Part 13

He showed the pipe to us. It was a beautiful thing, meerschaum, all dolled up with gold and amber. And it reposed in the cutest little case--one of those plush and papier-mache affairs that add a dollar and a half to the cost of any pipe. They are really worth about seven cents.

He showed us also a new tobacco pouch--grained leather, with gold monogram and rubber lining. Eight dollars, if it cost a cent!

Under his arm he carried a tin of tobacco that looked as big as a hat-box, and his pockets were full of pipe-cleaners, special ash-trays, and a patent combination arrangement of tools with which you could tamp the tobacco down in your pipe, gouge holes in the wad if you got it too tight, scrape the charcoal off the sides, and dig the pipe out when you had smoked it. All the thing lacked was a compartment in the end for ice to cool your tongue.

Altogether the outfit cost about twenty-five or thirty dollars. We said nothing. The thing was too pathetic. Three days later we met him smoking a cigar--still with the band on. He looked us straight in the eye with a truculent air, as though daring us to make a comment. We didn't. We knew how he felt. We had been through it all ourself.

Personally we have taken to smoking cheaper cigars, ever since that last increase in taxes. In our days of affluence we used to walk into the shop of our favorite tobacconist, and throwing down a quarter with a reckless hand, would say, "Gimme three!" Now we slip into a drug-store--we cannot bear to abate a jot of our lordly air in the presence of our tobacconist--and dejectedly buy a "five-cent straight," though they cost ten cents now.

(No, girls, the cigars are not always straight, nor are they always made of straight tobacco--on the contrary! We presume that they were called "five-cent straights" because they were bought by people in straightened circumstances, in dire straits, so to speak.)

In happier days if we had dared to smoke five-centers around the office, we would have been subjected to nasty personal remarks from the other members of the staff. But nobody says anything now. They are smoking stogies themselves, or consorting with pipes of ill-repute. The Financial Editor in the room next door smokes a villainous briar that growls even at its owner. We hate to say this, but only the other day we put our hand too near it as it lay on his desk asleep, and it almost got our little finger.

Not only are we smoking cheaper cigars, but we are making them last longer. How do we do this? Easily, dear reader, easily. We don't light them, that's all! We bite the end off very carefully, and insert the cigar at a rakish angle in the middle of our expression, and carry it around like that for nearly an hour before we touch a match to it. That way two cigars can be made to do the work of six. The worst of lighting a cigar is that it becomes oxidized so quickly. After that it isn't any good, except possibly as tooth-powder.

Another economy we indulged in during last fall was the buying of a straw hat. Of course, it may at first seem rather late in the season for one to start in and buy a "boater." But we got this one for ninety-eight cents--a three-dollar hat, the salesman assured us. But more of that anon.

You see, we had met our old friend Bjones on the street, carrying under his arm a box about the size of those they crate oranges in.

"G'wan in and buy one before they're all sold," he gasped, "greatest bargain I ever saw!"

"But what are they?" we asked, displaying an indulgent interest by ceasing to twirl our silver-mounted cane--(yes, a present from a lady).

"Hats, of course--ninety-eight cents--worth three and a half or four! Just bought six of them. Everything going up--got to keep supplied, you know."

We never stopped to reflect that Bjones would take the next six years to wear those hats out, and that his wife would probably divorce him if he tried. In fact, that may have been part of his plan. But we caught the fever from him. We hunted up the store and rushed right in. There was a big table of sailor straws, with about thirty men grabbing them up and trying them on. The lot didn't contain our exact size, so we took the nearest we could get. It was a little small, and it sat up on our head in a way that suggested an amateur performance of "H.M.S. Pinafore." But it was a very nice hat. That is, we thought it a nice hat.

Candor, however, compels us to state that we showed it to a friend in the hat business whom we met while we were triumphantly carrying it home. We asked him if he didn't think it was a mighty nice hat.

"Oh, yes, it's a nice hat all right," he answered cordially. "Why, those hats cost forty-nine cents each, buying them by the dozen wholesale!"

We tried to ascribe his words to professional jealousy. But somehow we took a sudden scunner against that hat. In fact, we tried a few days later to give it to the office-boy. But he declined. He sports a six-dollar one himself. Besides, his head is bigger than ours.

We have also been looking at some celluloid collars lately--just looking, you understand. Of course, we wouldn't think of wearing one of the things, but it is just as well to keep them in mind, for you never can tell, with the price of laundering where it is. Besides, they aren't so bad--a little blue and shiny, perhaps, and with peculiar button-holes. But with the washer-ladies buying closed cars, and the stringency becoming more stringent all the time, it is well to know of collars that can be done up with a tooth-brush or simply left on the neck when taking a bath.

But we have no intention of wearying the reader with a further account of those symptoms of a financial depression which has long since become chronic with us. We are no more depressed now than we ever were, except inasmuch as any kindly and sensitive heart must be depressed at the sight of widespread destitution--especially among millionaires.

Depression--and when we speak of depression we naturally refer to financial depression and not to the state of a man's liver or conscience--depression, we repeat, is largely a relative matter. A man is depressed or otherwise in comparison with the high-water mark of his prosperity. A financial status which would make the hairs of John D. Rockefeller's Sunday wig rise up in separate and individual horror, might cause us in sheer exuberance of joy to buy and stock a "Winter Garden" just for ourself alone. In view of the jeopardy which would ensue for our eternal salvation, we are glad--or should be that this is not immediately imminent.

It is really the rich who suffer most in a period of stringency. The mental anguish of hardened stringe-ists like ourself is nothing to what must be endured by the people who have never before had to ask the price of anything. We met one of them not long ago on the street. He is not a regular millionaire--only an intermittent, so to speak. Every little while he manages to chin himself on the trapeze of wealth, though he never quite succeeds in climbing securely into it. He was looking very gloomy, his suit needed pressing, and the diamond in his tie seemed smaller and less brilliant than of yore.

"Hello, old pirate, why so glum?" we asked insolently--we always make a point of being rude to millionaires. "What's the trouble?--those naughty stocks misbehaving again, or does some fresh Aleck of a legislator propose to investigate you?"

He looked at us with a melancholy and lack-lustre eye. There was none of the old bounce and condescension in his manner.

"It's all right for you chaps to make bum jokes," he grumbled. "You're on Easy Street. What difference does the depression make to you? You haven't promised a new touring-car to your wife as I did. And now the poor little girl has to worry along on last year's model. And I could only give her a pearl pendant for her birthday instead of the diamond sun-burst she wanted. While you...."

But we hurried away. Far be it from us to stand idly by and gaze upon a strong man's agony. The vision of that defeated and broken man has followed us ever since. Not even the little sunburst she wanted--gawd, can such things be! Why doesn't someone start another war so that he can get back into the munitions business? There must be dozens of others like him. And while these deserving millionaires are in this state of comparative destitution, here are gay, care-free fellows like ourself swaggering about town, jingling the quarter against the small change in our pocket, and wondering whether we will blow it on two cigars or on three. It doesn't seem fair, does it?

It has been said thousands of times--therefore, we have no hesitation in repeating--that one-half the world doesn't know how the other half lives. Not that millionaires constitute half the world--God forbid! They are not even the emerged tenth, if we may say so. But it is none the less true that the rest of us don't know how they live.

You may see the magnificent, yea, verily, the palatial residences they have built after the model of famous prisons and royal stables abroad. You may hear the accents and see the spats of their sons who have been to Oxford--in fact, you can almost see the accents and hear the spats. You may gaze upon their daughters at theatre-parties, clad in feathers and the rail of the box, with nothing between them and lumbago but the backs of their chairs. You may be dazzled by the flash of the twenty-carat headlight in fawther's dress-shirt, or by the soft refulgence of mother's stomacher of pearls. You may witness all this--you may even envy it. But little you know the breaking heart that may lurk in the limousine.

To look at the average millionaire you would never suspect what worm may prey upon his damask cheek--or should we say, damaged cheek? The gilded sausages of his double watch-chain may be as ponderous and resplendent as ever. The crease in his trousers and the shine on his shoes may still show the skill and energy of an expensive valet. He may curse at the waiters in his old lordly manner, even though he no longer is able to order his cocktails in a tumbler. But he is not at peace within.

If you are a shrewd observer you will notice that his sixty-cent cigar is not quite at the old aggressive, betcha-million-dollars angle. And the familiar wad of mazuma in the right-hand front pocket of the pants is not so swollen as of yore. We should say it is thinner by several one-hundred-dollar bills. In fact, it may be padded up with fives and tens and other bills of small denomination just to make it look good.

In a word, the average millionaire is not the man he was only two or three years ago, when the war was on, and orders were flowing in, and he was picking what crumbs of comfort he could--and also quite a few nice, bright little nuggets--out of the general chaos. It may seem to you that he is going as strong as ever. You may suppose that once a week he still has a lorry back around to the side entrance to take his profits down to the bank to be weighed and shoveled into the vaults. You may imagine that he still spends his leisure hours clipping the nimble coupon. But such is far from being the case, as you would realize if you could only get him to open his heart to you.

Try asking him to increase your salary--this is a really good way to find out. Then you will discover that most of his business day is devoted to running around with his hat in his hand begging hard-hearted bankers to let him have just a few more hundred thousands--surely a man has a right to this pittance--so that he may pay his bills and be able to look the world in the face once more. You will be horrified to learn of such hideous octopuses--(thank you, Professor, we should have said "octopi")--as Labor Unrest, Overhead Charges, Depreciation, and Stagnant Markets. Secure in your weekly envelope with its usual twenty dollars--unless like ourself, dear reader, you draw an occasional I.O.U.--you may care little for the vagaries of any other market than the one at which your wife or landlady buys the family meat and vegetables. But this great and good man has to bear the brunt of the fight. Is he complaining? No, friend, he is not.

"It is not for myself," he tells you in a voice quivering with emotion and considerable brandy-and-soda--they can still get it, of course. "It's not for myself, my boy. I must keep the old plant going for the sake of the men and their families."

Just about then you burst into tears and beg his pardon for ever having even thought of such a thing as more pay.

"You have no idea how delicate and complicated these financial problems are," he assures you in a burst of confidence, "You don't realize, for instance, that if I were to raise the wages of everyone in the institution a dollar a month, I'd simply have to shut the old place up. And I couldn't bear to do that--the associations, you know."

You have a vision of him in his poverty-stricken old age, out of work, condemned to spend all his time at Palm Beach or the Riviera. If you are a man of real feeling, you will tell him you think you could get along on ten dollars a month less, and would he please take it to help tide him over his difficulties?

It is experiences like this which convince a man that these are indeed times of depression. And everything deepens the feeling. See the lines of people waiting to buy the best seats for musical comedies and hockey-matches! See them crowding into the cabarets at midnight! And the jolly little dance-and-supper parties after the show in homes where the cellar has not yet been entirely despoiled of its treasures!

All this is merely a proof of general anguish of mind. They are seeking for respite and nepenthe and surcease of sorrow. They are dying game, so to speak. If they were to sit down quietly at home and think things over, they might become so desperate as to cut down their expenses. So they roll out the old touring-car instead, and collect a few congenial spirits, and possibly some more spirits under the cushion of the back seat, and go--but it doesn't matter so much now where one goes. All towns are alike.

Of course, there are financial giants, whose position is so secure that no money panic can ever disturb their equilibrium or equanimity. We called on one the other evening--two floors up over a grocery store. It was a cold night, the heat was off, he was wearing his overcoat in the house, and was feeding old newspapers into the parlor grate. In the intervals he was reading Anatole France in the original, and consulting a big French dictionary every line or so.

"Come in," he roared, "and help feed the fire. I've left the hero in a delicate and somewhat improper position, and I want to see if anything happened. I'll tell you in a minute." And he reached for the dictionary.

We intimated that we would certainly like to know if anything of an indelicate nature occurred, so that we might rush right out and report the matter to the proper authorities.

"But how can you be interested in such things as that," we enquired, "when hundreds of your fellow-millionaires and near-millionaires--they are human beings after all--are writhing in financial agony? Have you any European holdings, any Russian roubles, or anything of that sort?"

"I'm not holding 'em any longer," he said with a shameless grin. "I gave them to the butcher as an instalment on last month's bill."

"But you must have some stocks on margin--are they properly covered?" we persisted. That's the kind of fellow we are, always looking for information--the more unpleasant the better.

"Huh, what's that?" he grunted, after a long pause during which he had been hunting feverishly for a word. "What's that, margins? Are my margins covered? Sure, they're covered, old top--and so are the missus's and the kid's. Our margins are all protected from the weather--also our chests and such other places as one usually takes cold in."

But what's the use of talking to a man like that? He shut the book with a bang and reached for the tobacco-jar.

"Now what do you know about that?" he groaned. "Nothing happened after all. Just as things were at their liveliest, and the hero held out his arms, and the heroine--well, just then the old Abbe blundered in and...."

But there is something criminal and callous about such indifference as this.

*Taming the Furnace*

"And what the devil do you know about taming furnaces, anyway?" asks the reader, presuming that the reader has a somewhat abrupt style in conversation. "Here you go around bragging about being a bachelor and having inclinations for the monastic life and all that sort of rot"--meaning the bragging, of course--"and yet you have the nerve to write an article on how to handle a furnace. G'wan and teach your grandmother to suck eggs!"

Thereupon, the reader in torrid indignation drops the book and goes down into the cellar, and seizing a short shovel with a broken handle tosses half a ton of coal into the maw of the steel dragon there--a dragon which consumes its own heat and lets none of it get as far as the radiators.

Incidentally, why should it be regarded as the height of absurdity to teach one's grandmother to suck eggs? Why should one's grandmother be expected to know all about sucking eggs? Is one's grandmother a weasel that she should be universally regarded as a supreme exponent of this art? We are aware that this paragraph is in the nature of a digression, but we have all our life been puzzled to account for this curious tradition that grandmothers know everything to be known about removing the contents of eggs by the primitive process of suction. We feel quite sure that both our own personal and private grandmothers knew nothing about it. We are also sure that we would never have had the nerve to teach them how to do a thing so obviously vulgar and futile. Furthermore, no one's grandmother could afford to suck eggs at the present market quotations. So what would be the use, anyway, even if she did know how? Altogether this seems to us a very silly proverb.

But, to return to furnaces, we really do know something about them--not everything (what man does?), not even a great deal, perhaps, but still something. And we ought to know something, for we have wrestled in spirit and otherwise with every one of the fifty-odd varieties--hot air, hot water, steam, and everything that lies between. Some men are born furnace-tenders. Some learn it from plumbers. But we have had our knowledge forced upon us.

One of our earliest and least-treasured recollections is of an enormous old furnace in our grandfather's house--a mediaeval contraption, all bricked-in, as big as a cottage, with a mouth the size of a pair of folding doors, and a capacity for coal which would make a twin-screw steamship turn a dark bottle-green. We used to be held up to the door of it when we had been very naughty, and have it explained to us that naughty boys were sent to a place bearing a general resemblance to that bed of red-hot coals. We do not recall that we had much joy of the prospect.

Later on, when we had got to the point of having Holy Writ retailed to us with expository remarks--our preceptors usually picked out something infernally gruesome--we used to associate that old furnace with the various trials by fire mentioned in the Old Testament. Especially could we see those three brave young Hebrews, who were condemned by old Nebuchadnezzar to be burned to death, standing smilingly on the familiar coals--each with a fire-insurance policy in his pocket, as we presume now. Else why be so cheerful about it?

Even as a boy at grandfather's place we began to form that intimate acquaintance with furnaces which has been the bane of our young life. When the furnace man did not turn up--usually as a sequel to a nocturnal endeavor to make the distilleries enlarge their plants--we had to shovel coal into that grinning old monster until our back and arms ached, and we would cheerfully have thrown in a few sticks of dynamite if there had been any handy.

But, of course, that sort of thing is part of the penalty of being a member of a family. We have no complaints to make. If a fellow will permit himself to be dragged into a family he must pay the price thereof. What we really object to is that since we have attained the dignity of manhood and the responsibility of a vote in provincial and federal affairs, we are still obliged to toil in cellars with a coal-shovel--a black-and-white slave, so to speak.

It would be different if we were married. We would expect to look after a furnace. And, anyway, to a married man what is a little trouble more or less?--he has lots of it. But freedom from worry about the furnace should be one of the most sacred privileges of the bachelor. We have been deprived of our rights. Instead of "the" furnace, we have several to think about. We are one of the busiest little amateur stokers in town.

There must be something in our appearance which suggests that we have a masterful way with furnaces, that we can make them eat right out of our shovel. It has become a habit with our lady friends when we call on them in the evening--naturally we have social duties to perform--to pat the radiator in a reflective sort of way, and then smiling brightly at us to say in a casual but wheedling tone something to the following effect:

"Oh, Mister O'D."--a few of them call us Peter in a sisterly way--"I just hate awfully to bother you, but paw is at the lodge and--well, you are such a good hand with a furnace. It's such a comfort to have a man who is really handy around the house, and--just a shovelful--thanks!"

So we bid a temporary farewell to the company and to all the delights of polite conversation, and retire to the cellar to give first aid to a rusty demon of a furnace whose vital spark is almost extinct. Laying our coat neatly folded on the bottom step of the cellar-stairs, we first seize a long lever which comes out every moment or two on our toe, and we shake enough ashes out of the grate to stifle Pompeii. Then groping our way to the coal-bin--away at the other end of the cellar--we proceed forcibly to feed the furnace with a broken scoop-shovel. About half of each shovelful misses the little opening--why the dickens do they put such small doors on the things?--and by the time we have accomplished the chore we are knee-deep in anthracite. Great stuff for a nice, new serge suit, that!

When we come upstairs again we are coated with a soft covering of powdered ash, our collar is melted, our hands suggest that we have been working on a slag-pile, and the young lady insists on sitting on a little narrow chair instead of on the sofa as usual. Every time we stir she glances nervously at the rug and the upholstery. The social atmosphere grows chillier and chillier, though the water is boiling in the "rads."

About an hour later "paw" comes home from the lodge, disappears into the subterranean depths, and emerges in a moment to ask in a loud belligerent voice who th'ell has been and gone and put all that coal on the furnace, and if people are aware that coal costs fifteen dollars a ton, and if people wouldn't be better advised to mind their own business. Whereupon daughter blushes violently and rushes out to him in the hall. There is a brief dialogue which is brought to a conclusion by "paw" grunting, "Oh, him, is it?" in a manner not altogether flattering.