By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 13, 1937.
“I may be a little late,” said Jimmie Frise, “coming back from lunch. Just tell anybody that asks I’ve gone up town.”
“Pool again, eh?” I supposed.
“What of it?” asked Jim, a little grimly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems a little odd to me that you can mix around with those pool sharks. They’re not your kind.”
“Oh, yes they are,” said Jim. “What do you know about it anyway. You’ve never even been in a pool room.”
“I go by what I hear,” I informed him. “Pool rooms are joints.”
“Call them billiard parlors,” said Jim. “See how that sounds.”
“Even so,” I disagreed.
“Listen,” said Jim, “some of the finest men in this country are billiard players. Many of the finest homes in Canada have billiard rooms. All the best and most exclusive clubs have billiard rooms where our leaders in industry and finance play every noon hour. In fact, the billiard rooms are the most crowded rooms of all.”
“I was referring,” I said, “to pool rooms.”
“What’s the difference?” demanded Jim. “Billiard rooms for rich guys. Pool rooms for poor guys. It’s the same thing.”
“There are better ways to employ your lunch hour leisure,” I declared.
“I suppose,” sneered Jimmie, “you mean I should come to lunch with you and listen to you and your fishing friends gassing about trout fishing and trout flies and four-ounce rods and 4X gut and so forth?”
“The trout season,” I stated, “is only eleven weeks away. It’s time you were thinking about your plans for the coming season.”
“I like a little action,” said Jimmie. “I never could figure out what all you thousands of lunchers have to gas about all through a long lunch hour. The sight of them mystifies me. Sitting blathering.”
“Many of them,” I advised, “are talking about sport, like us anglers.”
“The greatest modern sport,” announced Jim, “is blather. The reason golf, fishing, shooting and that sort of thing is popular is because it gives, for the least effort, the most amount of blather. Ten months you sit on the tail of your coat blathering about fishing, for two months of fishing, during which you actually fish about three or four times.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” I confessed.
“Give me action,” said Jim. “Even Russian pool. You can play it all the year round. You don’t just talk about it.”
“Of course, Jim,” I explained to him, “the age of action is coming to an end. The great age of action is right now in its last stages. The sooner we realize that, and take up conversation as the only course open to us, the happier we will be.”
“Do You Call That Action?”
“Why,” scoffed Jimmie, “there never was a greater era of action in human history than the present. What are you talking about?”
“Action?” I inquired. “Now?”
“Yes, action, now,” cried Jim. “Never in human history has there been such action as in these last few years. Think of the highways, boiling with traffic to the ends of the earth. Planes racing through the sky. Great cities towering into the heavens, filled with an action incomparable in all our long story.”
“My dear boy,” I protested, “how ridiculous. Come to the window.”
We stood at the window looking down into the street, with the traffic jamming past, hundreds of cars moving in a great parade.
“Do you call that action?” I inquired.
“I certainly do,” said Jim.
“Every man in that whole parade,” I informed him, “is sitting down.”
“What of it?” asked Jim.
“Do you call it action,” I demanded, “with everybody sitting down?”
“Er…,” said Jim.
“Only seventy years ago,” I told him, “and there are dozens of men in this building that old, when men wanted to do anything, there had to be action. They had to stand up and walk. You speak of aeroplanes streaking across the sky. Sure. They can cross the continent now in a day. Seventy years ago, when they wanted to cross the continent, that called for action. It took weeks to plan and organize the trip. Action. They had to drive covered wagons. Paddle canoes and row York boats. Action. They had to climb mountains and cut roads. Cross plains and deserts, carrying their supplies and water. Action. Action. Action.”
“What I mean by action,” began Jimmie.
“Just a second,” I interrupted. “When things were made, a few years ago, blacksmiths had to toil and labor. Now a skinny little guy turns a handle or presses a button on a giant machine. Action is already vanishing from the earth. In olden days, when Nelson wanted a ship, it took hundreds of men, toiling for months by hand, to make him his Victory. When Nelson sailed into action, it was action. They ran in close to the enemy, blew him to blazes and then boarded him with pike and cutlass. Action.”
“Ha, ha,” laughed Jim. “How about the last war? Twenty million men killed in action.”
“Killed in inaction,” I corrected. “Never was there a more dreadful example of the decline of action as that last war. Millions of men herded into trenches, where they stood, perfectly helpless, to be slaughtered by machines. Waiting in cellars and dugouts for death to come hurtling out of the sky. In old wars, there was action. Armies marched on foot. They met. They attacked each other with axes and spears and stabbed and jabbed and had some fun. Modern war is a dreadful thing of inaction. Men stand and wait. Machines do the rest.”
“Er ” said Jim.
“Never in the history of the world,” I insisted, “has action, by which I mean the activity of men, been less. We are marching steadily towards the end of all action. The day is not far distant when all mankind will have nothing to do but just sit.”
“And talk,” said Jim.
“Yes, sit and talk,” I agreed. “I am an angler. But the fish are vanishing. Presently, there will be no fish left for me to catch. But if I can talk about fishing for ten months of the year, it won’t be so hard for me to talk about it for twelve months.”
“I’ll play pool,” chose Jim.
“No, there won’t be room,” I explained. “The human race is multiplying so fast that in another couple of hundred years there will be no space left for action of any sort, least of all for idle pool players. The end of the picture is simply this-the entire human race, packed closely together, sitting talking.”
“Tough Game, Dis Russian”
“It’s a swell prospect,” said Jim.
“Come to lunch with me,” I said, “and meet the anglers.”
“Come pool shooting with me,” countered Jimmie, “and get a little action.”
“A lot of action,” I scoffed, “there is in poking a few oversize marbles around a table.”
“There’s a lot more action than you suppose,” said Jim. “Billiards is a real game. It can be played all year round. It can be played by young and old. Size or strength do not count. It trains your eye and mind. Develops your faculties. Teaches you control, judgment, caution.”
“I have all of those things I need,” I informed him. “I’m too cautious as it is. My eyes see more than I can take in. My judgment informs me it is better to sit and talk than to go around pool rooms and other joints looking for action.”
“You’ve never been in a pool room?” asked Jim.
“Never,” I said, proudly.
“I never took you for a man,” mused Jim, “who entertained prejudices, without knowing anything about the subject. I thought you had an inquiring mind. I thought…”
“If you put it that way,” I agreed.
So we went out and had a stand-up sandwich at a counter and then got Jim’s car at the parking lot and drove uptown to one of several pool rooms which Jimmie frequents in his almost religious quest of mankind. Jim says it must be dreadfully dreary knowing only one class of people.
We entered a shabby little tobacco shop, which from the outside appeared to be nothing more than a tobacco shop. But back of the tiny store, there was a large, dim, smoky pool room, with six green tables planing off into the foggy distance, green-shaded lights suspended above the table and a hum of human sound as, around each table, groups of men, with their hats on and their coats off, bent and straightened at this curious game of poking man-sized marbles around.
The proprietor, a cat-like little man with an eye shade, with a purring voice and a permanently crouched attitude, greeted Jim heartily.
“Chimmie,” he cried. “It’s a pleasure.”
As we walked back of the partition, and entered the big room with its tables, nearly everybody knew Jim and hailed him loudly and affectionately as Chimmie. Most of them held cigar butts clenched in their front teeth, and wore their hats on the back of their heads. We strolled along to the far end of the pool room and there we found a sort of high bench running along the wall like in a shoe shine parlor. Green plush. Up on to this we hoisted ourselves to watch the game at this farthest table.
“Howsa goin’, Chimmie?” cried a long limber man, with gold teeth, enthusiastically. “Play ya soons dis is over.”
“Okay, Smiler,” agreed Jim, pushing his own hat back and suddenly looking very tough. Jim shifted his cigar to his front teeth. Suddenly my amiable friend Jimmie was transformed, by these slight alterations and by a sort of inward change, into as hard-boiled an individual as there was in the whole place.
“Fine looking bunch,” I said quietly.
“What’s dat?” said Jim, and the expression in his eye caused me to overlook the matter.
We watched. The game was Russian pool1. Jim explained to me, out of the corner of his mouth, and with sundry curious expressions and technical terms, that the white ball was the shooter, and the other four balls, red, blue, green and yellow, each had a different value. If you sunk each ball in its proper pocket, you made the number of points the ball was worth. If you sunk it in the wrong pocket, you were deducted the value of the ball and lost as well all the points you had so far scored.
“But dat,” explained Jim, “ain’t de woist of it. De game is a hundred, see? If you makes your hundred, see, you is okay. But suppose you is ninety-six and sinks de yellow ball which is woit nine points, see?”
“How interesting,” I agreed, sitting back a little from this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of my own intimate acquaintance.
“Well, den,” said Chimmie, “you busts. You goes right back to nuttin’ again. She’s a tough game, dis Russian.”
By the time the game before us ended, a good many of the players had finished their games at other tables and the pool room was emptying. The cat-like proprietor walked, crouched and purring, amid the tables, and as the crowd thinned, I noted that only the cream of the collection were being left, the cigar-buttiest, the hat-tiltedest, the side-talkers. A sinister air seemed to flow around me.
Jim’s turn finally came and taking off his overcoat, he jumped down and took a cue and chalked up, while the boy in the white coat came and set up the five colored balls for the new game between Jim and the curiously slender, gold-toothed man named Smiler.
Smiler won the toss and the break and caromed and pocketed a score of 22 in no time. And then accidentally sunk the blue ball in the yellow pocket.
“Cheese,” said Smiler, “I can’t hit an elephant with a scoop shovel. I been shootin’ like dat all week, Chimmie.”
Chimmie carefully hung up his hat. Slowly chalked his cue. Rolled up his sleeves. The yellow ball was hanging right over its pocket.
Chimmie leaned out and rested his entire upper works on the pool table. He set his cue against the white ball and made a few tiny, experimental passes with the cue tip.
A sudden sharp stabbed silence filled the room.
All eyes turned to the far end, at the doorway. Standing staring sternly at the partition were two very large men in fedoras.
“Nix,” hissed Smiler.
Chimmie, all in one graceful, snakelike motion, laid down his cue, withdrew his length off the table, swept up his coat, hat and me, taking me by the elbow. Almost without a sound and certainly without a single pause in one long continuous motion, Chimmie swept us backward where a door was already opening to the hand of Smiler.
“Come on,” said Chim.
Smiler led, with long legs flinging slush and mud, down a narrow lane walled with garbage cans and packing cases, around couple of bends, through a shed, around a stable, up another lane, and over an eight-foot fence. They boosted me over. I got splinters in my hand as I was flung into the yard of a surprised-looking little house. Down the alley we sped, and into the street where, suddenly slowing, we formed three abreast, walked, with unconcern, but with slush and mud on our coats and pant legs, down the street, like three citizens returning from lunch to their affairs.
“Well, said Smiler, “Chimmie, dat was a tough break.”
“It’s de foist time,” said Chim, “I’ve had dat yellow ball hung on de pocket like dat for munts. Munts and munts. Of all de luck.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “but what was all the excitement, if I may ask?”
“Poor old Hoibie,” explained Chimmie, “was pinched again. Tree times in a year.”
“Pinched. What for?” I demanded.
“A little hand book he runs,” explained Smiler. “Just a little book on de races, see?”
“Why did we have to run?” I demanded.
“If you is found in,” explained Smiler, “you is found in, see? Found in a gambling joint, see? Ten bucks and costs.”
Smiler accompanied us around about to our car and bade us adieu.
“Well,” said Jim, Jim once more, with no cigar butt and looking just the same as ever, “well, you saw a little action after all.”
“I got splinters in my hands. I nearly fell in that muck in the lane,” I admitted.
“You got action, though.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I suppose, in the field of morals, there will always be action. Even when there is no other action any more.”
Editor’s Note:
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