Part 4

"Oh, as for that," the Idiot remarked, "when I advocate the maintenance of an attic as one of the first duties of mankind, I mean its intelligent maintenance. The thing which makes of the British Museum, the National Attic of Great Britain, a positive educational force is its intelligent direction. It is the storehouse of the useless possessions of the British Empire which have an inspiring quality. There is nothing in it which makes a Briton think less of himself or which in any way unpleasantly disturbs his equanimity. So with the attic of the humble citizen. It must be intelligently directed if it is to become an institution, and should not be made the repository of useless things which ought to be destroyed, among which I class that other possible bundle to which you refer."

And inasmuch as the whole party agreed to the validity of this proposition, the subject was dropped, and the Idiot and his guests wandered on to other things.

VI

THE IDIOT'S GARDEN

"I should think, my dear Idiot," Mr. Pedagog observed one summer evening, as his host stood upon the back piazza of "Castle Idiot," as they had come to call the dwelling-place of their friend, "that with all this space you have about you, you would devote some of it to a garden."

"Why, I do," said the Idiot. "I've got a small patch down there behind the tennis-court, fifty by one hundred feet, under cultivation. The stuff we get is almost as good as the average canned goods, too. We had a stalk of asparagus the other night that was magnificent as far as it went. It was edible for quite a sixteenth of an inch, or at least I was told so. That portion of it had already been nibbled off by my son Thomas while it was resting in the pantry waiting to be served. However, the inedible end which arrived was quite sturdy, and might have stood between my family and starvation if the necessity had arisen."

"One stalk of asparagus is a pretty poor crop, I should say," observed the lawyer, with a laugh.

"You might think so," said the Idiot. "But everything in the world is comparative, after all. Ants build ant-hills which are several feet lower than the Alps, and yet they are monumental, considering that they were made by ants. All things considered, Mrs. Idiot and I were proud of our asparagus crop, and distinctly regretted that it did not survive to be served in proper state at dinner. If I remember rightly, Thomas was severely reprimanded for his privateering act in biting off the green end of it before I had a chance to see it."

"'Twasn't specially good," said Tommy, loftily.

"I am very glad it was not, my son," said the Idiot. "I should be very sorry to hear that you had derived the slightest sensation of pleasure from your piratical and utterly inexcusable act."

"Do you usually serve so small a portion of the product of your garden?" asked Mr. Brief.

"Sometimes we don't serve anything at all from it," said the Idiot, "which you will observe is smaller yet. In this instance Mrs. Idiot intended a little surprise for me. We had struggled with that asparagus-bed for some time. The madame had studied up asparagus in her botany. I had looked it up in the cyclopedia and the Century dictionary. We had ordered it in various styles when we dined out at the New York hotels, and we had frequently bought cans of it in order to familiarize ourselves more intimately with its general personal appearance. Then we consulted people we thought would be likely to know how to obtain the best results, and what they told us to do we did, but somehow it didn't work. Our asparagus crop languished. We sprinkled it in person. We put all sorts of garden cosmetics on it to improve its complexion, but it seemed hopeless, and finally when I footed up the asparagus item in my account-book, and discovered that we had paid out enough money without results of a satisfactory nature to have kept us in canned asparagus for four years, we got discouraged, and resolved to give it up. It was while Michael, our gardener, was removing the evidences of our failure that he discovered the one perfect stalk, and like the honest old gardener that he is, he immediately brought it into the house and presented it to my wife. She naturally rejoiced that our efforts had not been entirely vain, and in her usual spirit of self-sacrifice had the stalk cooked as a surprise for me. As I have told you, that small circumstance Thomas, over which we seem to have no control, got ahead of us--"

"You was surprised, wasn't you, pa?" demanded the boy.

"Somewhat, my son," said the Idiot, "but not in the way your mother had designed, exactly."

"Is asparagus the extent of your gardening?" queried Mrs. Pedagog.

"Oh no, indeed!" replied Mrs. Idiot. "We've had peas and beets and beans and egg-plant and corn--almost everything, in fact, including potatoes."

"Yes, ma'am," said the Idiot, "almost everything, including potatoes. Our pea crop was lovely. We had five podfuls for dinner on the Fourth of July, and the children celebrated the day by podding them for the cook. They popped open almost as noisily as a torpedo. It was really very enjoyable. Indeed, one of the results of that pea crop has been to give me an idea by which I may some day redeem my losses on the asparagus-bed. An explosive pea which should be edible, and yet would pop open with the noise of a small fire-cracker, would be a delight to the children and serviceable for the table. I don't exactly know how to bring about the desired results, but it seems to me if I were to mix a little saltpetre in the water with which we irrigate our pea-trees the required snap would be obtained. Then on the Fourth of July the children, instead of burning their fingers and filling their parents with nervous dread setting off fire-crackers, could sit out on the back piazza and shell the peas for the cook--"

"I'd rather shell Spangyards," said Mollie.

"I am surprised at you, my child," said the Idiot. "A little girl like you should be an advocate of peace, not of war."

"You can't eat Spaniards, either, can you, pa?" said Tommy, who, while he shared Mollie's views as to the comparative value for shelling purposes of peas and Spaniards, was nevertheless quite interested in the development of a pea-pod that would open with a bang.

"No, Tommy," said the Idiot, "you can't eat Spaniards, and they'd be sure to disagree with you if you could."

"That is a very interesting proposition of yours," said Mr. Brief, "but it has its dangers. A dynamite pea would prove very attractive so long as its explosive qualities were confined to the pod and its opening. But how are you going to keep the saltpetre out of the peas themselves?"

"That is where the difficulty comes in," said the Idiot. "I frankly don't know how we could insulate the peas from the effects of the saltpetre."

"It would be deucedly awkward," observed the Bibliomaniac, "if, as might very well happen, one or two of the peas should become so thoroughly impregnated with the stuff that they would explode in the mouth of the person who was eating them, like bombs in miniature."

"True," said the Idiot. "The only safeguard against that would be to compel the cook to test every pea before she cooked it. She could slam them down on the hearth-stone like torpedoes, and every one that didn't go off could be cooked and served with safety. Still, there would be danger even then. A careless cook might forever ruin the tooth of a favored guest. I guess I'd better give up the idea."

"Oh, don't, pa!" cried Tommy, his interest in explosive vegetables worked up to a high pitch. "I'll test 'em all for you, and if they work I don't see why you couldn't raise dynamite punkins!"

"It would be a strong temptation, my son," said the Idiot, "which is all the more reason why I should abandon the plan. A dynamite punkin, as you call it, would wreck the whole neighborhood if one should set it off properly. No, we will, after all, confine our attention to vegetables of a more pacific nature. The others might prove more profitable at first, but when the novelty of them wore off, and one realized only their danger, a great deal of the pleasure one derives from eating fresh vegetables would be utterly destroyed."

Tommy looked out over the railing of the piazza, deep regret and disappointment depicted in his brown little face; but if the glitter of his eyes meant anything it meant that the idea of putting vegetables on a war footing was not going to be allowed to drop into oblivion; and if the small youth progresses in inventive genius in a fair ratio to his past achievements in that line, I have no doubt that if a Vesuvian pumpkin _can_ be produced at all, the day will dawn when Thomas is hailed as its inventor.

"Is it true," asked Mr. Brief, "that home-raised peas are sweeter than any other?"

"We think so," said Mrs. Idiot.

"We know so," amended the Idiot. "That Fourth-of-July night when we ate those five podfuls we discovered that fact. Five podfuls of peas are not enough to feed a family of four on, so we mixed them in with a few more that we bought at the grocer's, and we could tell ours from the others every time, they were so much sweeter."

The Bibliomaniac laughed scornfully.

"Pooh!" said he. "How did you know that they were yours that were sweet, and not the grocery-bought peas?"

"How does a father know his own children?" said the Idiot. "If you'd labored over those five pods as hard and assiduously as we did, nursing them through their infant troubles, guarding them against locusts and potato-bugs, carefully watching their development from infancy into the full vigor of a mature peahood, I guess you'd know your own from those of others. It's instinct, my dear Bibliomaniac."

"Tell about the strawberry, pa," said Tommy, who liked to hear his father talk, in which respect I fear he takes strongly after his parent.

"Well," said the Idiot, "it's not much of a story. There was one. We had a strawberry patch twenty feet by ten. We had plenty of straw and plenty of patch, but the berries were timid about appearing. The results were similar to those in our asparagus venture. One berry was discovered trying to hide itself under half a bale of straw one morning, and while I was looking for Mrs. Idiot, to ask her to come down to the garden and see it grow, a miserable robin came along and bit its whole interior out. I hope the bird enjoyed it, because on a bed-rock estimate that berry cost twenty dollars. That is one of the things about gardening that make me especially weary. One doesn't mind spending forty-four dollars on a stalk of asparagus that is eaten, even surreptitiously, by a member of one's own family; but to pay twenty dollars for a strawberry to be wasted on a fifteen-cent robin is, to say the least, irritating."

"You forget, John," said Mrs. Idiot, with a somewhat mirthful look in her eyes, "that we got fifteen boxes out of the strawberry-patch later."

"No, I don't," said the Idiot. "I was coming to that, and it involves a confession. You were so blue about the loss of our one beautiful berry that I entered into a conspiracy with Michael to make that patch yield. The fifteen boxes of berries that we took out subsequently were bought at a New York fruit-store and judiciously scattered about the patch where you would find them. I had hoped you would never find it out, but when you spoke the other day of expending thirty-eight dollars on that strawberry-patch next year, I resolved then to undeceive you. This is the first favorable opportunity I have had."

Mrs. Idiot laughed heartily. "I knew it all along," she said. "Michael came to me with them and asked for instructions as to where to put them. Really, I--ah--I arranged them under the straw myself."

"What an ass a hired man can be!" ejaculated the Idiot. "I shall discharge Michael to-morrow."

"I wish you would," said Mrs. Idiot. "Ever since the conspiracy he has been entirely too independent."

"Don't discharge Michael, papa," said Mollie. "He's awful nice. He's always willin' to stop anything he's doing to play with Tommy and me."

"You bet he is!" cried Tommy. "He's a dandy, Mike is. He never says a word when I sit under the sprinkler, and he told me the other day that his grandfather would have been king of Ireland if Queen Victoria hadn't come in. He said the Queen was a lady, and his grandfather gave up his seat to her because he was a gentleman and couldn't do anything else."

"Very well," said the Idiot, suavely. "Then I won't discharge Michael. One feels a better American, a better Republican, if he has a royal personage in his employ. I always wondered where Michael got his imperious manner; now I know. As a descendant of a long line of kings it could not be otherwise. I will give him another chance. But let me give you all fair warning. If next summer Michael does not succeed in producing from my garden four beets, ten pods of peas, three string-beans, and less than ten thousand onions, he goes. I shall not pay a gardener forty dollars a month unless he can raise three dollars' worth of vegetables a year."

"But really," said Mr. Pedagog, "haven't you raised anything in your garden?"

"Oh yes," said the Idiot. "I've raised my water bill in the garden. I used to pay twelve dollars a quarter for water, but now the bills come to at least twenty-five dollars. Truly, a garden is not without profit to some one."

VII

HOUSEHOLD POETRY

"Yes," said the Idiot, in response to an inquiry from the Poet, who was passing a Sunday with him at Castle Idiot, "I have found that there is a great deal of poetry in the apparently uninspiring little things of a household. There is to me as much poetry in a poker as there is in a snow-clad Alp, if you only have an eye to find it; and I am sure that to thousands of housewives the whole land over a sonnet to a clothes-pin, written by one who knows the clothes-pin's nature intimately, would be far more appealing than a similar number of lines trying to prove that we are all miserable phantoms flitting across a morass of woe."

The Poet pulled away thoughtfully at his pipe. He was a broad-minded poet, and while he had never owned a poker of his own, he was ready to admit its possibilities; but he could not follow his friend closely enough to admit that it contained as much that was inspiring as did Mont Blanc, for instance, a bright particular Alp of which he was very fond.

The Idiot continued:

"A ton of coal contains far more warmth than a woman's eyebrow; sends the mind of a thoughtful person chasing backward to the time when it lay snugly hid in the fair breast of nature; to the joys and woes of the toilers who mined it; through a variety of complexities of life, every one of them fraught with noble thoughts. Yet who ever wrote dainty verses to a ton of coal, and who hasn't at one time or another in his life written about the eyebrows of some woman?"

The Poet laughed this time. "A triolet to a ton of coal would be a glorious thing now, wouldn't it?" he observed.

"No," said the Idiot. "A triolet could never be a glorious thing under any circumstances; but to the extent that a ton of coal contains a certain amount of grandeur in the service it renders to mankind, I think the form would be ennobled somewhat by the substance. Let's try it and see."

"You do it," said the Poet; "I really don't think I could do the subject justice."

The Idiot got out a pencil and a pad of paper and began.

"I don't think I'll make it a triolet," he said, after biting the end of his pencil for a few moments. "A whole ton is a good deal to cram into a triolet. I'll just make it a plain poem of the go-as-you-please variety instead, eh?"

"In the manner of Whitman, perhaps?" suggested the Poet, dryly.

"Just so," said the Idiot. "In the manner of Whitman; in fact, I think the manner of Whitman is the only manner for the poetic description of a ton of coal."

He began to scribble on the pad.

"I'm going to call this 'Content,'" he said in a few moments. "Contentment strikes me as the main lesson a ton of coal teaches."

He scribbled on, and in four or five minutes he put down his pencil and read the following lines:

"I'm glad I'm not as men are-- Always worrying about something, and often about nothing; About what was and what wasn't; Fretting about what may be and what might have been; Wondering whether when they are called upon to do their duty They'll be able to do it, And generally deciding they won't, To their own discomfort. And if so be they're women, Cogitating from morn till night, From night till morn, Wherewithal shall they be clothed, And if their hats are on straight! Yea! I am glad I am not like one of these, But am myself-- A ton of coal--jetty in my blackness and luminous in my bituminosity. Lying here in the cellar content and not bothering a bit. Not needing income or clothes, and wearing no hat, and with no complexion to bother about. Happy and serene about my duty, Certain that I shall succeed when the time for action comes; Knowing that I shall burn, And in the burning glow like the polar star. Cackling and crackling, Hissing and smoking, Full of heat, A satisfaction to mankind, And never worth less than $5.65, delivered! Ah, me! What bliss to be a ton of coal! I am content."

The Poet nodded his pleasure at the effort. "It is charmingly put," he said. "I must confess, my dear Idiot, that the idea of contentment is the last one that I should ever have extracted from contemplation of a binful of anthracite, and yet when I consider how you put it I wonder it has not occurred to every one. You have the manner of the Whitman parodist down fine, too."

"Thank you," said the Idiot. "It is entirely natural to me. I think, too, that using the Whitman lack of form carries with it the notion of the coal sliding down the chute, don't you? Coal runs into the cellar in such an irresponsible, formless way, eh?"

"Precisely," smiled the Poet. "You have the right notion about that. The form of a poem should really be adapted to the substance. It should be descriptive, always. Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has in its rhythm nothing more or less than the clatter of the horses' hoofs as they and their riders dashed through the valley of death at Balaklava. And how vividly Southey's brook comes before the mind in its mad rush downward as one reads that wonderfully lyrical poem. Why don't you write a book of household poetry? You seem to me to be eminently well qualified to undertake it."

"I intend to," said the Idiot. "In fact, I've begun it already. Written five or six. Like to see 'em?"

"Indeed I should," said the Poet. "Anything you do interests me."

The Idiot went to his desk and took from it a few pages of manuscript.

"Here is a thing on pokers I did the other night. I called it 'The Song of the Poker Bold.'" And then he read these lines:

"Warder of the grate am I, Ever standing near; Poking, poking all day long, Knowing naught of fear.

"Keeping coals up to their work, Setting them aglow, Minding not the scorching heat, Rather like it so.

"Knocking ashes right and left, Flirting with the tiles; Bossing tongs and seeing that The brazen kettle biles.

"And the little girls and boys As they watch me pause, Wishing that I'd talk and tell 'Bout old Santa Claus!

"Cracking jokes with crickets on The merry hearth, elate; Happy lot indeed is mine-- Warder of the grate!"

"Splendid!" cried the Poet, clapping his hands with enthusiasm. "Splendid! A good stiff pokeresque lyric, and your characterization of the poker as the 'Warder of the Grate' gives it a flavor of romance. You could almost imagine the implement going out into a mediæval world in search of knightly adventure--a sort of hearth-stone Quixote. Have you tackled the clothes-pin yet?"

"Yes," replied the Idiot. "Indeed, my first effort was a lyric on the clothes-pin. I started one night to do the contents of the kitchen-dresser drawer in French forms, but the first thing I took out was an egg-beater, and it wouldn't go, so I did the clothes-pin lyric. I call it

"FIDELITY

"Blow, ye winds, I fear ye not; Blast, ye simoon, Sere and hot!

"Hurricane, And cyclone, too, Blow, I have no Fear of you.

"Lacking beauty, Lacking grace, Lacking handsome Form and face;

"Lacking soul And intellect, Still I stand up, Proud, erect.

"For the Fates Have given me Wondrous great Tenacity.

"And success, Both fair and fine, Comes to him Who holds his line.

"Burrs can stick And so can glue-- Mucilage, Stratena, too;

"But there's nothing Holds so fast As the clothes-pin To the last."

"And you gave up the egg-beater altogether?" asked the Poet, restraining a natural inclination to find flaws in the construction of the clothes-pin poem.

"Oh no," said the Idiot, "I knocked off a little quatrain on that. I called it 'The Speedy Egg-Beater,' and it goes like this:

"Great Maude S. can beat all steeds, However speedy be their legs; But I distance her with ease When it comes to beating eggs."

"I really think that you would have done better to give up the egg-beater," said the Poet, grown critical. "I've no patience with one-rhymed quatrains. Now if you had written:

"Great Maude S. can beat all steeds, However speedy be their legs; But despite her doughty deeds; I can beat her beating eggs,

"I should not have objected."

"I accept the amendment," replied the Idiot, meekly. "I realized the weakness of the thing myself, and thought of changing it into a couplet, where you only need one rhyme. How's this on a 'Carpet-Tack'?"

"However dull the day, However dull the skies, However dark the night may be, My spirits ever rise.

"For though I'm but a carpet-tack, Afar from moil and strife, No one can ever truly say That mine's a pointless life."

"That is very good," said the Poet. "I think almost any editor of any comic paper would be willing to pay you three dollars for that. It is as good as your poem on a ton of coal--simple in its expression and sweet in sentiment."

"I thought you'd think so," said the Idiot. "It struck me so. I've got one on a screw-driver, too, that is very much of the same order, and conveys a moral lesson to the reader who is always reaching out after the unattainable. It reads as follows:

"I cannot tool a tally-ho, I cannot drive a nag; I dare not hold the ribbons On a hack or rumbling drag.

"I could not guide the reins upon A simple billy-goat, And I should hesitate to try To drive a can-al boat.

"But I don't mind these things at all, For I can drive a screw, And I am happy, for that's just What I was meant to do."

"The fourth line of the second verse is weak, but otherwise it's good," commented the Poet. "It's not a _can_-al boat; it's a can-_al_ boat, and all the poetic license in the world wouldn't excuse your taking such a liberty with language."

"I appreciate that," said the Idiot. "But I don't see how I could get around it."

"There's only one way," said the Poet. "I think if you omitted that verse altogether you'd improve the poem."