacon in the butcher-shop, forgetting that by the time the family had eaten about one-fifth of the supply, the flour would make a Limburger cheese seem like sweet hay for aroma, and the bacon would be scratching at the cellar door to get out. They even bought crates of eggs and oranges and cart-loads of vegetables!

Men's notions of economy are frequently not much better. We have a friend--oh, we still manage to keep one or two--who announced not long ago that he had given up cigars. He said they cost too much. We were rather sorry to hear of his decision, for he is one of those large, expansive fellows who are becoming to a cigar--he smokes them with the band on. We expressed our surprise.

"Not giving up smoking altogether, are you?" we asked. "Won't you find it difficult to think without nicotine to act as a...."

"Certainly I'm not giving up smoking! I've taken to a pipe, and believe me, my boy, it's the only smoke that...."

But you know how they all talk the first few days.