Part 5

"Thank you," said the Idiot, ignoring the shaft. "I shall never forget your kindness in coming to my aid, though I can't say that I think I needed it. Even with a racking headache sustained by these delicious waffles, I believe I can handle the Doctor and my bookish friend without assistance. I am what the mathematicians would call an arithmetical absurdity--I am the one that is equal to the two they represent. At present, however, I prefer to let them talk on. I am too much absorbed in thought and waffles to bandy words."

"If I had a headache," said Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog, without, it must be said, in any way desiring to stem the waffle tide which was slowly but surely eating into the profits of the week--"if I had a headache I should not eat so many waffles, Mr. Idiot."

"I suppose I ought not to," replied the Idiot, "but I can't help it, ma'am. Waffles are my weakness. Some men take to drink, some to gaming; I seek forgetfulness of woe in waffles. Mr. Whitechoker, will you kindly pass me that steaming ten of diamonds that is wasting its warmth upon the desert air before you?"

Mr. Whitechoker, with a sigh which indicated that he had had his eye on the ten of diamonds himself, did as he was requested.

"Many thanks," said the Idiot, transferring the waffle to his plate. "Let me see--that is how many?"

"Five," said Mr. Pedagog.

"Eight," said the Bibliomaniac.

"Dear me!" ejaculated the Idiot. "Why can't you agree? I never eat less than twelve waffles, and now that you have failed to keep tab I shall have to begin all over again. Mary, bring me one dozen fresh waffles in squads of four. This is an ideal breakfast, Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog."

"I am glad you are pleased," said the landlady, graciously. "My one aim is to satisfy."

"You are a better shot than most women," said the Idiot. "I wonder why it is," he added, "that waffles are so generally modelled after playing-cards, and also why, having been modelled after playing-cards, there is not a full pack?"

"Fifty-two waffles," said Mr. Whitechoker, "would be too many."

"Fifty-three, including the joker," said Mr. Pedagog.

"What do _you_ know about cards, John?" asked Mrs. Pedagog, severely.

The Idiot laughed.

"Did you ever hear that pretty little song of Gilbert and Sullivan's, Mr. Poet, 'Things are seldom what they seem'?" he asked.

"Why shouldn't I know about playing-cards?" said Mr. Pedagog, acridly. "Mr. Whitechoker seems to be aware that a pack holds fifty-two cards--if he, why not I?"

"I--ah--I of course have to acquaint myself with many vicious things with which I have very little sympathy," observed Mr. Whitechoker, blandly. "I regard cards as an abomination."

"So do I," said Mr. Pedagog--"so do I. But even then I know a full house--I should say a full pack from a--er--a--er--"

"Bob-tail flush," suggested the Idiot.

"Sir," said Mr. Pedagog, "I am not well up in poker terms."

"Then you ought to play," said the Idiot. "The man who doesn't know the game has usually great luck. But I am sorry, Mrs. Pedagog, that you are so strongly opposed to cards, for I was going to make a suggestion which I think would promote harmony in our little circle on waffle days. If you regard cards as wholly immoral, of course the suggestion is without value, since it involves two complete packs of cards--one cardboard pack and one waffle pack."

"I don't object to cards as cards, Mr. Idiot," said the landlady. "It is the games people play with cards that I object to. They bring a great deal of unnecessary misery into the world, and for that reason I think it is better to avoid them altogether."

"That is quite true," said the Idiot. "They do bring about much unhappiness. I know a young woman who became a victim of insomnia once because in a series of ten games of old maid she got the odd card seven times. Of course it wasn't entirely the cards' fault. Superstition had something to do with it. In fact, I sometimes think the fault lies with the people who play, and not with the cards. I owe much to the game of whist. It taught me to control my tongue. I should have been a regular talk-fiend if it hadn't been for whist."

Mr. Pedagog looked unutterable things at the Idiot.

"Are you laboring under the delusion that you have any control over your tongue?" he asked, savagely.

"Most certainly," said the Idiot.

"Well, I'll have to make a note of that," said Mr. Pedagog. "I have a friend who is making a collection of hallucinations."

"If you'll give me his address," said the Idiot, "I'll send him thousands. For five dollars a dozen I'll invent hallucinations for him that people ought to have but haven't."

"No," returned the School-master. "In his behalf, however, I thank you. He collects only real hallucinations, and he finds there are plenty of them without retaining a professional lunatic to supply him."

"Very well," said the Idiot, returning to his waffles. "If at any time he finds the supply running short, I shall be glad to renew my offer."

"You haven't unfolded your Harmony Promoting Scheme for Waffle Days," suggested the Poet. "It has aroused my interest."

"Oh, it is simple," said the Idiot. "I have noticed that on waffle days here most of us leave the table more or less dissatisfied. We find ourselves plunged into acrimonious discussions, which, to my mind, arise entirely from the waffles. Mr. Pedagog is a most amiable gentleman, and yet we find him this morning full of acerbity. On the surface of things I seem to be the cause of his anger, but in reality it is not I, but the waffles. He has seen me gradually absorbing them and it has irritated him. Every waffle that I eat _he_ might have had if I had not been here. If there had been no one here but Mr. Pedagog, he would have had all the waffles; as it is, his supply is limited. This affects his geniality. It makes him--"

"Pardon me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But you are all wrong. I haven't thought of the things at all."

"Consciously to yourself you have not," said the Idiot. "Subconsciously, however, you have. The Philosophy of the Unconscious teaches us that unknown to ourselves our actions are directly traceable to motives we wot not of. The truth of this is conclusively proven in this case. Even when I point out to you the facts in the case you deny their truth, thereby showing that you are not conscious of the real underlying motive for your irritation. Now, why is that irritation there? Because our several rights to the individual waffles that are served here are not clearly defined at the outset. When Mary brings in a steaming platter full of these delicious creations of the cook, Mr. Pedagog has quite as much right to the one with the six of hearts on it as I have, but I get it. He does not. Hence he is irritated, although he does not know it. So with Mr. Whitechoker. Five minutes ago he was hastening through the four of spades in order that he might come into possession of the ten of diamonds that lay smoking before him. As he was about to put the last spade in his mouth I requested him to hand me the ten of diamonds, having myself gulped down the deuce of clubs to get ahead of him. He couldn't decline to give me that waffle because he wanted it himself. He had to give it to me. He was irritated--though he did not know it. He sighed and gave me the waffle."

"I did want it," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But I did not know that I sighed."

"There you are," said the Idiot. "It is the Philosophy of the Unconscious again. If you are not conscious of so actual a thing as a sigh, how much the more unconscious must you be of something so subtle as motive?"

"And your waffle-deck?" said the Genial Old Gentleman who occasionally imbibes. "How will that solve the problem? It seems to me to complicate the problem. As it is, we have about thirty waffles, each one of which is a germ of irritation in the breast of the man who _doesn't_ eat it. If you have fifty-two waffles you have twenty-two more germs to sow discord in our midst."

"You would have but for my scheme," said the Idiot. "I'd have a pack of cards at the table, and I'd deal them out just as you do in whist. Each card would represent the corresponding waffle. We'd begin breakfast by playing one hand after the manner of whist. Each man would keep his tricks, and when the waffles were served he would receive those, and those only, represented by the cards in the tricks he had taken. If you took a trick with the king of diamonds in it, you'd get the waffle with the king of diamonds on it, and so on. Every man would be clearly entitled through his skill in the game to the waffles that he ate."

"Very good," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But suppose you had bad luck and took no tricks?"

"Then," said the Idiot, "you'd have bad luck and get no waffles."

"Tutt!" said Mr. Pedagog.

And that was the sole criticism any of the boarders had to make, although there is reason to believe that the scheme had objectionable features to the majority of them, for as yet Progressive Waffles has not been played at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's.

IX

A Clearing-house for Poets

"How is your Muse these days, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Bibliomaniac one Sunday morning while the mush was being served.

"Flourishing," said the Idiot. "Just flourishing--and no more."

"I should think you'd be pleased if she is flourishing," said the Doctor.

"I'd rather she'd stop flourishing and do a little writing," said the Idiot. "She's a queer Muse, that one of mine. She has all the airs and graces of an ordinary type-writer with an unconquerable aversion to work."

"You look upon your Muse as you would upon your type-writer, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "That's all my Muse is, and she isn't even a capable type-writer. The general run of type-writers make sense of what you write, but my Muse won't. You may not believe it, but out of ten inspirations I had last week not one of them is fit for publication anywhere but in a magazine or a puzzle column. I don't know what is the matter with her, but when I sit down to dictate a comic sonnet she turns it into a serious jingle, and _vice versa_. We can't seem to get our moods to fit. When I want to be serious she's flippant, and when I become flippant she's serious."

"She must be very serious most of the time," said the Doctor.

"She is," said the Idiot, innocently. "But that's only because I'm flippant most of the time. I'm going to give her warning. If she doesn't brace up and take more interest in her work I'm going to get another Muse, that's all. I can't afford to have my income cut down fifty per cent. just because she happens to be fickle."

"Maybe she is flirting with somebody else," suggested the Poet. "My Muse does that occasionally."

"I doubt it," said the Idiot. "I haven't observed any other poet encroaching upon my particular province. Even you, good as you are, can't do it. But in any event I'm going to have a change. The day has gone by when a one-muse poet achieves greatness. I'm going to employ a half-dozen and try to corner the poetry market. Queer that in all these years that men have been writing poetry no one has thought of that. People get up grain corners, corners in railway stock, monopolies in gas and oil and everything else, about, but as yet no poet has cornered the market in his business."

"That's easily accounted for," said the Bibliomaniac. "The poet controls only his own work, and if he has any sense he doesn't want to monopolize that."

"That isn't my scheme at all," said the Idiot. "You have a monopoly of your own work always if you choose to avail yourself of it, and, as you say, a man would be crazy to do so. What I'd like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing, for instance, that I opened an office in Wall Street--a Bank for Poets, in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them just as they do in ordinary banks with their money. It would be fine. Take a man like Swinburne, for instance, or our friend here. Our poet could take a sonnet he had written, endorse it, and put it in the bank. He'd be credited with one sonnet, and wouldn't have to bother his head about it afterwards. He could draw against it. If the Clearing-house company could dispose of it to a magazine his draft would be honored in cash to its full value, less discount charges, which would include postage and commissions to the company."

"And suppose the company failed to dispose of it?" suggested the Poet.

"They'd do just as ordinary banks do with checks--stamp it 'Not Good,'" said the Idiot. "That, however, wouldn't happen very often if the concern had an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits. If the receiving-teller were a man fit for the position and a poet brought in a quatrain with five lines in it, he could detect it at once and hand it back. So with comic poems. I might go there with a poem I thought was comic, and proceed to deposit it with the usual deposit slip. The teller would look at it a second, scrutinize the humor carefully, and then if it was not what I thought it, would stamp it 'Not Comic' or 'Counterfeit.' It is perfectly simple."

"Very simple," said Mr. Pedagog. "Though I should have used a synonym of simple to describe it. It's idiotic."

"That's what people said of Columbus's idea that he could discover America," said the Idiot. "Everything that doesn't have dollars slathered all over it in plain view is idiotic."

"The word slathered is new to me," said the School-master; "but I fancy I know what you mean."

"The word slathered may be new to you," said the Idiot, "but it is a good word. I have used it with great effect several times. Whenever any one asks me that foolish question that is asked so often, 'What is the good word?' I always reply 'Slathered,' and the what's-the-good-word fiend goes off hurt in his mind. He doesn't know what I mean any more than I do, but it shuts him up completely, which is just so much gained."

"I must confess," said the Poet, "that I cannot myself see where there is any money for your Rhyme Clearing-house. Ordinarily I quite approve of your schemes, but in this instance I go over to the enemy."

"I don't say that it is a gold-mine," said the Idiot. "I doubt if I had every cent that is paid for poetry in a year by everybody to everybody that my income would reach one hundredth part of what I'd receive as a successful manufacturer of soap; but there would be more money in poetry than there is if by some pooling of our issues we could corner the market. Suppose every writer of a quatrain in America should send his whole product to us. We could say to the magazines, 'Gentlemen, quatrains are not quatraining as hard as they were. If you need a four-line bit of gloom and rhyme to finish off your thirty-second page, our price is twenty-five dollars instead of seventy-five cents, as of yore.' So with all other kinds of verse. We'd simply name our figure, force the editors to accept it, and unload. We might get caught on the last thirty or forty thousand, but our profits on the others would enable us to more than meet the losses."

"And would you pay the author the twenty-five dollars?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.

"Not if we were sane," replied the Idiot. "We'd pay the author two dollars and fifty cents, which is one dollar and seventy-five cents more than he gets now. _He_ couldn't complain."

"And those that you couldn't sell?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"We'd simply mark 'Not Good' and return to the author. That's what happens to him now, so no objection could be raised to that. But there's still another side to this matter," said the Idiot. "Publishers would be quite as anxious to help it along as the poets. Dealing through us, they would be spared the necessity of interviewing poets, which I am informed is always painful because of the necessity which publishers labor under to give the poet to understand that they are in the business for profit, not for pleasure or mere love of sinking money in a magazine. So the publishers would keep a standing account of hard cash in our bank. Say a magazine used one hundred dollars' worth of verse in a month. The publisher at the beginning of the year would deposit twelve hundred dollars with us, and throughout the year would draw out sonnets, ballads, or pastels-in-metre just as he needed them. The checks would read something like this: 'The Poets' Clearing-house Association of the City of New York will pay to John Bluepencil, Editor, or Order, Ten Sonnets. (Signed) Blank Brothers & Co.' Or perhaps we'd receive a notice from a Southern publisher to this effect: 'Have drawn on you at sight for eight quatrains and a triolet.' Now, when you consider how many publishers there are who would always keep a cash balance in the treasury, you begin to get some notion as to how we could meet our running expenses and pay our quarterly dividends to our stockholders anyhow; and as for future dividends, I believe our loan department would net us a sufficient amount to make the stock gilt-edged."

"You would have a loan department, eh?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"That would be popular," said the Poet; "but there again I dispute the profit. You could find plenty of poets who would borrow your funds, but I doubt the security of the loans."

"All of your objections are based on misconceptions," said the Idiot. "The loan department would not lend money. It would lend poems for a consideration to those who are short and who need them to fulfil their obligations."

"Who on earth would want to borrow a poem, I'd like to know?" said the Bibliomaniac.

"Lovers, chiefly," said the Idiot. "Never having been a poet yourself, sir, you have no notion how far the mere faculty of being able to dash off a sonnet to a lady's eyebrow helps a man along in ultimately becoming the possessor of that eyebrow, together with the rest of the lady. _I_ have seen women won, sir, by a rondeau. In fact, I have myself completely routed countless unpoetic rivals by exploding in their ranks burning quatrains to the fair objects of our affections. With woman the man who can write a hymn of thanksgiving that he is permitted to gaze into her cerulean orbs has a great advantage over the wight who has to tell her she has dandy blue eyes in commonplace prose. The commonplace-prose wight knows it, too, and he'd pay ten per cent. of his salary during courtship if he could devise a plan by means of which he could pass himself off as a poet. To meet this demand, our loan department would be established. An unimaginative lover could come in and describe the woman he adored; the loan clerk would fish out a sonnet to fit the girl, and the lover could borrow it for ten days, just as brokers borrow stock. Armed with this he could go up to Harlem, or wherever else the maiden lived, and carry consternation into the hearts of his rivals by spouting the sonnet as nonchalantly as though he had just thought of it. So it would go on. For the following call he could borrow a ballad singing the glories of her raven locks, likening them to the beautiful night, or, if the locks were red instead of black, to the aurora borealis."

"You'd have trouble finding a rhyme to borealis," said the Poet.

"Tutt!" said the Idiot. "What's the matter with 'Glory, Alice,' 'Listen to my story, Alice,' 'I'm going to war so gory, Alice,' 'I fear you are a Tory, Alice' (this for a Revolutionary poem), or 'Come rowing in my dory, Alice'? There's no end to 'em."

"If you'll write a rhyming dictionary I'll buy a copy," was the Poet's sole comment.

"That will come later," said the Idiot. "Once get our clearing-house established, we can branch out into a general Poetry Trust and Supply Company that will make millions. We'll make so much money, by Jove!" he added, slapping the table enthusiastically, "that we can afford to go into the publishing business ourselves and bring out volumes of verse for anybody and everybody. We can deal in Fame! A man that couldn't write his own name so that anybody could read it could come to us and say: 'Gentlemen, I've got everything but brains. I want to be an author and 'mongst the authors stand. I am told it is delightful to see one's book in print. I haven't a book, but I've got a dollar or two, and if you'll put out a first-class book of poems under my name I'll pay all expenses and give you a royalty of twenty per cent. on every copy I give away!' No money in it? Bah! You gentlemen don't know. If you say fortune would not wait upon this venture _I_ say you are the kind of men who would sell government bonds for their value as mere engravings if you had the chance."

"You certainly do draw a roseate picture," said Mr. Whitechoker.

"I do indeed," said the Idiot, "and the paint is laid on thick."

"Well, I hope it goes," said the Poet. "I'll make a deposit the first day of three hundred and sixty-seven ballads, four hundred and twenty-three couplets, eighty-nine rondeaus, and one epic about ten yards in length, all of which I have in my desk at this moment."

"Very well," said the Idiot, rising, "With that encouragement from you I feel warranted in ordering the 'Not Good' stamp at least."

X

Some Electrical Suggestions

"If I were beginning life all over again," said the Idiot, "I'd be an electrician. It seems to me that of all modern pursuits, barring architecture perhaps, electricity is the most fascinating."

"There's probably more money in it than there is in Idiocy, too, I fancy," said the Bibliomaniac, dryly.

"Well, I should think so," assented the Idiot. "Idiocy is merely an intellectual diversion. Electricity is a practical science. Idiocy cannot be said to be anything more than a luxury, while electricity has become a necessity. I do not even claim that any real lasting benefit can come to the world through Idiocy, but in electricity are possibilities, not yet realized, for which the world will be distinctly better and happier."

"It is kind of you to speak so highly of electricity," said the Doctor. "The science may now advance, knowing that you approve."

"Approve?" cried the Idiot. "Approve is not the word, sir. I enthuse--and why should I not, feeling, as I do, that in the electrical current lies the germ of the Elixir of Life! I thoroughly believe that a bottle of liquefied electricity would make us all young."

"Then don't take it!" said the School-master. "You have suffered from an aggravated case of youngness for as long a time as I have known you. Pray do nothing to intensify your youth."

"I fear I shall be forced to deny myself that pleasure, Mr. Pedagog," returned the Idiot, mildly, "for the unhappy reason that as yet the formula for the Electrical Elixir has not been discovered; that it will be discovered before I die I hope and pray, because, unlike the man in the hymn, I would live always. I'd like to be an immortal."

"An immortal Idiot! Think of it!" said the Doctor.

"I didn't expect much sympathy from you, Dr. Capsule," said the Idiot. "The man with car-horses to sell does not dote upon the trolley-car."

"The application of the allegory is not entirely apparent," said the Doctor.