Category: Greg-Jim Story Page 1 of 33

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 15, 1939.

This Greg-Jim adventure is from Gregory Clark’s book, “Which We Did,” published by Reginald Saunders, Toronto.

“I have been invited,” said Jimmie, “to act as adjudicator in connection with some amateur theatricals.”

“What the heck,” I begged, “is adjudicator?”

“It means judge,” said Jim.

“Then why not say it?” I inquired.

“Ah,” said Jimmie, “that’s the drama of it. In the drama, it is how you say things; not what you say.”

“As a matter of fact.” I agreed, “there really isn’t very much to say in life, is there?”

“Drama,” said Jim, “is the memorable saying of things about which there is very little to say. Now you take Shakespeare. Take Romeo and Juliet. A couple of kids fall for each other. But it turns out that their families have been pulling some raw business deals on one another and aren’t on speaking terms. It’s a very common situation. You’ll find it in every town and village. Especially villages. So, these kids try to get together secretly, but everything turns out against them. You could tell the whole story in about two paragraphs in a newspaper. But Shakespeare takes five acts.”

“How different,” I confessed, “from the newspaper business. There it doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you say that is all important. The news. The facts. Get it across quick.”

“And how different,” said Jim, “from the movies. In the movies, it is what you do, not what you say, that counts.”

“This is the age of action,” I pointed out. “Doing is more attractive to us nowadays than saying.”

“The movie business,” said Jim, “hasn’t yet got over the discovery of the movie camera. You’d think they would get used to the idea sooner or later. But no. The guy with the camera is really the boss. There he sits, demanding that everybody move. And the director obeys, and makes them all move. It’s like on a fishing trip, when you take a bunch of the boys with the little amateur movie camera. They all feel they have got to wave their arms and lift the strings of fish up and down, to prove it is a movie. You can go to the movies for a whole year and never hear an intelligent remark or conversation that lingers an hour in your memory. Why? Because the conversation in the movies is nothing but part of the sound effects. They still make the movies the way they did back 20 years ago. All movement, with sound effects.”

Two Kinds of Everything

“I can’t say,” I confessed, “that I could I stand for movies consisting of just two people sitting a half hour at a time quietly chatting, the way it used to be in the stage drama. Or even soliloquy. Do you remember soliloquy, where the actor used to stand all alone on the stage talking to himself out loud?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” protested Jimmie. “I can still remember, as if it was only yesterday, the scene in ‘Liliom’ where Joseph Schildkraut¹, as Liliom, debated with an old crook the question of God. You could put that on the movies. Just the two of them, sitting in a dirty old back yard. Because what they were saying was fascinating. W. C. Fields² talking to himself is one of the greatest features of the modern movies. Yet they cut him short, and hustle him into movement again. The trouble with the movies is, they are camera struck.”

“Like everything else,” I suggested, “the public will probably get weary of seeing nothing but action and begin to yearn in time to hear some words of beauty or wisdom.”

“No,” disagreed Jim. “There’s no hope in that direction. The great mass of the public have only the one sense, visual. Their only power of appreciation of beauty is optical. It is their weekly two bits, or twice-weekly two bits, that make up the vast fortunes of the movie industry.”

“Then,” I surmised, “the stage drama is going to survive after all?”

“What I think,” said Jim, “is, there are. two kinds of everything. Two kinds of cars, cheap and dear. Two kinds of clothes, houses, churches, schools, fishing rods. In a little while, there will be two kinds of movie theatres. The big cheap ones where the same old whang-doodle goes on for ever and ever. And small, expensive movie theatres where the true artists, the real dramatists, actors, stage-craftsmen, will perform for a minority who are eager to pay the cost. We are all at the vaudeville stage of the movies now.”

“But,” I disagreed, “there will still be wandering minstrels. There will still be actors and actresses forlornly travelling the wide world, making personal appearances in small hotels, conservatories and church basements.”

“Ah,” agreed Jim. “And there will still be amateur theatricals.”

“That’s a thing,” I said, “I never had any yen for when I was young, amateur theatricals.”

“No, because you had sport,” said Jim. “You dramatized yourself with gun and rod and canoe. You ranged the rocks and hills, imagining yourself a mighty hunter before the Lord. For one deer you have ever really shot, you have, in a thousand dramas of your own invention, shot ten thousand wild and fierce creatures.”

“How do you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

“We’re all alike,” said Jim. “Drama is a word that comes to us straight from the ancient Geeks. It means to perform. Every living being loves to perform. It is the very spirit of life itself. One minute, we are nothing. Then we are alive, for a few brief minutes. Then we are nothing again, forever. But during those few minutes that we are alive, the one great yearning in us, between those two dreadful darknesses, is to perform, to move, to act, to do something, however strange.”

Pretend They’re Other People

“And amateur theatricals?” I asked.

“Most people who go in for amateur theatricals,” explained Jimmie, “are bank clerks, accountants, oppressed, repressed individuals who dare not venture, even in the imagination, away from the ledgers, the desks, the hard realities of their lives. Church people go in for amateur theatricals. Church people are publicly trying to lead a good life. Therefore, even in the secret of the night, or in the shadow of their own hearts, they dare not go gallivanting in any dreams. And dreams are drama. Ah, the uncounted billions of unwritten dramas of humanity!”

“Who are these people you are going to adjudicate?” I asked.

“Oh, just a neighborhood drama league,” said Jim. “A couple of churches, a men’s club and a community association of some kind. I guess they will be pretty dreadful.”

“I remember one time,” I said, “I got into a movie theatre on a juvenile amateur night. I never suffered so much for 37 cents in all my life.”

“It will probably be fun, though,” said Jim. “I am to attend a dress rehearsal of this play, some sort of a drama of family life. Each season, before they present a play, they call in a critic or adjudicator, not, a professional, you understand, but some prominent citizen like me, who is asked to decide if the characters are properly apportioned, if the players are suited to their parts, and if the drama, as so presented, is suitable for a stage offering in the community hall.”

“It’s a nice idea,” I admitted, “I’d like to go with you.”

“Come along,” cried Jim. “They’ll be delighted to have you.”

So, the night of the rehearsal, Jim telephoned to remind me, and called for me in his car.

“You’re late,” I said. “It’s 8.25.”

“I phoned them,” said Jim, “and they said they would start and we could come in after the fuss of getting going was over.”

“We the only audience?” I asked.

“Just us,” said Jim.

We arrived at our destination, a handsome big home. It was all in darkness. We rang the bell; but there was no response.

“That’s funny,” said Jim. “They said 102.”

“Maybe it is 120,” I said. “You’re not very good at figures.”

“They said 102, I am sure,” said Jim, as we walked down to the pavement. We strolled east. Down a few doors, there were several cars parked in front and an air of activity in a brightly lighted house.

“That’s 112,” I said. “You got it wrong by one.”

Number 112 was the house, all right. The shadows of people moving on the blinds, the sounds of voices, of voices raised in mock passion.

We rang the bell.

“They’re going good,” said Jim, as we heard a woman’s voice rise in tearful entreaty.

We rang the bell again.

“I guess,” said Jim, trying the door knob and finding the door open, “they can’t hear the bell for the racket they’re making.”

A crowd was assembled in the living-room, so Jim and I quietly tip-toed in and hung our coats and hats on the crowded rack. Through the hall curtains, we could see the drama going on, full bang. Around the living room, seated crowded on chesterfields and chairs and standing leaning against the walls, were the players, four or five middle-aged or elderly men and women and about seven or eight younger persons. In the middle of the room, the centre of all eyes, were two of the company, a middle-aged woman a middle-aged man. As we slipped in by the curtains and took our stand against the wall, the action was not interrupted, and a few of the players threw brief glances and smiles.

“For 40 years of my life,” the woman was saying, in a deep. tremulous voice, and I was impressed to see very real looking tears on her face, “I have been a faithful daughter to him, devoting my life to him. I denied myself marriage…”

“Ha, ha,” laughed the man who was standing with her, undoubtedly the villain, though an elderly villain. “Denied yourself marriage, you say?”

“Yes,” cried the woman, in a hoarse, broken voice that was most dramatic, “denied myself marriage.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” laughed the villain, and all the other players around the room smiled at his humor, “I tell you, Lizzie, you have been the joke of the family all your life for the desperate efforts you have made to capture a man. Why, even the little boys of the neighborhood make jokes about your next attempt.”

“You brute,” gasped the woman, staring tragically around at us, “you filthy brute. To think, a brother should ever speak to a sister in such words! Why, even as a little girl, who was it stayed home with Daddie while you others went your ways? When he had the typhoid fever, who was it nursed him? Where were you when he had the typhoid fever, I ask you?”

The male villain was now standing over against the mantel, with his arm resting on it, in the approved attitude.

“Lizzie,” he said, “we all see through you. There isn’t one of us in this room, young or old, that could not testify in a court of law that you had deliberately prevented us, time after time, from doing acts of kindness to Daddie. Eleanor, there…”

The pretty girl cried out –

“I tried to take Granddaddie for motor rides.”

“Hah,” cried Lizzie, the lady standing up, “let a rattle brain like you take a nervous old man driving? You who’s been in three dreadful accidents, all your own fault?”

“Lizzie,” said the villain, pointing a lean finger at her, “you can’t face it. No court of law would uphold you. Every member of this family will testify that you usurped the old man’s love; that you poisoned his mind against us all; that you misrepresented us all to him; that you frustrated us in all our attempts to show him a natural family affection.”

“Affection?” screamed Lizzie, whirling about the middle of the room to stare at us all most tragically, “Affection? Why half of you, didn’t come to his funeral. You were too busy playing golf or grubbing your filthy money.”

“Filthy money?” sneered the villain, “Heh, heh, heh! I tell you, my dear sister, unless you voluntarily divide up Daddie’s estate among us, his proper heirs, we’ll take you for a ride through the court of this country that will take every cent he left you, make you a public character, and make you wish you had never been born.”

Lizzie, standing there in the midst, burst suddenly into tears. It was magnificent acting. Real tears cascaded through the fingers of her hands as she covered her face.

“Oh, oh,” she wailed, in an entreaty to Fate more moving than any words could be.

Jimmie stepped forward.

“Ladies and gentlemen, he said, smiling, and even Lizzie stopped crying and everybody stared.

“My dear friends,” said Jim, “as adjudicator, I think I might interrupt at this stage of the proceedings to say that the acting of the villains the way he leans on the mantel, the way he sneers so and points his finger, is a little too melodramatic. In real life he would be cold, soft-speaking, insinuating and threatening. My dear sir, you will forgive me, but I think you bluster too much.”

There was an instantaneous outburst of mutter and murmur and chatter.

“Who,” demanded the villain, advancing on Jim, “are you?”

“I’m the adjudicator,” smiled Jim.

“The what?” cried the villain.

“The adjudicator,” said Jim. “Didn’t you invite me here to act as critic of your little drama?”

“Drama?” said the villain. “I thought you two were her lawyers.”

Dazed Triumph

There was a sudden burst of excitement and everybody stood up and crowded around.

“I thought,” said Lizzie, “they were your lawyers. Who are you two gentlemen, please?”

Jim and I stood side by side.

“Pardon us,” I said, for Jimmie was temporarily at sea, “but we are just a couple of newspapermen, who were invited by a local amateur theat…”

“Newspapermen,” muttered the villain, looking fearfully around. “Newspapermen,” the others all muttered, starting for the hall. Men, women and young folk, they all seemed like children when the fire bell rings, so eagerly did they bump into one another on their way to the hall, grabbing their coats and hats. “Newspapermen,” they all mumbled and muttered and gasped, with sideway glances. And the sound of engines starting up and cars departing in gear filled the night while Jim and I still stood bewildered, and there was nobody left but Lizzie and us two.

“But,” said Jim, apologetically, to that lady who stood with a look of dazed triumph on her face, “we thought this was where the neighborhood drama league was rehearsing. We were invited.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Lizzie. “God sent you.”

“No ma’am, we just mistook the house number,” confessed Jim.

“Mistook?” sighed the lady, like Jane Cowl³. “Mistook? My dear friends, those were my brothers and sisters and their children, come to rob me of my rights, a poor woman who has devoted her whole life to a dear old neglected man. And you come in, two newspapermen, and are witnesses of the whole dreadful thing…”

“Ma’am,” said Jim, deeply, “we are dreadful sorry. Never a word of it would either of us ever breathe.”

“You won’t need to,” laughed the lady almost hysterically, seizing our arms. “You won’t need to not if I know my brothers and sisters. I’ll never even hear of them again.”

And laughing and crying, she threw herself on a chesterfield and laughed and cried, while Jimmie and I got into our coats and hats and said good-by 12 different ways and times, and went out and shut the front door, with her still sobbing and laughing.

And we never did find those amateur theatricals.

---

Editor’s Notes: As indicated at the start of the story, this was originally published in Which We Did (1936).

1. Joseph Schildkraut, an Austrian-American actor, played the title role in the first American stage production of Liliom, the play that eventually became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. ↩︎
2. W. C. Fields was an American actor and comedian. ↩︎
3. Jane Cowl was an American film and stage actress and playwright. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 12, 1941.

“Isn’t that the same old coat?” inquired Jimmie Frise.

“Yes, it’s the same coat,” I informed him stiffly. “And the same old suit underneath. And the same old shoes. Probably you’ve forgotten there is a war?”

“I suppose you are not doing any spring cleaning at home this year,” surmised Jim, “on account of the war.”

“Being neat and tidy is one thing,” I stated. “But spending money on new clothes is another. The money I might spend on clothes I might lend the government to buy war material.”

“You might, is right,” agreed Jim. “But if you are the average person, you will just buy enough war bonds and certificates to keep your conscience from yelling out loud. And then you’ll weasel along as usual.”

“I haven’t bought any new clothes,” I insisted.

“But have you bought any new war bonds?” inquired Jim.

“No,” I confessed. “But at least I am in a position to buy some; which I wouldn’t be in if I had spent the money on clothes.”.

“In other words,” said Jim, “if they can persuade you, you can be persuaded. I see.”

“I don’t like your tone,” I informed him. “The government would rather have you save your money than spend it. Every dollar you spend these days on personal things, on non-war things, is a dollar’s worth of work done by somebody else on non-war jobs. And a dollar’s worth of material used for non-war purposes.”

“So if we starve a lot of tailors and clothing store clerks,” pursued Jimmie, “we are helping the war. Is that it?”

“Well, they can join the army,” I pointed out.

“I see,” said Jim. “And the $40¹ you would have spent on a new suit of clothes will buy them uniforms and feed them for three days or so.”

“If,” I explained, “I lend the government the $40.”

“Then they come back from war,” said Jim, “and take off the uniforms. And then you want your $40 back from the government – plus interest. Where does that money come from?”

“The government can issue a new lot of bonds, peace bonds,” I explained, “and pay back the war bonds.”

“Who’ll buy these peace bonds?” inquired Jim. “There will be no war profiteers this time to soak away their loot in bonds.”

“Well,” I explained, “when I get my cash back I’ll go and buy the suit of clothes I’ve been putting off. And tailors and clothing store clerks who have just taken off the uniform will be back on the job to sell them to me. And they’ll start making money again. They can buy the peace bonds.”

“Won’t they want a new suit of clothes, too?” demanded Jim.

“It’s very complicated. Jim,” I showed him. “All I know is, a lot of clever men are working on this problem of war finance. And we’ve got to accept their advice.”

Using War As Excuse

“Who says they’re clever?” asked Jimmie.

“Well, they’re the cream of the financial world,” I assured him. “They proved their cleverness by rising to the top of their profession in the past few years.”

“What does that prove?” demanded Jim. “Maybe they’re the same birds who got the world into this mess.”

“Okay,” I submitted. “Who will we put in their place? You and me? Or some of those wild-eyed agitators? Or just another bunch of the same sort who are in now? Jim, I don’t think it’s the leaders of the world who are fuddled. I think it’s us, the people of the world.”

“We’re sheep,” said Jim. “We’ve got to have a shepherd.”

“Good sheep usually have a good shepherd,” I reminded him.

“In that suit,” declared Jim, “you sure look like an old sheep that had been let run wild. You’ve got stouter since you bought it. It pulls at all the buttons. The pants are shiny. I can faintly see your shirt through the elbow.”

“I’m going to make it do until summer,” I stated. “Then I can put on my old gabardine suit. Next fall I’ll get a new tweed.”

“Come clean,” wheedled Jimmie. “What is it you are buying instead? A new boat? An outboard engine? You’re just like millions of other people. You are using the war as an excuse. You are going around in old clothes, creating an impression of how patriotic you are, and getting away with it; while really you are soaking your money away into something else you’ve really wanted all your life but couldn’t afford because you had to keep up with the Joneses.”

“Jim, being cynical won’t get you anywhere,” I assured him.

“I’m not cynical,” said Jimmie. “I’m just trying to figure things out. And to figure things out, you’ve got to face the facts. And the easiest fact to face is you. And me.”

“And what light do you see in me?” I inquired.

“Look,” said Jim. “We’re at war. We insist that we are not at war with nations, but with certain gangsters in those nations. However, the people of those nations are not like us. They are not giving what they feel like giving. They are giving all. Do you realize that if you want a new overcoat in Germany you have to turn in your old one?”

“It’s a good idea.” I agreed. “We should get an allowance on all our old clothes when we buy new ones.”

“They don’t get any allowance,” said Jim. “How many coats have you got? They’re only allowed one. And when they buy a new one, they turn in their old one without any allowance or without any question. The idea is that they can’t have any more of anything than they actually need. It goes for food, for household furniture and goods of all kinds; for books, lawn mowers, soap, handkerchiefs, everything.”

“They’ll rebel,” I assured him. “Human nature is human nature.”

“All these people who are allowed as little as possible,” went on Jimmie, “are organized by harsh law to produce as much as possible. But since there is no possible demand for clothes, furniture, books, soap, lawn mowers, they produce only what the government wants. And that is bombs, planes, guns, and food for soldiers.”

“Now you see the reason,” I exclaimed, “why I am not buying a new, suit.”

“Suppose,” said Jim craftily “the government suddenly announced that you couldn’t buy a new suit?”

I looked down at myself. It was true my vest buttons all drew my vest in ridges and creases. It was true my trousers bagged. I examined my elbow. I could detect a faint whitish tone through the tweed.

“The government wouldn’t do that,” I declared.

“Certainly it would,” cried Jimmie, “if we, the people, wanted it to.”

“Ah,” I smiled. “If we wanted it to.”

“There are plenty of people shouting at the government to do more than it is doing,” said Jim. “And about the only thing they haven’t done is start to interfere with the private lives of Canadians.”

“They don’t let us go to Florida for a holiday,” I pointed out.

“That doesn’t affect the people of Canada,” scoffed Jim. “That only affects a tiny minority of people who have the money to think of their comfort. Wait until the government starts telling you what you can buy with your money.”

“They’re telling us now,” I retorted. “By taking our surplus in taxes, they’ve cut me off of a lot of things I intended to buy.”

“That isn’t the same as being told you can’t buy a new suit,” warned Jimmie. “Or that you can only have one pound of bacon a week. Or you can only buy ten gallons of gasoline a week.”

“Will it get that tough?” I wondered.

“It’s that tough and a thousand times tougher in Britain now,” said Jim. “And it is Britain we are supposed to be helping.”

“Aren’t we helping?” I demanded.

“Well, there are a lot of people yelling, for the government to go full out in the war,” said Jim. “Remember, in our country, the government represents the people. And if the people suddenly agree that we want to go full out, the government will obey. Then they’ll take all your money, not borrow it. They’ll tell you what you can buy. They’ll tell you what work you’ll do. We can save democracy all right by throwing it over.”

“I can have this suit pressed,” I considered. “If it doesn’t look right then, maybe I will get a new suit.”

“After all, it’s Easter,” said Jim.

“And besides,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to be caught by any high-handed government decree that I can’t buy any clothes I want…”

“That’s the spirit,” cried Jim.

“You won’t know this suit in a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll send it to be pressed tonight.”

“Look,” said Jim, “there’s a while-you-wait pressing place just a block north. At lunch, let’s both go in and get all pressed up. I could do with a little smartening up, seeing it’s Easter.”

“What kind of a place is this pressing establishment?” I inquired.

“It’s just up in the next block or the one next to that,” said Jimmie. “I can’t just place it. But I’ve seen it lots of times. We’ll find it. You sit in little cubicles while they press your suit. It only takes a few minutes…”

“Probably one of those cheap little joints,” I protested, “where they leave a smell of gasoline all over you…”

But we had a quick sandwich and went out looking for the press-while-you-wait shop that Jimmie had often seen. And after walking around four blocks and not finding it, we finally asked a cigar store man if he knew of it. And he said it was two blocks farther west. He knew it well. His cousin ran it. So we went into a rather down-at-heel neighborhood, mostly garages and warehouses, found the press-while-you-wait shop as directed.

It was hardly the kind of place I would have selected myself. There were two or three very odd-looking gentlemen sitting in the front part of the shop, reading the papers. They had long sharp noses and sideburns. They were all smoking cigars which they had tucked halfway into the very corner of their mouths. They looked up at us when we came in as though we were the funny-looking customers, not they.

There were no cubicles, as Jimmie had promised. Only a large screen. The place was barely furnished. There were a couple of second-hand cupboards partly filled with a few shabby garments on hangers. But at the back there was a man working very casually at a hot smelling pressing machine. Not a very modern pressing machine at that.

“Can you press us up while we wait?” asked Jimmie pleasantly, as this gent left his job to come and attend to us. He, too, had a cigar butt jammed away off in his east cheek.

“It’ll take three-quarters of an hour,” he said rather impatiently.

“Let’s leave it, Jim,” I said. Because from the back of the shop two more men came out, looking at us with the same cold, appraising eye. Behind them I could see others. The place was alive with them, all the same kind, lean, oddly dressed, and all with cigars shoved away over in their cheeks. And most of them with sideburns.

But Jim had his coat off and was undoing his braces.

“Let’s get it over with while we’re at it,” he said.

So the proprietor shoved the screen impatiently around to shield us, and the men sitting and standing about resumed reading and muttered to one another, and some of them drifted into the back room.

“Gimme,” said the proprietor, reaching for our pants and coats.

Jim picked up a paper to read. It was a racing paper, like a railway time table full of small print.

I picked up some annual of the pressing and cleaning trade. And the thudding of the pressing machine came to us behind the screen. Jim was intent on his catalogue of horses and I was glancing over the pressing journal when a sudden scuffle caused us to prick up our ears.

The door opened and we heard a loud voice say:

“Nobody budge!”

But everybody budged. There were scuffles and thudding of feet. There were soft, startled yells of warning and loud bellows. Everybody budged but Jimmie and me, sitting there behind the screen, in our underwear, unable to see what was going on, but very much interested, I can assure you.

In the midst of the rumpus, there appeared around the edge of the screen a large and startled policeman.

“Now what’s this?” he said very cheerfully.

“What’s what?” inquired Jim, hiding the paper he was reading behind his back.

“Come on, me buckoes,” said the policeman. “Get your pants on.”

He hailed somebody over the screen and two more policemen came and stood looking at us.

“A new one,” said the oldest.

“Evidence,” said the second, “of the honest character of the establishment.”

“What is this, constable?” I demanded with dignity.

“Come on, get your pants on,” said he. “It’s chilly in the wagon.”

I was the first to smell singeing.

“Whose pants?” I yelled, leaping up and trying to dash past the constable.

They were my pants. The proprietor had my trousers on the machine and in the excitement he had left the pad down, with the power on. It was an old-fashioned machine. And when the policeman lifted the lever, there was very little left of my good tweed pants.

Meanwhile, ignoring us and our tragedy, other policemen were leading men out of the shop half a dozen or more coming from the back room. Upstairs, we could hear tramping and scuffling, and still more came down the back stairs.

“It’s a raid,” said Jimmie. “And if I’m not mistaken it’s on a handbook outfit².”

“Wrap something around him,” said the head policeman, “and get him in the wagon.”

“Inspector,” I cried, “we can prove we are innocent customers who just dropped in.”

“This one,” said the first cop, “was reading a racing form when I popped around the screen.”

“There was nothing else to read,” retorted Jimmie indignantly.

From our coats, we were able to produce identity cards.

“Identity cards won’t help you,” said the head policeman. “You were found in. You can prove your identity and innocence in court. Our job is simply to raid the joint and collect all those found in.”

 “Are you going to ruin my good name,” I demanded, “when you can see the charred ruins of my pants right there on that pressing machine? What will the judge say to you when I tell him that evidence of my innocence was still smouldering before your very eyes?”

So they took our names and addresses. And in the cupboard they found a pair of pants that would at least carry me as far as the nearest clothing store. In fact they drove Jimmie and me to the store in one of the scout cars.

And that is how I got this very handsome Donegal tweed³ I’m wearing.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $40 in 1941 would be $785 in 2025. ↩︎
2. A “handbook outfit” is a criminal organization involved in illegal gambling, like a bookie. ↩︎
3. Donegal tweed is a woven tweed manufactured in County Donegal, Ireland. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, April 5, 1947.

“Hasn’t this,” yawned Jimmie Frise, “been a perfect evening!”

“We ought to have them oftener,” I agreed, glancing at my watch.

It was 10.30.

“Just sitting here in front of a fire,” sighed Jim, gangling himself deeper and wider in his easy chair. “I suppose we have to be middle-aged before we really appreciate an evening like this. When we were younger, we had to be on the go. We had to have something to do. An evening was considered wasted, if we just sat like this, chatting.”

“Not in the good old days,” I pointed out. “Jim, before the invention of the motor car, or the movie, or the radio, the vast majority of men spent nearly all their evenings like this, not only the middle-aged, but even the young men.”

“Of course, they entertained,” put in Jim. “In the good, old days, people visited around with one another more than we do now.”

“Not any more than you having me over here tonight,” I countered. “This is the way men spent their evenings, fifty, a hundred years ago. Invite a neighbor over to sit and converse.”

“Just look at that fire,” gloated Jimmie.

We sat drowsily gazing at the fire, in the wide fireplace. It had burned down to a slumbering bed of ruby embers. Little lazy fingers of flame waved up, and then vanished. The fire was like us; warm and content and quiet, after a pleasant evening.

“Men would live longer,” I submitted, “if they so arranged their lives that they could have three nights a week like this.”

“It’s impossible,” sighed Jim. “How many nights a week could we get our families ALL out? Somebody is bound to be home; and even if there’s only the one at home, then the radio is going, doors are opening and shutting, footsteps tramping around, telephone conversations going yakety-yakety…”

“Probably the idea,” I suggested, “of gentlemen’s clubs arose out of this problem, Jim. As a man gets past his youth, he yearns for a little peace and quiet and the fellowship of other men his own age. So they found a club, where they sit around a fire in the evenings, just the way we’ve been doing.”

“We’d live longer,” agreed Jim.

“With all the wonderful discoveries of medical science in the past fifty years,” I propounded, “men don’t live any longer, really. In fact, I sometimes think men don’t live as long as they did in our grandfather’s time. Why? Because we don’t get enough of this sort of complete relaxation, this snoozing. I think all men should snooze so many hours a day. Sleep isn’t enough. Snoozing is in the very nature of man.”

“Well, then,” suggested Jim half-heartedly from the depths of his chair, “how about us trying to join one of these exclusive men’s clubs?”

“Aw, no, Jim,” I explained, “they’ve all gone to pot. The old-fashioned snoozing club has vanished, just the way the old-fashioned home has. And for the same reason. Men’s clubs are just business organizations now. They’re an extension of modern industry and commerce. Do you see the members snoozing now? No, sir. They’re all gathered in nasty little groups, talking furiously. Selling.”

“Mmmmmm,” dozed Jim,

“We take vitamins,” I pursued, “we have annual checkups. We take carefully prescribed exercise, such as golf or bowling or trips to Florida. But we still die of hypertension. Ten, maybe 20 years younger than our grandfathers.”

“I’ve got an idea,” murmured Jim, rousing himself slightly. “How about us bribing our families to go out three nights a week? This has been too perfect an evening to be wasted in its lesson to us. We’ll take turns. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we’ll bribe our entire families to go out for the whole evening. Yours, Monday. Mine, Wednesday, and so on.”

“All it would cost us,” I agreed, “would be a few movie tickets, maybe a few concerts during the season, a few gallons of gas for the car…”

“Cheaper,” submitted Jim, “than joining an expensive men’s club.”

“Think,” I cried, “what a delight it would be to look forward to three evenings like this every week, where nobody can get at us. Nobody disturbs us. We just sit here, idly conversing about all the things that really interest us, all the events of our lives that have gone unnoticed, actually…”

The telephone rang.

“There,” grunted Jim, “Probably one of the kids wanting me to go and fetch them in the car…”

He got up heavily and slithered in his slippers out to the hall.

But it wasn’t one of the kids.

Jim’s voice was confused. It was a cross between agitation and politeness. Between warmth and chill.

“Why, certainly…” he said, “Why, of course, of course. What time is it..?”

I looked at my watch. It was 10.35.

“What time does the train leave?” asked Jim carefully. “Okay! I’ll be right there! No, no, don’t mention it. It’s nothing…”

He came bounding back into the living room.

“There!” he grated. “Peace, eh? Peace and quiet eh…!”

And he dashed upstairs for his shoes and coat.

“What is it?” I yelled up.

“Neighbor,” called Jim. “Old uncle from the country has to catch the 11 o’clock train. Car won’t start. Can’t get a taxi…”

I began putting my overcoat and hat on.

Jim came galloping down the stairs.

“They saw my car standing out in front,” groaned Jimmie. “So they… “

We nipped out the door and down the walk.

“You don’t have to come,” reminded Jim.

Three doors up, a party of agitated neighbors gathered on the lighted verandah. Jim swung the car into the side drive.

“No time to lose,” gasped an elderly gentleman with a suitcase in one hand, travelling bag in the other, charging down the steps.

“This is my Uncle Wesley,” introduced the agitated neighbor, his hands and elbows full of large packages and cartons, Five in number.

“How do you do, how do you do,” we greeted, stepping out while the valises and bundles were hurled into the back seat of the car.

“Are you going?” the neighbor enquired of me eagerly. “If so…”

“No, I’ll just walk home, around the corner,” I said, backing slightly.

“I was thinking,” suggested the neighbor, as he hoisted Uncle Wesley into the back seat,” that if there wasn’t any room for me, I’d just stay and try to get my car started. I don’t know what’s happened…”

“We tried all over for a taxi,” cried the lady neighbor from the verandah.

“We’ve got to get cracking,” said Jim pleasantly, racing the engine.

“Okay,” I said, springing in beside Jim.

And out we backed, while the neighbors waved thankfully, and Uncle Wesley waved in response and puffed.

“Whew!” he said. “Those people are always in some kind of a panic.”

“We’ll make it,” assured Jim, speeding out onto the night streets.

“Have you got far to travel?” I enquired, facing around chattily.

“No,” said Uncle Wesley, “only about 40 miles out. But I like this night train, because it gets me in around midnight. And my son is the station agent, and he drives me home, as he’s through for the night. It’s a nice arrangement.”

“Been shopping?” I supposed.

“I come down every spring,” explained Uncle Wesley, “for a couple of days visit with my nephew back there… drat the man! … he’s always in a tizzy like this! Yeah, I come down for a couple of days, and visit all the seed houses, and the implement dealers, and lay in a little stock of this and that. Some harness. A new bunch of felt for horse collars…”

Uncle Wesley, in the dark of the car, was feeling over his various packages, to see they were all there. Seven pieces in all.

“Yep,” he said. “All here.”

And we skimmed down deserted blocks, and whanged around corners, and I kept my eye on my wrist watch to see 10.45 come and go. And then 10.50. And at last, at 10.53, we came into the stretch and pulled up with a screech in front of the station. Jim slid into a vacant space, for once, and I leaped out to help bail Uncle Wesley free of his bundles.

“No red caps¹,” breathed he heavily.

“Red cap!” I sang out, in the best big city fashion.

But no red caps were to be had.

We divvied up the luggage. Jim took three pieces and Uncle Wesley and I two each.

“What’s your car number?” I asked.

“Day coach,” whuffed Uncle Wesley.

It was 10.56 as we barged into the station rotunda. It was 10.57 as we rounded the buoy and showed Uncle Wesley’s ticket to the gateman. The gateman didn’t attempt to stop Jim and me with the bundles.

Up the stairs we hustled. It was 10.59 when we galloped along the platform, away to the head of the train where the day coaches were. And the conductor was chanting “board … boooaaarrrddd!”

“Take it easy!” gasped Jim at old Uncle Wesley’s heels. “Here!”

We had to jostle several other people scrambling at the car steps.

We boosted Uncle Wesley on.

We started to heave his bundles in after him.

“Hey!” commanded the conductor. “Don’t leave those bundles there! You can’t obstruct the vestibule.²“

Uncle Wesley glared wild-eyed back down over the heads of others scrambling on.

“Okay, just a minute,” cried Jim. And he leading and I following, we shoved into the group struggling up the steps.

“We’ll just,” cried Jim, “toss them up into a parcel rack.”

“Booaaarrrddd!” boomed a fateful voice behind us.

“Hey, Jim,” I shouted, trying to drop my two bundles. But somebody was shoving from behind, so that I couldn’t even drop them.

The air brakes gave that long, lazy hiss and the train creaked.

“Aw, here, wait a minute,” I groaned, as I was shoved ahead into the passageway alongside the drinking water tank.

I could see Jim struggling, two places ahead of me now, trying to chuck his bundles, a la basket ball, into parcel racks already full.

There was a jerk; and the train started.

Behind were a dozen heads, flushed and excited. Ahead, Jim pushed for all his might towards me, but in vain.

We were off.

By a species of wriggling, struggling and sidewinding, Jim and I got together at last on the vestibule. The brakeman had just slammed the doors.

“We’re carried off,” I cried.

“We’ll get off at a suburban station,” soothed Jim easily but loudly.

“No stop at any suburban station on this train,” said the trainman, picking up his lantern to go.

“But hold on,” exclaimed Jim.

“See the conductor,” advised the trainman briefly.

Well, it was far past the last suburban station when we found the conductor. And it was in defiance of all the rules, he explained, that he would arrange to stop the train, just for 20 seconds, at a village about 20 miles out.

“The first stop,” he said, “is 40 miles out.”

That would be Uncle Wesley’s.

“Men of your age,” said the conductor sternly, “ought to know better than get carried off. By rights, I should charge you the fare.”

Uncle Wesley was most indignant, when we passed him on our way to the vestibule where the trainman was to let us jump. “Coming to the city,” he declared hotly, “is getting worse all the time.”

At the dim little village, we jumped.

All was dark. It took us a good half hour to find anybody who would taxi us back 20 miles to town. And because it was after midnight, he charged us special rates – $10.

And, of course, when we reached Jim’s car, parked in front of the station, there was a ticket on it – for parking in a limited area.

“Well …” said Jim, in a high, patient voice, as he grasped the wheel and stepped on the starter, “maybe we’d better join an exclusive men’s club after all.”

“There’s no escape, Jim,” I countered darkly. “If it isn’t the family, it’s the neighbors. If it isn’t the neighbors, it’s somebody else. The truth of the matter is, society has just got too damn social!”

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Red Caps are train personnel who helping you move and pack your luggage and provide other services on the train. ↩︎
2. The vestibule of the train is the doorway at the ends of the car used for loading and unloading passengers. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 27, 1937.

“I could eat,” said Jimmie Frise, “an “Eskimo’s boot.”

“I’m a little hungry myself,” I agreed. “Where will we eat?”

“Eating,” said Jim, “is not the casual matter most of us think it is. What a man eats, he is,”

“Let’s have a good sit-down lunch to-day,” I said.

“It isn’t how you eat,” stated Jimmie, sinking deeper into his chair, “but what you eat. A man consumes food. That food, by a chemical process, becomes him. You are not you really. You are what you have eaten.”

“I’m too weak to argue to-day, Jim.” I explained. “Let’s go and eat.”

“Eating,” stated Jim, “should be by rights a spiritual exercise. It is as important as religion. What is the use of a man trying to implant high spiritual truths in his brain if that brain consists of fibres taken from bulls, hogs, oysters, mud-turtles¹ and turnips?”

“Oysters,” I said. “That’s it. We’ll have a dozen Blue Points on the half-shell². They’ll soon be out of season.”

“The human race,” said Jim, “is right on the verge of a great discovery. And that is, that what you put into a man, that is what you get out of him. Food. Food is the secret of it all.”

“All what?” I inquired.

“All our troubles,” said Jim. “We’ve solved everything, yet we are still in a universal confusion. We’ve solved the riddles of science and can make cloth out of wood and wood out of air: we can fly and we can travel under the sea; we’ve measured the stars; we’ve explored the human mind to its uttermost end; we’ve solved all questions of law and justice and society; we’ve solved everything, yet the human race as a whole is closer, in its own heart, to the cave man today than it has been since it started out of the caves.”

“We have gone kind of primitive,” I admitted.

“We’ve mastered everything else,” said Jim. “The whole animal and vegetable kingdom we’ve brought under control. Cattle we’ve taken and altered and changed to our own requirements. Horses, hogs, sheep, poultry, we’ve possessed body and soul and perfected them to our own needs. Wheat, potatoes, vegetables, flowers, trees, we’ve corrected and moulded and shaped and improved to our liking. How? By feeding. The only living creature, other than wild things, that mankind has not bothered to alter or improve is mankind himself.”

“Science.” I protested. “has vastly improved all food products. The very reason we have altered cows and cabbages was to improve their eating quality.”

“Yet,” cried Jim triumphantly, “we let mankind eat what it likes. That’s the point. You don’t catch us letting cattle or vegetables eat what they like. No, siree. They eat what we give them. And see the result of feeding oil cakes to cows or fertilizing celery?”

“Fascism,” I accused. “Jim, I hope you are not advocating that we humans be fed, not as we like, but as the government decrees?”

“Why not?” demanded Jim. “If we’ve brought all the animal and vegetable kingdom so far with science, wild cattle converted into Jerseys and great shorthorn beef; wild plants and roots transformed into those succulent vegetables and salads: why not wake up to the facts and start applying the same successful principles to ourselves?”

For a Government Menu

“Suppose,” I suggested, “that you would have a daily menu published by the government and we’d go to jail if we departed from it?”

“Better than that,” said Jim, who had apparently forgotten it was lunch time. “The first thing would be to appoint a royal commission consisting of scientists, doctors, agricultural experts and so forth to determine what foods are holding us back and what foods would, as the farmers say about steers and hogs, finish us. The whole history of the improvement of other species could be gone over, from Percheron horses to Pekingese dogs. Then the government could adopt the report of this royal commission and establish a new department called the Department of Human Agriculture or something. Each day in the newspapers would appear tomorrow’s menus. Inspectors would rove the streets of cities and towns, like weed inspectors, and pop into homes at meal time, to see that nothing noxious was being served. Restaurants and hotels would have permanent officers of the Department of Human Agriculture working right in them, sort of New Age dietitians.”

“Would they allow potato cakes?” I asked.

“Or Winnipeg gold eyes³? Or Roquefort cheese?”

“At first,” said Jim, “there would be a pretty general lenience, so as to wean the human race gradually away from its wicked and destructive individualism. I have no doubt that our ancestors had quite a time with wild horses, teaching them to eat what was good for them. But let us make it a Five Year Plan. In five years, the whole nation will be eating what is good for them according to the rules we have found so eminent successful in all other animals.”

“Fascism, Jim,” I said. “It sounds like fascism to me.”

“Well,” cried Jim passionately, “what else can you blame, but eating, for the way the world is to-day? We’ve tried everything else. We’ve mastered and conquered and explained in every conceivable direction. Yet man remains as mysterious and unmanageable as ever. I think it’s what he eats. Turn a herd of horses loose in the wild state, and how long does it take them to slide right back into the primitive mustang again? Let a field of turnips run wild and what happens to them?”

“Pork,” I said. “That’s what we’ll have for lunch, some lovely nice white roast pork, with cracklings on it, apple sauce and bright turnips with lots of pepper sprinkled on them.”

“Why,” said Jim, slowly straightening himself up out of his chair, “we can see the results of eating right in our midst. Wallace Beery eats beef⁴. Bernard Shaw⁵ eats vegetables. And look at them.”

“Well, it all depends what you want to do with them.” I said: “if it was a fight in a night club. I’d have Beery: but if it was a witty conversation in a parlor, I’d have Shaw.”

“Where,” said Jim, now upright and reaching for his coat and hat, “will we eat?”

“There are all kinds of places,” I said. “I feel like a sit-down meal to-day.”

“It’s lovely out.” said Jim. “We could eat a stand-up sandwich and spend the rest of the time strolling through the streets.”

“We could go down to the hotel grill room and have,” said I high-pressuredly. “let’s see, first: essence of tomato soup, that pale ruby consomme delicately tinged with tomato; followed by a mixed grill, consisting of a tiny plump lamb chop, a sausage, two strips of transparent grilled bacon, a grilled half tomato and a small kidney.”

“Or let’s go to a cafeteria,” suggested Jim, holding the door open for me. “In a cafeteria, you can see what you are getting. You can even pick the one steak you like out of a dozen steaks sizzling in the pan. Or the exact piece of pie you want out of a great and serried parade of pie. When I look at a menu and read the kinds of pies, apple pie, pumpkin pie, caramel cream pie, rhubarb pie and pineapple tart pie, I can’t visualize then. It’s just a great muddle of pie in my mind. But this is the age of realism. A cafeteria is realistic. I can glance over the pies, and just as you can pick the prettiest girl out of a bunch – though no two men will pick the same girl – you can pick the pie of your heart.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m weak from hunger, but nevertheless, let us go and walk around the downtown until the spirit moves us.”

Which we did; and the noon hour was lovely, and the streets jammed with people looking their best, either because they were just going to eat or because they had just eaten. If nothing else bears witness to the spiritual character of eating, this look of noontime beauty on the faces of everyone old and young does. At no other time of the day down town do you see it. That cold and hopeless and hurrying expression of the morning is gone; the tired, veiled look of the homing throngs of evening, gone. Noon is the hour of joy, of smiles, of freshness and of shining eye.

“Jim,” I said, “these girls are like vestal virgins going to the temple, these men – look at that old fellow, there. I bet he is an old buzzard in his office, yet what an air of comfortable and happy expectation is on him now, as he heads for lunch.”

And all the cars at corners slowed politely. and never tooted a toot, it being noon; though in the morning and the evening, these same cars would come angrily to the turns and with indignant horn fling us pedestrians out of their way. And policemen sauntered with far-away gaze. And lads on bicycles whistled tunes. And in the upper windows of office buildings, men sat leisurely on the sills, looking down, embracing their ankles and dreaming.

“Ah, Jim,” I said, “what a lovely thing noon is.”

“How about eating?” suggested Jim.

This Babylon Hour

So we slowed and looked in all the gating places: the drug stores, their windows filled with hardware and shoe trees and globes of the world, with their long counters within where men sat shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow and ate by the wrist movement; the little orangeade places⁶ where the girls sit, with wide eyes and self-conscious mouths, chewing as if chewing were slightly improper; restaurants, with and without beer parlors, where men, mostly in threes, go in and hang their coats up ceremonially, always having a brief flirt with the pretty coat-check girl; cafeterias, where forever somebody is always standing, tray braced against chest, staring helplessly around; funny little kosher sandwich shoppes, the spicy odor of which, skilfully emitted from an open transom, makes an invisible and potent advertisement all along the street whichever way the wind blows; tea shops upstairs and down cellar; armchair lunches where forsaken youths sadly push mops along the damp floors forever, and aged men, bent and tousled, carry great tin baskets full of dirty dishes; gloriously pretty soda joints where even the ham sandwiches taste of vanilla.

So we wandered in this Babylon hour amid the topless towers and the meaningless racket of a great city’s interlude of leisure, and the longer we looked, the less we felt like going into any one of them, for when I said beefsteak Jim said sandwiches, and when I said a chicken pie Jim said liver and bacon.

“The only thing we can do,” declared Jim, “is chuck and chance it. Let’s agree we’ll go into the fifth eating place north of here.”

“O.K..” said I.

And, the fifth was one of those orangeade places, where there were forty girls and only two men eating, and both the men looked as if they had duodenal ulcers and were eating as if they were adding up a column of figures.

“Hang it,” I said, as we paused irresolute, “I never felt more like a sizzling steak in my life.”

“An agreement’s an agreement,” said Jim, thrusting the door open, “but I must admit I could go for a large plate of curried lamb.”

So we went in and stood with the girls at the counter, and watched the little trays coming out, with their mug of coffee and saucer of dinky sandwiches on lettuce, and we studied the complex series of notices, signs and advertisements on the back wall.

I’ll have,” I said, “a tomato, cheese and bacon sandwich. And coffee.”

“Make mine,” said Jim, “a chicken, bacon and tomato sandwich. And coffee.”

And there we stood, while the food continued to stream out the little pantry wicket and the girls around us went seeking pews; and presently, out came our sandwiches.

Skidding and Skating

 They were three-deckers. On white bread. Skewered with toothpicks on which was impaled an olive.

On the little tray there was a knife, fork and spoon. The plate the sandwich was on was a bread and butter plate. But the coffee mug was large and husky and manly.

Jim and I balanced our trays out into the sea of skirts and up by the window found a table just being vacated by five girls. The table was 18 inches square.

We removed our coats, but, except by climbing over several strange young ladies, we could not hang them up. So we sat on the coats.

“I hate these three-deckers,” I said to Jim as we faced our food. “You can’t open your mouth wide enough to get a bite at them, yet, if you unskewer them, they slither all over the table.”

“Curried lamb,” muttered Jim numbly contemplating his sandwich.

The knives were not sharp, and when I tried to cut into my sandwich, the bacon resisted, at which, this the very first attack, the three-decker began to come to pieces. The top slice of bread skidded on the buttered lettuce underneath. The bacon slewed out sideways.

I stabbed it with the fork to hold it firm.

“Easy,” said Jimmie. “I guess we shouldn’t wait so late for lunch. It affects our temper.”

“Whose temper?” I demanded. “I’m not in a temper. I’m just indignant at these silly three-deckers. A sandwich is a sandwich. It is meant to be eaten in the hand.”

I tried another cut at the thing, and the two top slices, resting on cheese and lettuce. skidded in a new and hitherto unsuspected direction. I made a quick stab with the fork and nailed that runaway.

“Pssst,” said Jim, who was sawing cautiously at his.

I laid my knife and fork down and sat back and looked at him.

Jim, with dignity, continued to saw, and presently got a corner loose. This he proceeded to impale on his fork and transfer to his mouth. But tomato is by nature slippery and elusive. The bottom piece of bread, with tomato and lettuce, slipped off half-way to its terminal and fell in Jim’s lap. He made a quick duck with his head and captured off the fork the two upper bits of bread and some wisps of chicken.

“Ha,” said I, resuming knife and fork and advancing to the attack.

I stabbed the largest and firmest part of the sandwich which by now was slithered out, like a pack of cards, all over the little plate. I laid my knife firmly upon it and pressed. I pressed harder. I drew.

The whole business skidded, the little plate tilted, the tray skated, and my sandwich went to the floor.

“Good!” I said. “Now I’ve got you, you…”

And I got down and stabbed it on the floor.

“Pssst,” said Jim, kicking at me. “Keep cool.”

“The… the… the…” I said.

Easy,” said Jim. “Ladies present.”

So, as if by mutual consent, we rose quickly, snatched our coats and hurried out into the street and went down to a drug store and had a double malted egg chocolate, and went back to work much refreshed.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. Turtle soup was a common food until turtles were over-hunted and the soup lost its popularity by the 1950s. ↩︎
2. “Blue Points on the half shell” are a serving of raw Blue Point oysters. Oysters were plentiful and cheap from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, so they were treated as a cheap protein like eggs. ↩︎
3. Goldeyes are a type of freshwater fish. ↩︎
4. Wallace Beery was an actor who was well known for his tough guy roles. ↩︎
5. George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, was a well known vegetarian. ↩︎
6. I’m not sure what these are but it seems like “orangeade places” were restaurants were known for serving small meals that would be more popular with women. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 21, 1936.

“To-day,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the first day of Spring.”

“I remember one time,” I retorted, “that it snowed on May 17th.”

“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, emotionally, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

“But older men,” I said in prose, “think of gardening. Or fishing. Or golf.”

“To us who live in cities and towns,” said Jim, “Spring has really a very small meaning. It means, as you say, golf or planting a few seeds in a pathetic grubby little backyard. Spring wakes a feeble emotion in us city people. We are like people with no ear or sense of music sitting politely through a concert by a great symphony orchestra.”

“I don’t think city people are quite so soulless as you make out,” I objected.

“They are not soulless,” agreed Jim. “They are just underprivileged.”

“We city people,” I declared stoutly, “have finer and subtler sensibilities. We may not have the opportunities to observe the Spring, but we appreciate it more.”

“I wonder,” said Jim.

“Think of us anglers,” I cried. “How we are suffering, right now, counting the weeks to May the first.”

“May,” scoffed Jim. “By May the Spring is over.”

“Over!” I exclaimed.

“Have you no conception,” begged Jim, “of what Spring means to millions of your fellow Canadians? May, if you please! Why, by May the summer has come. All the lambs have been born. Most of the calves have arrived and the colts are on the pastures. The plows are long ago worn bright and dull. The seeds are springing. By what you call Spring, my poor fellow, summer lies o’er all the pleasant land.”

“Tut, tut, Jimmie,” I protested.

“To-day is the first day of Spring,” declared Jim. “And to-day, even though a blizzard should rage, a million farmers are at their doors sniffing the tide of life. The ditches are loud with a singing sound of water. The bright sun grasps the earth in its mighty hands and caresses and hugs it. The earth, the sweet earth, lifts its breast upward, and a fragrance you and I are unable to sense, much less know, rises from it in an incense ancient and eternal.”

“A kind of sour, mouldy smell?” I agreed.

“Haw, haw,” scorned Jimmie. “Sour and mouldy to your poor, fume-ruined city nose. But what makes the birds sing along the fence posts, this very day, is that sweet incense of resurrection. The south walls of the barns are bright with the sun, and the warmth flows inward and all the cattle are bawling to be out. The horses kick their stalls and cry. The mother sheep are hoarse with bleating.”

“I see it,” I confessed.

“In the barn the farmer,” said Jimmie. rapidly, “is laboring with his implements. mending harness, tightening up the bolts of share and counter. In the bright kitchen the wife is scouring pails and scalding out the separator.”

A Kind of Dizziness

“But there’s weather ahead,” I interjected.

“Yet in the shelter of the fences,” said Jim, “the grass is green, and the buds on the dogwood scrub are swollen, dark and sticky. In the woodlot, far at the back, there is a sense of unseen excitement, the branches wave sadly no more, like they do in winter wind, but like young ladies taking setting up exercises, gaily, eagerly, the branches wave…”

“Crows, like black rags, blowing on the wind,” I contributed.

“The lady in the kitchen,” said Jim, “busy with the pails, sees something touch her eye, like a little burning thing, out of the corner of her eyes she sees it. She stops, the pail held motionless, and looks out the window. stealthily, her eyes creeping, into the orchard. And there, a bluebird!”

“Aw, Jim,” I complained.

“So the lady walks over, slightly weak in the legs, and sits down in the rocking-chair with the old cushion on it,” sang Jimmie, “and starts gently to rock, and the smile on her face, the smile of remembering all her Springs and all the babies she has rocked in this same chair, and all the bluebirds and the sound of calves bawling and sheep calling and water in the eaves and men kicking mud from their boots at her door – the smile on her face flows right out that window, a prayer, a gift, a part of the Spring.”

I said nothing.

“Do you ever see that?” demanded Jim, sharply.

“I’m sorry,” I confessed.

“Then,” said Jim, “don’t ever try to pretend you know anything about the Spring just because you fish or play golf or stick seeds from ten-cent packets into your sour city dust plots.”

“I feel something though,” I said weakly. “I feel a kind of dizziness. Or a limpness. Couldn’t that be the Spring?”

“No doubt,” granted Jim, “a certain decayed remnant of the feeling of Spring still lingers in city and town men’s minds. But it is only a shabby tatter. A sort of thing like you see in a poodle dog when it turns round three or four times before lying down in its bed. Spreading a bed in imaginary grass, a faint memory out of the forgotten ages.”

“I like to read poetry in the Spring,” I declared.

“A sort of sulphur and molasses¹,” decreed Jim. “A Spring tonic.”

“I get a kind of religious feeling,” I insisted, “when I hear the first robin, at sundown, on a rooftop.”

“You would be practically dead if you didn’t feel that,” pronounced Jimmie. At certain times of the year Jimmie gets a terrible homesickness for the country where he was born and raised. Right now is one of those times. Another is when the great winds of autumn blow, with immense sounds, and the trees wheel and lash in the gales that do not rest at night, but cough and thunder in our chimneys. At such a time, Jimmie is restless and fey, and he buys things at stores and carries them home, hams and bags of potatoes, whole sacks of biscuits for his dogs, as if he were storing up against some strange and hopeless winter. But in the Spring he can’t work; he stands hours at his high windows, far in the tipmost top of The Star building, staring with face thrust forward at the dim fringes of the great gray city spread like an old carpet beneath. There he stood, trying to see the fields, the dark meadows, the green veils of winter wheat, beyond the vasty doormat…

“We could go for a walk?” I suggested.

The wind of Spring was blowing.

“We could go home,” muttered Jim, “and spend the afternoon putting away our winter coats in large pillow slips and stuff our goloshes and scarves and wool-lined gloves into boxes, for there is no use trying to work with that wind blowing.”

Which seemed to me a curious thought, since we were tight and sound behind strong windows, where no wind can even moan.

Blowing in a Window

But down we went and walked to the car park, and men clutched their worn winter hats and girls leaned back against the gale, one arm stretched down to control their festive skirts. Dust and old papers. and all manner of unmentionable and unthinkable things blew in the breeze off the pavement, and we puckered our eyes and breathed carefully through our noses.

Out along the Lake Shore we drove, seeing the lake, all yellow with the silt of dying rivers, heaving and bucking in a kind of joy and slight anger.

Up through High Park we turned, merely to see the trees dancing, to see the brown hillsides facing the sun, to look, with a quiet triumph, at the cowering islands of fouled snow in the shadows.

Re-entering the residential streets again, we were in time to behold a comedy. A young man, just as we were about to pass him, had his fedora blown off. I sailed up against the wall of a large apartment house. It bumped along the wall, falling slightly, and came to an open window. It fell unsteadily on to the window sill and, to our joy and excitement, hovered there a moment and then, like a homing creature, right inside the window.

“Ho, ho,” laughed Jim and I, slowing the car and looking back at the young man. He was standing speechless and amazed, staring up at the window.

“Wait,” I cried; “let’s see what happens.”

But nothing happened. The young man stood awkwardly staring up at the window, but nobody came. He looked abashed all around him, as if for witness to the incredible incident and perhaps for suggestions. Then he started slowly to walk on.

“The silly fellow,” I said. “Back up, Jim. He isn’t even going to inquire.”

We backed, and encountered the young chap, all flushed looking, after he was well past the apartment house entrance.

“That was a funny one,” I hailed him. “Never saw that before.”

“It sure was funny,” agreed the young man shyly. He was one of those slow-speaking shy youths, with a strained expression in their eyes when you talk to them.

“Well,” I said, “aren’t you going to go in and ask for your hat?”

“No,” he said.

“A hat costs five bucks,” I pointed out. “And if I saw right it was a new hat.”

“Yes, just got it three weeks ago,” admitted the young man, anxiously beginning to move on.

“But hold on,” I laughed. “Don’t be shy. Look here, all you have to do is go in and ask for the janitor and point out to him which window.”

“I always leave my hat go,” said the young man, “when it blows in any window.”

He meant it. He was one of those drawling young men almost paralyzed with bashfulness. His face was apoplectic. His eyes were suddenly bloodshot with shyness. He tried to withdraw from the magnetic fastening of my gaze.

“My dear boy,” I said, opening the car door and stepping out, “don’t be absurd. If you lose your hat you go and get it. Come. I’ll go in with you. We’ll call the janitor.”

“This,” said Jim, getting out of the car, “too, ought to be good.”

So we entered the apartment house entrance and on the list of tenants I found the bell of the janitor and rang it summarily. We waited, smiling. The young man was now a fixed purple in color and he was perspiring in large loose beads. Speech had entirely deserted him. He had the expression in his eyes you see in the eyes of a young bull which has a ring in its nose for the first time and is being led about by it.

“I wouldn’t bother,” he said in a weak voice.

“You Home Wreckers!”

The janitor did not answer. I rang again. I stepped down a flight of marble steps and looked along a corridor. I called. I whistled.

“Oh, janitor,” I yodelled.

“Leave it go,” said the young man.

“Not at all,” I assured him heartily. And stepping out the entrance for a moment I fixed in my mind the location of the open window through which the hat had blown, and then walked up one flight, beckoning Jim and the young gentleman to follow me.

“I spotted the apartment,” said I. “It’s either the third or the fourth apartment along I should say.”

“Leave it go,” repeated the young man.

Apartments are so hushed. At least from the corridors they are hushed. A faint radio. A muffled step.

But from the third apartment, as we came abreast there rang loud and challenging voices. A man’s voice. And a lady’s voice.

“H’m,” said I, “a little Spring song going on in here.”

“Leave it go,” pleaded the young man, but Jimmie was holding his arm in a friendly and encouraging embrace.

I rapped smartly. And smartly a man appeared.

An angry-faced, glare-eyed man whose teeth were bared in the very midst of a snarl.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but is there a hat…”

“Hat,” shouted the angry man, leaning out the door and seeing the shy young man with Jimmie. “So you came back for your hat, huh?”

“This young man’s hat,” I began, pleasantly.

The gentleman in the doorway squared himself off and began making small circles with his clenched fists in front of his chest.

“You come back for your hat,” he yelled, “but you bring your gang with you.”

“My dear sir,” I said soothingly, “can a gentleman help it if the Spring breezes-“

“Ah,” screamed the gentleman, crouching, and spitting on his hands.

A woman’s voice from within said reproachfully:

“Joe-werge! I was resting. I didn’t even see the hat.”

“Hah.” said the gentleman. “I come home unexpectedly. I find your hat square in the middle of the chesterfield. So what?”

“Sir,” I said calmly, “his hat blew in. This is the first day of Spring. The equinoctial gales. The wind.”

“What a story, what a story,” the poor gentleman sobbed, for now, in addition to crouching down and circling his fists menacingly in the doorway, he had suddenly been stricken with the injustice of it all. “I know my own strength, or I’d beat the whey out of all three of you. You sneaks. You home wreckers.”

“Leave it go,” said the shy young man, backing away from Jimmie.

“May we have the hat?” I demanded firmly, but preparing to retreat.

With a final heartbreak, the gentleman wheeled, dashed furiously into the room, thudded furiously back and, making a drop kick, he booted the hat savagely into the corridor and slammed the door. I picked the hat up, bulged it back to shape, put a nice tidy dent in it and following the youth, handed it him.

“What a mess,” strangled this young man, as I went down the stairs beside him.

“At least, I got your hat,” I pointed out, a little huffed at his ingratitude.

“Imagine a stranger’s hat blowing into a happy home,” moaned the young fellow.

“It is the Spring.” I said. “March gales.”

The young man jammed his hat on and fled down the street.

“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, as we got into the car, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

“And,” I added, “suspicion.”

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on April 1, 1944 as “Spring Song“.

1. Old wives’ tales indicated that sulphur & molasses, drank by children in early spring, provided a needed thickening of the blood, thinned down by winter. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 13, 1943.

“How do you like my new hat?” inquired Jimmie Frise, setting his new kelly at a jaunty angle.

“Not bad, not bad,” I admitted. “How do you like mine?”

“Your hats always look the same,” said Jim, “so excuse me not noticing it. Mine’s English.”

“English?” I protested. “Where on earth would you get an English hat nowadays?”

“How do you mean?” inquired Jim.

“Don’t tell me,” I exclaimed, “that they are still making hats in England.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake,’ cried Jimmie, “what do you suppose they’re doing in England? You must be listening to Herr Goebbels on your short-wave radio. You must think England is in ruins. Of course they’re making hats in England. And you can still buy English hats and English clothes and English boots and pretty nearly everything else that is useful not only in Toronto but in New York and Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. In fact, wherever convoys come from, convoys go to. You don’t suppose all those convoys of merchant ships you see in the newsreels are one-way traffic, do you?”

“Well, yes,” I muttered, a little confused, “as a matter of fact, I did think of it as one-way traffic. I guess most people do.”

“That just shows you,” declared Jimmie, “the pity of propaganda. We have to have propaganda, the same as we have to have guns in wartime. But it certainly pulls us all out of shape. So ardently have we swallowed the propaganda about Britain’s war factories that we have unconsciously taken it for granted that all other factories in Britain have simply closed up.”

“I can’t get fishing tackle any more from Britain,” I pointed out.

“Well, naturally,” explained Jim. “For two reasons. One, they aren’t wasting any metal by exporting it. Two, the factories that could make fishing tackle could easily make parts for aircraft, weapons, and so forth. But there are hundreds of factories that don’t fit into war production and hundreds more that, while mainly engaged on war contracts, have plenty of by-products for sale. And above all is the practical consideration of having thousands of ships going away empty from Britain. Good old Britain! She has not only been taking a terrific mauling from Europe. She has not only been taking a bloody nose in her ill-manned outposts of Empire…”

“As the Americans have,” I reminded.

“… but,” concluded Jim, “she has time to figure out that it is bad business to have ships going away empty from her shores. So, despite all her other worries, she has contrived to organize industry so that the ships from America and South America and Africa and all the rest of the places convoys come from do not go home again empty-handed.”

Hats Off to Them

“By golly,” I admitted, “they’re a great people.”

“Where I got this hat,” said Jimmie, “they said they were only allowed 15 per cent. of the dollar volume of hats they normally got in peace-time from Britain. It’s a big department store. But they told me that in their own big store, in the main lines of merchandise, they still imported over one-third of their normal peace-time imports from Britain.”

“No?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” declared Jim. “One-third is still coming, regular as clockwork. First, textiles, mostly woollen, cotton and rayon. Second in volume, pottery. Third, linens from Ireland and Scotland. When we were arguing, the merchandise manager happened along and said that while this big store was getting about a third of their normal pre-war volume, he thought that, across Canada as a whole, it would be more like one-fifth the normal import from Britain was still coming in.”

“Why, that’s amazing,” I cried. “I had no idea.”

“Well, the next time you see a convoy newsreel,” said Jim, “you can think to yourself whether it is going or coming. Because one route is as important as the other. If a ship goes down coming, it can’t go back.”

“More power to them,” I asserted. “They’re a great people. It is 125 years since the last of my forebears left Scotland. Except for a few English, Irish and Scotch who have sneaked in and married into my family when we weren’t looking, we have had no connection with the Old Country for a century and a quarter at the latest. And most of my forebears came out nearly 200 years back. So any sentiments I have about Britain are, you might say, purely sentimental. But I say, hats off to them.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Jim, whose ancestors are French and Scotch a long way, farther back in Canada than mine. “Because I’ve often heard you cussing the English,”

“Not the English,” I protested hotly. “I love the English people. I have been to England dozens of times in my life. I’ve spent months and months of my life wandering in the English country, among the villages, walking, bird watching, shooting and fishing. I’ve got the truest sentiments towards the plain people of England. The trouble is, I dislike too many Englishmen.”

“You love the English,” scoffed Jimmie, “but you dislike too many Englishmen!”

“Well, that’s possible, isn’t it?” I demanded. “Until the tourist traffic from the States got so big in recent years, we used to dislike too many Americans, didn’t we? That was because the main body of visitors from the States were salesmen and rich folk. What is the characteristic of salesmen? Are they quiet, modest, retiring folk? Not them. They are lively, pushful, energetic, breezy, noisy, penetrative. Their job is break down resistance and sell things. So, up until a few years ago, when the motor car brought us millions of average Americans and the motor car allowed us, in numbers, to visit the States, we thought Americans were all breezy, pushful, noisy, selling people.”

“By golly,” mused Jim.

“And what is the general characteristic of rich people?” I inquired. “A certain assurance, isn’t it? And doesn’t that certain assurance give plain folk the impression of arrogance?”

“H’m,” said Jim.

“Well, what was true about Americans, until we found out better,” I suggested, “is probably true of Englishmen. Nothing like the invasion of Americans in Canada has occurred with the English. So it is probable the English who come out to Canada have largely been those with a job in hand. Or the well-to-do. Their character and their manners, for example, bear little resemblance to those of the people of England as a whole. If there is anything drives me nuts, for instance, it is an official Englishman.”

“Psst,” warned Jimmie. “This is wartime. Watch out for colonels and generals.”

“But also,” I painted out. “I am also driven nuts by a professional Irishman, if you know what I mean. One of those Irishmen who tries to be like the Irishman of fiction, stage and screen. I also am driven slightly bugs by a Scotchman who feels it necessary to be forever dour and glum and who makes a point of speaking with the thickest possible burr.”

“H’m,” smiled Jimmie. “And what kind of Canadian gives you a pain?”

“To tell the truth, Jim,” I said humbly, “when I was not quite 30, I learned to shave in the morning without a mirror.”

“Ah, well,” said Jim, “if you don’t set Canadians up as the ideal.”

Made in England

“Jim,” I assured him, “I love the American people, but it took me time to find it out. I love the British people, but I still reserve the right to object to individuals who, because England is an old nation, founded on aristocracy and organized on a system of respecting their betters, try to get by in the world by pretending they are better than they are. If respect for one’s betters is fundamental of the system, how natural that some of them should try to make yards in the game, especially among simple strangers like us, by pretending to be two rungs higher on their own ladder than they really are? The tragedy is, we have no such system; so all their airs, which wouldn’t survive five minutes in their own country, only make them appear silly to us.”

“That’s a curiously interesting explanation,” agreed Jim.

“A plain Englishman,” I stated, “whether he is a banker or a village poacher, is a lovely experience, either at home or abroad. But a roving Englishman, far away among a lot of heathen like us, putting on, for his own gain and amusement, the pretensions of being something different and something more than he really is and when you have been born and raised in a class system, that is a temptation we can’t quite appreciate – then you’ve got a pain in anybody’s neck.”

“But that is true of Canadians going to Britain,” pointed out Jim. “Aren’t there the same silly Canadians going over and giving the English a pain in the neck?”

“Quite,” I said. “Quite. But there are four times as many English to draw your saps from as there are Canadians. Our army in England can correct that impression in England, But we haven’t any English army in Canada to let us see what the true, hall-marked, genuine English are like.”

“Quite,” said Jimmie. “Quite.”

“Hey,” I said sharply. “Where do you get that ‘Quite, quite’ stuff? That English hat of yours has gone to your head.”

“Me!” cried Jim. “You said it first. You said ‘Quite’ twice, just a second ago.”

“I did not,” I exclaimed indignantly.

“You did so,” declared Jim. “And you said it very English, too. You said ‘quaite, quaite’.”

“I did not,” I snorted.

“Let’s see your hat,” said Jim shrewdly. I handed him my new hat, to take the place of one I lost quite recently in a motion picture theatre.

Jim examined inside the hat, and suddenly let out a yell.

“Why, this hat is made in England! Look.”

And sure enough, on the reverse side of the inner band, opposite the label of the store where I had bought it, were the small gilt words: “Made in England.”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” I said.

To Heck With Bickering

“Look,” said Jim. “To heck with all this bickering about the English and the Canadians and the Scotch and Americans. If we are going to be impressed only by what irritates us, we are never going to have any peace in our hearts, much less on earth.”

“Then,” I said, “hats off to the English. I love their green and pleasant land.”

“They stood in the gate for us,” said Jim. “Without them, we would now be under the dominion of Germany.”

“This sceptred isle,” I quoted,

“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise.

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea….

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm.

this England…“

“What is that?” inquired Jim huskily.

“Mr. Shakespeare,” I said, also huskily.

“It is 4 o’clock,” said Jim. “Look: I have two sticks, two walking sticks. We have these hats. Outside, the fine March breeze blows. Two blocks away is a little Tea Shoppe. Let us take our sticks. Let us go and walk in the March breeze. And drop in and have a spot of tea in a Tea Shoppe.”

“Dammit,” I cried, “I’m with you.”

So, with chins up and chests out, and swinging our sticks in the best British tradition, we stepped forth into the hale winds of March to remember England.

And just a few doors north from Jim’s, a gust of wind caught my new fine hat, Made in England, and lifted it merrily into the air and lodged it in the branches of a maple tree.

“What ho!” cried Jim heartily.

“Just a second,” I said, manoeuvring into position.

I threw my walking stick with unerring aim at the hat. It touched the hat but failed to dislodge it. And the stick, sliding artfully back amid the twigs, caught and hung.

“Just a second,” said Jim, also picking a good spot.

And he threw his stick, more, I believe, to release the stick stuck in the tree than my hat.

A Mixed-Up World

The stick slid amid the branches and then slowly started down, finally hanging within a foot of mine.

“Now,” I said irascibly.

And at that moment, a lady’s voice broke in. A very haughty English voice.

“Go away from there, you brutal men,” she said loudly.

Jimmie and I turned to her with astonishment. She was a ruddy English lady and fairly vivid with indignation.

“Go away at once,” she commanded, like a major-general, “or I shall call the authorities.”

Drawing myself up like a lieutenant-general, I demanded with an equally haughty air:

“Madam, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Leave that squiddle,” she commanded, “alone.”

“Squiddle?” inquired Jim anxiously.

“Oh, don’t pretend,” cried the lady, who had one of those middle-aged voices that crack on the high notes. “I saw you from my window. I saw you hurling sticks at that poor black squiddle.”

“Aw,” squurl!” cried Jim, comprehending.

Neither Jim or I had noticed the blasted squirrel in the tree. It was my hat and Jim’s sticks we were intent upon.

“Go away at once,” said the lady.

“Madam,” I said patiently, “my hat blew off and lodged in this tree. We have been throwing our sticks trying to dislodge it. Do we look like men who would throw a hat at a squiddle?”

“One never knows what to expect,” said the lady no less and no more ruddy, “in this country. I shall get you a laddaw.”

And she led us over to her side drive where she loaned us her ladder. And under her personal supervision, we erected the ladder and rescued my hat and both sticks. Then she superintended the return of the ladder to her side drive, all very authoritative and efficient.

And as we proceeded, with hats a little tighter on our heads, towards the Tea Shoppe, Jim said:

“There, you see? You can never go by appearances.”

“It is an extremely mixed-up world,” I submitted.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 9, 1946.

“PFFTHFF,” said Frise.

“Which?” I inquired.

“Thipff,” said Jim. “Thoop! Something blew in my mouth. Felt like a pigeon feather or something…”

“Just a little soot,” I assured him. “There’s black on your lip.”

“Pffthff,” repeated Jimmie, wiping his mouth.

“Here, pay attention to your driving!” I warned. “You’re steering all over the street.”

“Well, if you had something blown in your mouth,” complained Jim, “you wouldn’t like it either.”

“Aw, just a flake of soot,” I submitted. “From one of the big factory chimneys.”

“It felt as big as a Plymouth Rock feather¹,” said Jim, still wiping.

“You can’t be fussy,” I philosophized, “and live in cities. It’s a wonder more things don’t blow into our mouths. Worse than hen feathers.”

“Doubtless,” said Jim, winding up the car window, “we do have a lot of pretty gruesome things blown in our mouths and noses without ever knowing it. When you look at these city streets, in the month of March, with all the accumulated filth of four months of winter beginning to lie revealed, it makes you think, eh?”

“What careless, dirty, sloppy creatures human beings are,” I mused. “Tossing away cigarette butts, packages, candy wrappers. Airily flinging away on to the public domain, any junk they have no use for…”

“Look up there!” pointed Jim.

From the upstairs window of a house we were passing, a woman was leaning out and beating a large mop against the bricks, down wind. A trail of dust, hair, and other light debris floated in a cloud into the public air, and into whatever windows were down wind.

“We’re really,” I submitted, “not much advanced since the days of Queen Elizabeth, when everybody just opened the upstairs windows and dumped the sewage and the garbage out into the street. That was what gutters were for, in the old days.”.

“What’s the difference, actually,” added Jim, “between a lady of Tudor times dumping the slop pail out the upstairs window, and that lady back there beating out her mop into the open street?”

“Thipff,” I said. “Thpooie! Jim, do you see anything…?”

I leaned out so Jim could look at my mouth.

“I just felt something,” I said, “blow into my mouth then. Do you see any hair or wool or anything?”

Jim slowed the car and examined me.

“Just a little soot, by the look of it,” he said.

“Thank goodness,” I cried. “I half fancied I had caught something that woman was shaking out of her mop. Thpew! Fffptt!”

I got out my hankie and wiped off my tongue.

“In days to come²,” asserted Jim, “when public health and sanitation is as well looked after as it should be, these days we live in will be regarded with exactly the same horror with which we look back on Henry the Eighth’s time. When you think of our garbage wagons plodding up the windy streets, with the boys hoisting up those battered, ramshackle containers we know as garbage cans…”

“Leaving a trail behind them,” I cut in, “of little bits of garbage, dirt and filth along the streets, to be rolled over and squashed by traffic, to be ground into particles, to dry and be picked up by the breeze and wafted far and wide.”

“The city of the future,” declared Jimmie, “will supply the householder with official cartons, sanitary cartons, in which all refuse from sweepings to food waste will be placed and sealed. These sealed containers will be picked up every other day by travelling incinerators which will burn the refuse under intense electric heat…”

“Haw,” I snorted, “you mean atomic atomizers³. A neat little truck with a small quantity of atomic energy, which will consume the refuse so that not even any smoke or steam is injected into the public air.”

“We’ll Lose Our Smokes”

“The public air!” cried Jim. “What a perfect expression. The public air. Air is about the only thing that is truly public. You can’t confine it. Or if you do, it goes bad. It isn’t like land or water, which people can own or control. Air belongs to all men alike. And there ought to be some recognition of that fact. Anybody who pollutes the air should be taken in hand as a public enemy.”

“Well, when you toss a cigarette butt out the car window,” I submitted, “as you did just now, you are a public enemy. That cigarette butt is fragile, and the nearest thing to dust. In a few minutes, under the rush of this morning traffic, that cigarette will be ground under a car’s wheel and pulverized. The wisp of paper will float off in the breeze. The scattered little grains of tobacco will join the indescribable and complex mass of dirt and dust that swirls forever over the earth. Any germs from your mouth that might have adhered to the wet end of the butt will be set free to carry, infection…”

“I haven’t any infection!” protested Jimmie.

“How do you know?” I inquired. “It takes 48 hours for the infection of the common cold to assert itself in you. How do you know you haven’t got the mumps, quincy, croup, or even leprosy and don’t know it yet? But you tossed that cigarette butt out into the public air as cheerfully and thoughtlessly as that woman back there was beating out her dirty mop!”

“Cigarette butts are the least of our worries,” came back Jim. “It’s far worse things we should put our minds on.”

“No, Jim,” I countered. “We’ve got to start with ourselves. We’ve got to stop tossing cigarette butts into the public air before we begin trying to correct the offences of others.”

“Listen,” said Jim, slowing the car he could argue better, “if we start with cigarette butts, the next thing somebody is going to argue about is smoking⁴. They are going to say that it is a public offence to fill the public air with cigarette smoke. That is the thin edge of the wedge. Once you start reforming, somebody comes along with a better reform. We begin with cigarette butts. Somebody comes along and takes away our smokes.”

“Common sense is all I suggest,” I asserted. “It stands to reason a little tobacco smoke, puffed into the air and vanishing instantly, is far different thing from a wet, sticky cigarette butt flung out at random into the public domain.”

“Common sense,” decreed Jim, “does not enter into the realm of public affairs. If you are going into the reform business, I warn you, be very careful where you start.”

My eyes were caught, at that instant, by a startling spectacle. We had passed out of the residential district and were entering the downtown area. And from the tall chimney of a factory, right ahead of us, there suddenly billowed up the biggest, blackest, oiliest boil of smoke I ever saw. It was like an explosion of smoke. And it fairly wallowed out of the tall stack.

“Whoa, Jim!” I cried, seizing his arm. “Slow down! Just take a look at that smoke!”

Jim ran to the curb and stopped. We sat and gazed at the spectacle. Against the gray March sky, the jet black smoke poured almost like a liquid. In vast, fat coils, it rolled thickly, heavily. It created a giant smudge across the sky and dissipated itself slowly. The buildings beyond were blocked from view.

“For Pete’s sake!” breathed Jimmie.

“In this day and age,” I enunciated. “Talk about capitalistic insolence!”

“Why,” cried Jim, “that’s an absolute outrage. Fouling the air. Blackening the property for miles around. An injury not merely to the public health but to private property!! Something ought to be done!”

“The owner of that factory,” I declared hotly, “is the perfect example of the lawless adventurer. He could put a smoke abater on that chimney…”

“He doesn’t even need that,” interrupted Jim. “All he has to do is feed the furnace properly. A little coal at a time. Build up a fire, little by little, adding a little coal at a time. And the fire consumes the smoke.”

“Maybe it isn’t the capitalist’s fault at all,” I suggested. “Eh? Maybe it’s the fault of some lazy beggar of a fireman⁵. A proletariat.”

“Proletarian,” corrected Jim. “Some lazy proletarian who can’t be bothered attending a fire properly, but comes along once every few hours and dumps a whole load of coal on.”

“And wastes the best of the coal,” I agreed, “by sending it up the chimney in smoke!”

“Correct,” cried Jim. “What is all that black smoke coiling so oily into the air? It’s pure chemical gas, full of carbon and valuable heating elements, being wasted in the air.”

“Let’s Do Something!”

“A waste to his employer,” I summed up, “and an offence against the public. Jim! Let’s act. Enough of this talk. Let’s act!”

“How?” demanded Jim.

“Let’s go in,” I said, “and catch that fireman red-handed. Let’s drag him out to take a look at what he’s doing with that chimney. And then, let’s tell him a thing or two about wasting fuel and ruining the public health and damaging private property all around the neighborhood.”

Jim glanced at his watch.

“We should be at the office,” he said.

“It won’t take 10 minutes,” I protested. “Jim, if we have the public interest at heart, we’ve got to DO something about it. There are enough people willing to talk about it. Let us DO something!”

“First let us speak to the manager,” suggested Jim.

We drove down and parked opposite the factory. We walked across the street, dodging the morning business rush traffic, and entered the front office doorway.

There was only a secretary in view, taking off her hat.

The building was icy cold.

“Is the manager about?” I inquired.

“He won’t be down till around 10,” said the young lady, shivering and rubbing her hands.

“Is there a foreman or superintendent we could see?” suggested Jim.

“No,” said the young lady, “we aren’t back in production yet, you see? A skeleton staff comes on around 10 o’clock. We’re re- organizing the plant…”

“I’ll tell you,” I said very kindly, “we’re a committee of citizens interested in public health and such, things, see? And we noticed the awful clouds of smoke, terrible black smoke, coming from the smoke-stack of this factory.”

“I see,” said the young lady, drawing herself up very stiff.

“We don’t wish to make trouble, of course,” I added, “but if we could just see the fireman, whoever he is. The janitor?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the authority,” said the young lady coldly.

“Still, you wouldn’t put anything in our way.” I submitted, “if we just dropped in and had a chat with the fireman? We wish merely to explain to him that he is not only creating a public nuisance, a public menace, but he is also wasting his employer’s fuel. If he stoked the fire a little at a…”

“Take that door to the left,” said the young lady, rubbing her hands and hunching up her shoulders.

The door led down a staircase to the basement. We could hear furnace sounds along the passage-way. And we walked along to the furnace-room where we discovered an elderly gent with a shovel patting ashes into ash cans.

The furnace was one of those old-fashioned monsters set in a pit.

“Good-day,” we said pleasantly.

“Good-day to you,” agreed the old boy, relaxing.

“Look,” I said, “you’ll excuse us for coming in on you like this. But we only have your interest at heart.”

“Life insurance?” asked the old boy.”

“No,” said Jim. “Smoke. Do you realize what a terrific smoke barrage you are creating? Will you come outside a minute and take a look at your chimney?”

“Aw,” said the old boy, “run along!”

“Pardon me,” I began firmly and loudly, for the old boy was making a racket with his shovel. “We haven’t seen the manager of this place yet. We’ve come to you, first. It’s for your own good. We happen to be a committee of citizens…”

“Self-appointed,” put in Jim, not too loud.

“…a committee of citizens interested,” I pursued, “in public health.”

“Run along, now,” said the old boy, commencing on the ashes again.

“I suggest,” I shouted above the racket, “that you at least listen to what we have to say. Otherwise, we will take steps that will astonish you.”

That always gets them.

“What’ll you do?” he demanded belligerently.

“Are you aware of the smoke nuisance you are creating?” I came back.

“I’ve heard little else,” he declared, “for 30 years.”

“Do you realize,” I insinuated, “that for 30 years you have been advertising to the whole world that you are a punk fireman?”

“Is that so?” he scoffed.

“Only a dope,” I pursued, “would heap coal on a fire so that half of it goes up in smoke.”

“Is-that-so?” he admired.

“If you lay the coal on,” I informed him, “a little at a time, so that the fire builds up and consumes the gases, little by little, there is no smoke.”

“You don’t say?” he sneered, wide-eyed.

“May I demonstrate?” I asked politely, ignoring his bad manners.

“Certainly,” he replied, handing me the shovel.

I removed my coat. I seized the shovel. I tripped open the fire door. I took a moderate scoop of coal.

“Observe now,” I said. “Watch how this small shovelful is instantly seized upon by the fire, the gases consumed, and the fuel embodied immediately, as it were, in the fire.”

“Well, well, well,” said the old boy, relaxing back into his chair.

At which moment, we heard footsteps of the stairs and a man who looked like a gas-meter reader, with a small ledger under arm, appeared at the furnace-room door.

“I warned you, Peters,” he said sharply.

“What can I do?” said the old boy, getting hurriedly out of his chair. “When citizens’ committees keep coming down and showing me how to fire my own furnace.. .”

“What’s this?” said the stranger.

“Don’t blame me,” said the old boy, Peters. “Blame these guys. I’m tending my furnace, when they come down and interfere. They insist on stoking her…”

“Peters,” said the stranger severely, “never before have such billows of smoke come from your furnace. We’ve had 40 complaints inside the last 20 minutes.”

“You’re a Menace”

“Am I stoking it?” demanded Peters sadly. “Or is this little guy?”

“What are you doing here?” demanded the gas-meter man bitterly.

“I came down-we came down,” I expostulated, “when we saw those clouds of smoke, to protest, and to show this man how to feed a furnace properly…”

“Yah, that’s their story,” said old Mr. Peters.

“I think, gentlemen,” said the stranger acidly, “if you will leave matters of this kind in the hands of the civic authorities…”

“We didn’t make that smoke,” I stated pleasantly. “Why, I had only laid on a couple of small shovels…”

“Good-morning, gentlemen,” said the stranger, opening his book.

“Come on,” muttered Jimmie, helping me into my coat.

So we stamped upstairs.

“You see how it is,” said Jim.

“I didn’t know there was a civic department working on smoke,” I protested.

“Probably the health department,” said Jim. “Or maybe the police.”

We crossed over into the car. Jim started her and gave her the gun. We pushed out into the traffic.

At King St. a motorcycle cop appeared beside us. He rode level and then drew ahead, his hand up.

“He’s signalling you, Jim,” I warned.

We drew into the curb.

The cop parked in front of us and walked back.

Jim ran down the car window for him.

“Are you aware,” he asked pleasantly, “that there is a by-law referring to excessive exhaust smoke from motor cars?”

“Eh?” cried Jim.

“Do you know,” continued the cop cheerfully, “that this old stoneboat of yours kicks up so much smoke from the exhaust that you are apt to cause a fatal accident any day?”

“Smoke?” queried Jim, giving me an agonized side glance.

“I came up behind you.” said the cycle cop, “just when you pulled away from the curb a couple of blocks back, and I couldn’t see my handle-bars in front of me. I tell you, you’re a menace to traffic. How about getting that exhaust looked at? How about getting some gaskets? How about checking your oil consumption? Eh?”

“Okay,” said Jim, “okay, officer, I’ll attend to it right away.”

So we drove on to the parking lot, not even thinking.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. A Plymouth Rock is a type of chicken. ↩︎
2. Clean air and anti-pollution laws were still to come. With so many coal furnaces (including in people’s homes), and all of the smoking, the air must have been not very pleasant. ↩︎
3. People still had great hope for atomic energy at the time. ↩︎
4. There were few smoking restrictions at the time, as you could smoke in most public spaces. ↩︎
5. In this context, the fireman is the one who stokes the furnace with coal. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 2, 1935.

NEW YORK

“Wake up, wake up,” hissed Jimmie Frise through the curtains of my lower berth. “We’re coming into New York.”

“That’s where we started for,” I growled, being one of those few who can sleep in a berth or anywhere else.

“The dawn coming up over New York, come on, let’s see it,” urged Jim.

“I’ve seen it before,” I assured Jim. “Miles of six-storey red tenements. Miles of bleak factories with ten-foot steel fences around them. If I like to wake up in New York at all, it is downtown.”

“You’ve got no soul,” said Jim sadly. “This is one of the wonder cities of the world. Seven million people live here. It is one of the cores, one of the ganglia¹, of the human system.”

I slid up the blind.

Just as I expected. Zipping by were vast drab red blocks of high tenement houses and spectral streets in the dawn, like streets excavated in Babylon or Pompeii. A terrible sameness. The same bottle of milk on all the window sills, and the same plate with something wrapped in newspaper. The same quilts flung half way out high windows by early birds already risen.

“Ugh,” I said.

I got up and staggered down to the washroom. There a half a dozen others were ahead of me, snorting, swizzling and gargling.

“New York,” I stated loudly, “gives me the jitters.”

Nobody paid any attention and Jimmie warned me with a shake of the head, his toothbrush twisting his face all out of shape.

“New York gives me an inferiority complex,” I announced, there being no basin empty for me. “I get the same feeling all New Yorkers have. I get intimidated.”

One or two of the gentlemen, drying themselves on scanty towels, gave me a cold look.

“The people of New York are all intimidated,” I repeated, sitting ready with my razor and things. “Their colossal buildings intimidate them. Those monstrous buildings all leaning backward, as if to ignore the millions of slaves crawling about their feet. The speed of New York intimidates them.”

All the gentlemen began coughing, snorting, gargling and snuzzling extra loud to drown me out.

“The people of New York,” I announced, “go about with lowered eyes, hurrying, timid, cold, scared. They are scared by the advertising cards in the subway trains. Cards that frighten them about their cough, warn them about their hair falling out, begging them to be careful of their skins. You can’t raise your eyes in New York, without being scared by something. New York is scared.”

Unseeing Myriads

Just then a gentleman surrendered his basin and I was next. When I was through washing, I sought Jim back in the car.

“Hah,” I said, “I told those New Yorkers a few things, eh? I’m not going to let them get away with the idea that their big town impresses me.”

“Those were all Toronto men in there,” said Jim. “Just before you came in, the porter remarked that everybody in his car this trip is a Toronto man.”

“Well, anyway, I said what I think,” I affirmed.

“You’re just a little excited,” said Jim. “Your approach to New York scares you. So you talk big.”

“I’ve been in New York before,” I asserted.

“And hid in your hotel all day except for little walks nearby the hotel, and a trip by taxicab to a theatre at night, and then, back home to bed.”

“I’ve been around,” I said.

“I bet you never were at Forty-second and Fifth Ave., at five p.m.,” declared Jim, “when the traffic is so thick you could walk across the street on the tops of the cabs! I bet you never yet risked your life in a subway!”

But the porter arrived and we entered a black tunnel where the train roared and thundered, and you felt very uneasy, hoping the engineer wouldn’t miss any switches in the dark.

Thus we came to the fabulous city. The new Ilium² with its topless towers. Thus we had our suitcases snatched by redcaps who led us at top speed out of the station as if the devil were come to town. Thus we were bundled into taxicabs with their radios blaring, and driven, in a sort of gargantuan, buffalo stampede of cabs, up a broad avenue where the entire traffic was racing, hub to hub and nose to tail, amidst a din of noise rising blasphemously unto the clean, virginal towers, spires, obelisks of serene beauty that aspired to the very sky.

Thus we were, with a lurch of brakes, spewed out at our hotel, where they are never surprised, but always seem to expect you; where all the bell hops seem always to have seen you before; and where, after the first trip in the elevator, they always remember your floor and tell it to you, with a smile.

Thus into the glorious and incredible streets, where a nation of all nations, white, gray, black, brown and all colors, mob past you at top speed, sightless eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left at all the incomparable beauties – the beauty of a window, a vast crystal window set in the foot of a very cathedral of a building, and in that stately vast window, one gown. A fragile, a silver gown.

Windows of incomparable grace, with one hat, one tiny pair of shoes. And windows of delicatessen stores as florid, resplendent, opulent, as if they were the windows of the jewels of Ophir³. And jewelry stores with – one diamond!

Yet to neither right nor left, nor up at the shimmering castellated towers in the sky nor down to the cold and bitter earth, did these passing myriads look.

And in this fabulous city, Jimmie and I walked alone, as if we and we alone were living, breathing, sentient in it.

To tackle stores we went, and saw fishing tackle beyond all dreaming. To book stores and print stores, where we saw prints and paintings and pictures in the care of speechless men and women. Our legs ached with walking, and our eyes smarted with looking.

They Can But They Don’t

We tried to go by subway from 44th St. and Madison Ave. down to Park Pl., and we ended up twenty miles away at the Bronx zoo. We tried to go from the zoo back to our hotel and landed at Park Pl.

We saw a store window with nothing but alligators in it. We saw a man singing only one hymn for a living. It was “Rescue the Perishing,” and he sang it in the morning, and he sang it still, ten miles away at evening, but on the same street, holding before him in the wintry wind an empty cap.

In a magnificent store where they sold flowers, there was in the window one white rose.

Jim led me, on foot, in taxicabs, by underground and by elevated, on bus and on tram car, round and round that incredible mulberry bush which is New York. We lunched at a restaurant where you slip five cents in a slot and your food, beautifully cellophaned, pops out at you on a chromium-plated tongue of steel which secretly slips back again when you take your food from it.

Nobody tried to sell us the Empire State building, so, while we were admiring its unholy height, I selected a few particularly gigolesque⁴ New Yorkers and tried to sell it to them. But it was no good. They merely looked at me with agate eyes, humorless, remote.

“Everybody in New York,” I said, as I padded painfully and breathlessly alongside of Jimmie, “is small. I have seen only a half a dozen big people all day, amongst the seven million I have seen so far. And they all looked like visitors.”

“Now that you come to mention it,” agreed Jim, “I noticed that, too.”

“Do you suppose,” I asked, “that there might be anything in my theory that the very size and majesty of the city makes the people timid and humble, and that they are actually growing smaller with each generation?”

“All the big people,” said Jim, “have been killed off by traffic. You’ve got to be small and nimble in New York.”

We nimbled our way from the Bowery to Morningside Heights, from the basement of five-cent stores to the needle tip of a fabulous building that points a final, accusing finger at heaven.

And thus we came, at five p.m., to Fifth Ave. at Forty-second St., where the cabs are jammed so thick you can walk across their roofs from one side of the street to the other.

“There you are,” said Jim. “On their roofs, from this side of the street to the other.”

But when I asked a cab driver to let me climb up the side of his cab to make the start, he refused. While we were arguing how much I should pay him for the privilege, whistles screamed, lights flashed, the mighty throb of sound changed its majestic tone, and away went the tide of traffic, rushing and whirling. And Jimmie and I fled across, with five hundred others, under the sheltering wings of ten policemen.

“There you go,” I said, “there you go, Jimmie. You can walk across the roofs of the cabs. But you don’t. That’s New York for you. You can, but you don’t.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Jimmie, “that in all this day, amidst all this splendor, after speeding a mile a minute down in the bowels of the earth and roaring along in the elevated above the roofs of a city, after all those stupendous stores full of fishing tackle and pictures and gowns and guns and alligators, after this glorious day spent rubbing your lonely elbows with ten million others, strange, swift, passing, forever mysterious and unknown, all you can say about New York is that they can, but they don’t!”

Deadliest Complex

“In all this day,” I said, “I haven’t seen a single soul that seems to call to me across the deep.”

“You’re hungry,” said Jimmie. “That’s all’s the matter with you. You need to eat. Now, after showing you the city as it should be seen, I am going to do you a great favor. I am going to take you to the greatest restaurant in America, and one of the five greatest restaurants in the world.”

“Ah, oysters,” said I.

“Oysters, if you like,” said Jim, steering me westward into a district where the buildings were smaller and the lights brighter. “But I advise you to save your capacity for more delectable things. They have a creamed fillet of sole that princesses have wept over. They have a pot roast which is acknowledged to be the greatest stroke of genius in the entire history of cooking.”

“Oysters,” I said. “And little soda biscuits.”

Through the streets all bright with red signs, past huddled little stores wedged in between theatres, every third door a theatre door, with congested cabs patiently, tooting their way all in one direction, packed from curb to curb, we bowed into the winter night wind and came at last to Vincent’s⁵.

It was a small and cosy restaurant. The lights were tender. The music was faint. The waiters, all pot-bellied and with thin gray hair slicked in two curls on their heads, swayed like adagio dancers among the white linen of the tables.

The menu was as big as a newspaper.

“Oysters,” said I, “and little soda biscuits.”

But Jim, with frequent dreamy gazes about the room, murmured to himself as he read the menu.

The restaurant was filled with people, and Jimmie told me they were the greatest people in New York, actors, owners of banks and radio stations, authors and playwrights, genius of every sort.

“Genius,” I remarked, “sure slurps its food.”

For they were bobbing and bending to the succulent dishes: their talk, their manners, their laughter was eager but not so eager as their forks and teeth.

“They make me hungry to look at them,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have something more than oysters.”

Jimmie raised his head with shining eyes and a flush on his brow. Reverently he nodded to the waiter. The waiter bowed, ear bent down to Jimmie, his pencil poised. “Baked,” said Jim, with a catch in his voice, “baked Boston scrod!⁶“

“Baked Boston scrod,” said the waiter, flicking a shrewd appraising glance at Jim, as if to say, “ah, a gourmet.”

“Oysters,” I said, “and little soda biscuits. And then some baked Boston scrod.”

Jim watched me engulf the oysters. I chew my oysters. Jim would watch me manipulate the beauties – Cape Cods, they were – into the cocktail sauce and then up to my mouth. Then he closed his eyes and shuddered while I chewed.

“I’ll say this for New York,” I sighed, as the waiter whisked away the empty shells, “their oysters are good.”

Then came the scrod.

From under glowing dull silver covers, the waiter revealed a vast plate with a magnificent light brown square of fish.

And beside the fish, heaped in a pile, like matches in a poker game, was my deadliest enemy!

My deadliest enemy, potatoes Julienne!

They are little measly French fried potatoes, about the size of a match.

They are brittle and hot and dry.

They are deadly, vicious, ruinous.

Liberated At Last

I thrust my chair back and half rose.

“Jimmie,” I said bitterly, “this is to much! This is the end! I’ve had a feeling all day that something like this would happen, that New York would, in the end, heap a final humiliation upon me.”

“What is it?” asked Jimmie astonished.

“Potatoes Julienne,” I rasped. “Potatoes Julienne, my inferiority complex personified. I hate them. I hate them. They and they alone have stood between me and my social rise. If it had not been for those measly, vicious little potatoes, I might have been a great man. I might have attended scores of dinners at Government House. I might be joined the York Club⁷. I might have been a member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club⁸.”

“Sit down, sit down,” whispered Jimmie, glancing around.

“It is not, as you might have supposed,” I said, “the fact that I look silly in a dress suit that has kept me from rising in society. It is those, those devilish little potatoes Julienne. And to think it was New York that sought out my deepest humiliation like this!”

I covered my face with my hands.

“Eat,” said Jim.

“My only nightmare,” I quavered, “is a vast platter of potatoes Julienne, and away on the far side of the heap, a great concourse of beautiful girls and handsome young men in dress suits, mocking me!”

“What’s the matter with them?” demand Jim.

“Try to eat them,” I cried.

So Jim tried and I tried. They served in a heap, lying end for end. If you put your fork under them sideways, you lift your fork and not one single little sticklet of potatoes Julienne comes up.

You look at your fork in amazement, and try it end ways. You slide the fork under them and lift. And one or at most two of the insignificant sticks comes out of the heap.

I tried a spoon. It was no better. Jimmie began to get red and perspire and cast anxious glances around the neighboring tables.

“Ah,” I said.

The sugar bowl was at hand, and in it, the sugar tongs. I seized the sugar tongs and took a grab at the potatoes Julienne.

And as I raised the tongful to my mouth I looked up and fair into the eyes of Vincent himself, the lean aristocratic proprietor of this famed house.

I signalled to him.

“Vincent,” I said, in a low voice, “forgive me, but will you tell me, in mercy’s name, how do you eat these potatoes Julienne?”

Vincent bowed.

“Wit,” he said, “your feengers!”

“Fingers!” I gasped.

“Feengers,” said Vincent, “like diss.”

And he took a pinch of potatoes Julienne from my plate, lifted them, and popped them into his mouth.

“Princes,” he said, “keengs, dukes, barons, all the people of the great world, eat potatoes Julienne, only like that.”

I rose.

I shook hands with Vincent.

I stepped around and slapped Jimmie on the back with one hand and shook his hand with the other.

“Jimmie,” I said, “it took New York to liberate me from a complex that has had me down for twenty-five years!”

And for the rest of the trip I embraced New York with my arms as wide as I could stretch them.

---

Editor’s Notes: This story also appeared in So What? (1937).

1. Ganglia is a group of neuron cell bodies in the peripheral nervous system. ↩︎
2. Ilium is an ancient Greek town. ↩︎
3. “Jewels of Ophir” is a nickname for the Jewels of Opar plant, also known as the fame flower. ↩︎
4. I looked this up and don’t know what it means. ↩︎
5. Vincent’s has been around since 1904. ↩︎
6. If you are not familiar with the term, scrod is just a whitefish fillet, served breaded. ↩︎
7. The York Club is a private members’ club in Toronto that began in 1909. ↩︎
8. The Royal Canadian Yacht Club is another old club in Toronto. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 25, 1933.

“Marlene Dietrich,” said Jim Frise, “has taken to wearing men’s clothes, hats, trousers, everything.”

“She looks lovely,” said I. “I saw her picture in The Star.”

“That’s the point,” said Jim. “She looks lovely. She dresses up like a man, but she only looks like a pretty woman dressed up in men’s clothes.”

“Well, what of it?” said I.

“If she dressed like a man and looked like a man there would be some point to her dressing funny. I don’t see,” said Jim, “that we should pay any attention to her when she still just looks like a woman.”

“You don’t understand human nature,” said I.

“Of course I do,” cried Jim. “If Marlene Dietrich dressed up like a man and looked like a man there would be some point in printing her picture all over the country.”

“Well, anyway, she couldn’t,” said I.

“I bet,” said Jim, “I could dress up like a woman and really look like one.”

“With a wig and a lot of powder and paint,” I admitted.

“No, no,” said Jim. “I mean I could just put on a woman’s clothes and one of those tin pot hats they wear and I could walk through the streets and everybody would think I was a woman.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Listen,” said Jim, “I bet you $5¹ we could both do it.”

Which is a double-edged kind of a bet!

I offered to be his gentleman friend if Jim would dress up and walk down Bay street with me. But Jim thinks we never get the full flavor out of an adventure unless we both take part in it.

Over on Queen street west Jim found a store where they had hundreds and hundreds of women’s second-hand coats and hats and dresses where the gentleman in charge would gladly rent us an outfit for an afternoon for $1 each and a deposit of $10.

So after lunch Jim and I crept off to Queen street west and in the back room of this strange and jumbled store changed into ladies’ clothes.

Jim selected a green cloth coat with fur collar, a small brown hat that pulled down well over his head, a kind of shapeless old Jersey dress of a color neither gray nor brown. I think the owner said it was booge. We decided to keep on our own underwear and socks.

“How about shoes?” I asked. “I wouldn’t try to walk in those high-heeled things.”

“Come on,” said Jim; “they would add to your height.”

“Do I Look Like a Lady?”

I chose an old fur coat, imitation seal, a red dress that was long enough to hide rather noisy socks, and a beautiful hat. It did not pull down over my head like a pillowslip on a pillow. It sat well up. It had plumes and flowers on it and was a little large, perhaps, for the present day pancake style. But it gave me a certain dignity.

The only shoes I could find that I felt safe in, with high heels, were a little shabby. In fact, when I stood in front of the mirror I looked a little like a cartoon in Punch of a lady from Limehouse².

“Now,” said the owner of the store, “gents, if there was only a public meeting for you to break up–“

“Do I look like a lady?” asked Jim.

“You certainly do,” said the owner. “All you need is some sort of handbag.” And he gave Jim a large parcel carrier of black oilcloth trimmed with red.

After a little practice walking up and down the store in the wobbly shoes and parading in front of the old mirror in the back room, Jim and I decided to go to the big department stores and do a little shopping.

Out on Queen street there were Chinese, Macedonians, cigarette-butt-picker-uppers, old men with beards, urchins, ladies of color³. But nobody paid us the compliment of a glance.

My feet were chilly and as I don’t wear garters I felt my socks slipping down a little on my underwear⁴, and I feared the dignified effect of the large hat and the seal coat was somewhat spoiled by a dowdy appearance at the extremity. The pavement was wet and the old shoes flip-flopped on the pavement. But old Jimmie was beautiful. He strolled along with little steps, pausing to look in the windows, and he never made the mistake even of looking at a cigar store window or a pet shop. He spent three minutes peering into a lingerie window.

“This is the first time,” said Jim, “I have ever had a real look in one of these windows.”

“I ought to step in and get a pair of garters,” I mumbled to him.

Farther along Queen, as we neared the department stores, a gentleman who was slightly brewed⁵ swayed over toward us. “Get out o’ me way!” he growled, hilariously.

Jim and I drew ourselves up the way ladies do and glared at him.

“You look like my wife,” said the gentleman, mildly astonished.

“Which of us?” asked Jim in a high voice.

“Are there two of you?” asked the gentleman.

“Can’t you see me?” I demanded in my own voice, which has still got the old army whisper in it, like a rip-saw.

And the gentleman, after a sudden stagger, hurried into a doorway on Queen street and hid.

A policeman stopped and looked sternly at us, so Jim and I walked on, a little unsteadily on account of the shoes, and headed for the stores.

We had a grand afternoon. We visited the basement and looked at all the things we had never had any reason to look at before, household utensils, kitchenware in red, blue and green, big wicker clothes baskets. Ladies’ wear, perfume, drapes, furnishings! China, fancy goods, my goodness! We priced everything. We got into dandy arguments with salesladies, especially the elderly ones.

We had an afternoon. We didn’t buy anything, but we saw and felt and fingered and patted more things in one afternoon than we had in a lifetime.

And about a quarter to five Jim said we ought to go and turn our clothes in at the store and get our deposit back.

We went out on to Queen street again, and we walked along in the dense crowd, our feet pretty weary, the big muscles on the backs of our legs aching, but there was life in the old gals yet.

There was a store with dresses in the window and a very pretty girl with gold hair looking out.

“Let’s go in and have a fight with her,” said Jim.

So, perhaps a little draggly looking, we stepped into the store.

As we closed the door the girl with the gold hair, with that perfectly cold look that women give to women and which men scarcely ever see, walked over to us and said:

“This way, please.”

She was an extremely good-looking girl. We followed her to the back of the store, into a dark and shabby hall, up a rickety old wooden stairs and along an upper hall. Jim and I click-clacked up after the pretty girl. We were a little wheezy.

“In there,” said she.

We stepped, not into a lovely fitting room, but into a dim and untidy small room filled with pails, brooms, mops, scrubbing brushes and smelling of strong soap.

Over a sort of sink a large, angry man was bending in his shirt-sleeves.

“Hurry up,” he yelled. “Hang your coats up and get busy.”

“What’s the idea?” asked Jim. And as he had been practising a high voice all afternoon he still used it. It was slightly cracked.

“Come on, get goin’; don’t you know four-thirty is the time you should get here?”

He whirled suddenly and took a fierce step toward us.

“Hey!” he roared. “Off with the coats!”

It was not a time to do anything hasty, so we took off our coats and hung them on nails on the wall.

I started to take off my hat, but Jim eyed me not to.

“Where are your aprons?” yelled the large, bleary man.

“We didn’t bring any,” squeaked Jim in his old lady voice.

“Didn’t bring none?” corrected the big man. “Here!”

And he yanked a couple of gray and terrible aprons off the wall and threw them at us.

“What a pair of birds you are!” howled the big man. “I’ll speak to Adams about this. Pick ’em up and come on.”

He led us down the dismal hall, we carrying pails and mops he had thrust at us, and went into the front store, where the girls were covering up the dresses with sheets and the girl with the gold hair was fixing her hair at a mirror.

“Start at the front and work back,” said the big man. “Get your hot water there.”

When a Lane Comes in Handy

Jim and I had not had a chance to converse, so I filled my pail and Jim crowded up behind.

“How far is this going?” I asked Jim under cover of the tap.

“I didn’t like to reveal ourselves as men to that bird,” said Jim. “You don’t know what he might have done. He might have flung us down those stairs. We’d have torn the clothes and lost our deposit.”

I stood aside to let Jim fill the pail.

“Are we going to scrub?”

“For a little while,” said Jim. “Then one of us can take sick and the other of us will have to see us home or something.”

We went back into the store, where the girls had finished covering up; the big man had disappeared and the girls were relaxing around the room on chairs to engage in a few minutes’ intimate conversation before departing for the night.

We rolled back the rug, set the chairs aside and started slathering up a good suds in our pails. Jim put his mop in the pail and the water went bloop all over the floor. We both dashed at it with our mops, but in the excitement I stepped backwards against my pail and upset it.

The girls screamed for the big man, who came running.

“Here,” roared the red-faced man. “Here. Hyah! Heeyah!”

And he treated us like no charlady⁶ should be treated.

But we got the water sopped up, not without getting our dresses wet and my large hat fell off into the pail and looked rather soggy. But just as we got organized and the girl with the gold hair was still standing staring at me, mostly at my feet and legs, there came from the back of the store, through the back entrance I suppose, two ladies looking a little flustered, carrying large shopping bags and looking as if they knew which end of a mop was for what.

“What is it?” demanded the purple man of them.

“We was engaged, sir,” said they.

“Who sent you?”

“Mr. Adams, sir.”

He whirled on us, glared, and Jim and I, walking sideways and wiping our hands on our pinnies⁷, hurried for the hallway, clattered up the stairs, got our coats and then went out the back way into a lane.

We found our way out, went along Richmond street, up York and back to the store where we had got outfitted. The owner charged us $2 each off our deposits for wetting the dresses and other injuries.

“We could have escaped that humiliation,” said I.

“But you couldn’t think of any way on the spur of the moment, could you?” asked Jim.

“So that’s what we looked like?” I mused.

“You did; not me,” said Jim.

“It was you went into the store first,” I retorted. “The girl with the gold hair decided about us when she saw you.”

“You owe me five bucks,” said Jim. “We looked like ladies.”

“I think you ought to wire Marlene some flowers with it,” said I.

“No,” said Jimmie, “I’ll wire her a hand-painted moustache cup⁸.”

---

Editor’s Notes: To explain this story, you have to understand that Marlene Dietrich was one of the biggest movie stars of the time. Starting in late January 1933, she was seen wearing men’s clothing including trousers.

Then she wore a tuxedo as seen in the article. Well, this caused quite the uproar! It was all the gossip columnists could talk about for a while.

Some people thought she was doing it for publicity, others thought she should not go out in public like that. Greg and Jim were commenting on all of this talk. She remained famous for sometimes wearing mannish clothing, most famously the tuxedo she wore as a nightclub singer in a movie to be released that November called Morocco.

1. $5 in 1933 would be $113 in 2025. ↩︎
2. I think at the time a Limehouse lady would be a term for a poor woman, perhaps even a prostitute. ↩︎
3. Yes, this sentence had to be cleaned up due to the language used at the time. ↩︎
4. Not sure what this means, but some men did wear garters to hold up their socks as the elasticity could not be that great depending on the material. ↩︎
5. “Brewed” meaning “drunk”. ↩︎
6. So “charwoman” was a common term to refer to a cleaning woman who was brought in for a job then left. They would use the term “maid” for someone who was live-in. This term was used up until the 1960s. ↩︎
7. Pinnie is slang for apron. ↩︎
8. A moustache cup is a drinking cup with a semicircular ledge inside. The ledge, called a moustache guard, allows the passage of liquids and serves as a guard to keep moustaches dry. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 15, 1941.

“Say, listen,” said Jimmie Frise anxiously over the telephone, “could you run over here for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I responded. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s this income tax return,” grumbled Jimmie. “I can’t make head or tail of it.”

“Well, you’re past the end of January, my boy,” I informed him heartily. “So why worry? Might as well be hung for a goat as a sheep¹. You’re going to be fined any way, so why let it spoil a fine winter’s night like this? Let’s take a walk over to the slides and see the kids tobogganing.”

“Listen,” said Jim earnestly. “Come on over, will you? I won’t be happy now until I get this thing off my mind. Gee, I wish I had never looked at the thing.”

“We all have to look at it sooner or later,” I said comfortingly.

“Haven’t you done yours yet?” inquired Jim.

“No,” I admitted. “I was all set to attend to it right after the New Year. But by that time everybody was talking about the taxes in such gloomy terms that I decided to put off the bad news for a few days.”

“You’re in for a shock,” came Jim’s voice over the telephone dully.

“But by the middle of January,” I explained, “the talk had grown so bad I simply couldn’t bring myself to the task. I mean – with all the war news and everything, I just couldn’t bring myself to it.”

“Oh, boy,” said Jim hollowly. “You’re going to get a swell bump.”

“Then along about the last week in January,” I continued apologetically, “I started planning to do it first thing in the morning. But when I got to the office the sun was shining and everything was so bright and brisk I would put it off until the afternoon.”

“Oh, me,” sighed Jim. “That’s exactly what I did.”

“And when the afternoon came,” I concluded, “I was too tired to face it.”

“Yes, but where do you stand now?” demanded Jimmie.

“Well, sir,” I informed him, “just about the last day of January, when I had given up all hope of escape, didn’t I learn that if you didn’t want to pay your taxes in instalments you had until April 30 just as usual.”

“But good grief,” cried Jim, “that’s the lump sum. That’ll kill you.”

“So long as I don’t know about it,” I explained, “I won’t suffer. What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

“A fine philosophy,” snorted Jim. “My dear sir, do you realize that if you were paying it in instalments those instalments are each almost as big as the whole amount of taxes you paid last year?”

“Oh, nonsense,” I laughed.

“I’m telling you,” shouted Jim. “I’ve been sitting here ever since supper working at mine. And the way I work it out, every instalment is pretty near as big as the whole amount I paid last year.”

Up to Item 53 N

“You’ve got yourself mixed up, somewhere, Jimmie,” I warned him. “No government would do that to us.”

“Oho, won’t they!” cried Jim. “Just wait till you take a look at this form. Net income. Taxable income, Dominion. Net taxable income, Dominion. General tax payable, Dominion. National Defence Tax, see item 32.”

“Item 32?” said I.

“Thirty-two,” cried Jim. “It goes up to item 53 N.”

“Fifty-three N, eh?” I said, a little disturbed.

“Listen,” said Jim, rattling a paper. “Quote: 53 A. Insert item 17 E increased if necessary because of item 37 (2).”

“M’hm,” I said.

“Come on over,” begged Jim. “You’d better.”

“Yeh. I’d better,” I said numbly.

Trapped by the Income Tax, after all these rosy weeks of stalling it off. As I walked around the corner and down the block to Jim’s, I reflected that I am not a meany or a skinflint. I don’t pinch my money. I don’t go around trying to buy things wholesale through my friends. I don’t hope to save a lot of money to leave my children so they’ll be ruined. I don’t do any of the things I suspect my friends of doing. Yet, somehow, I feel I have not a healthy attitude towards the Income Tax. Why do I try, even in my sleep, even in my widest-awake hours, to evade the thought of it? I am all for the war. I was an old soldier in the last one. I’ve been over three times to see this one. Surely I am a patriot. Yet…

Jimmie was waiting in the vestibule to let me in.

When he led me into the living-room I saw the family had been banished and the table was littered with large sheets of paper, including at least five sets of income tax forms.

“There was a pile of them,” explained Jim, “so I took plenty. I had a hunch I would need them.”

“Well, well,” I said comfortingly, rubbing my hands; “don’t let it frighten you, Jim. These forms have been worked out for the benefit of the whole population of Canada, the majority of whom are simple, common folk like ourselves. It stands to reason, therefore, that they are as simple as they can possibly be made.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” laughed Jim, mirthlessly, as we sat down.

“It has a formidable look,” I continued, picking up one of the forms and inspecting it. “But let us go on the assumption, let us start with the perfectly logical assumption, that even a child could work this out.”

“Heh, heh, heh,” hacked Jim bitterly.

“Now,” I said, “I see you have entered your name correctly. In block letters, Surname first. Yes. And then the Christian names, with James underlined. Quite correct.”

“Don’t waste time,” cut in Jim. “I’ve filled in all those places. Dependent children and all. Now come to the first real item. Item 17 A. Total income, see item 29.”

So we turned to item 29, page 2.

For the Smart Guys

“Item 29,” I pointed. “TOTAL INCOME. Well, that’s simple. That simply means, 17 A, Total Income, means TOTAL INCOME. See? In item 29 they put it in capitals, so you would understand it was TOTAL. That’s just to help you, see?”

“I see,” said Jim wearily, running his hand through his hair.

“So you put down your TOTAL income first,” I explained briskly, “and come to item 17 B. Deductions, see item 45.”

“Oh, sure,” sneered Jim.

“Okay,” I said reassuringly. “Here’s item 45. Sum of the Above Deductions.”

“What above deductions?” inquired Jim sweetly. “Above what?”

“Well, let’s look,” I heartened him. “Here’s one that should cheer you up. Interest Paid On Borrowed Money.”

“Read it,” commanded Jim hollowly.

“Exclusive,” I read, “of carrying charges in items No. 24 and No. 25…”

“No, no,” pleaded Jim. “Don’t turn to them yet. You have so far turned only three times already to try and get the very first question answered. Don’t you get dizzy, too, for Pete’s sake, or we are sunk. Try to keep your balance. Try to keep your sanity. Just read a little note in black type there, under where you were reading…”

“Here it is,” I read. “Note: Do not include interest on mortgages on residence of taxpayer or on moneys borrowed for personal and living expenses.”

“Well,” said Jim tragically.

“That is kind of mean,” I confessed.

“What other kind of money would I pay interest on?” demanded Jim. “The only kind of interest I could deduct, they won’t allow.”

“That item is for business men,” I explained.

“You bet it is for business men,” charged Jim loudly. “The whole blame thing is for business men. But if it is for business men, why do they keep poor simple people like us chasing back and forth all over that crazy form, as if we were all chartered accountants? I bet 80 per cent. of the people who have to pay income tax are not business people and don’t know one end of an item 28 C from the other.”

“Well, hold on,” I pleaded. “Wait till we see, here.”

It was, at this moment, about 9.25 p.m. I need not delay you with an itemized account of our evening. I took my coat off at 10.30 p.m. We sent over to the drug store for cold ginger ale at 11. The family came in and said hello to us from the hall about 11.30 p.m. and went straight to bed.

We figured and added and subtracted. We worked on Jim’s returns for about three hours and then turned to mine, just to see if it would work out a little simpler. We changed both our incomes into round numbers to see if that would help any. At 1 a.m. Jimmie went and hunted until he found his son’s Public School Arithmetic and we took a recess to explore away back into the almost forgotten realms of fractions and how to divide 7 ¾ by 461 8-9.

“Look, Jimmie,” I cried. “Lowest Common Denominator. Do you remember?”

“Aw,” said Jim, “let’s get back to the job.” He went to the closet and got out the card table. We shifted everything off the living-room table – forms, scribbling paper, books and all – and started afresh. It was 2.20 a.m.

“What,” demanded Jim grimly, “is the reason for all this hanky-panky on these income tax forms? Do you know the answer?”

“Well,” I submitted, “I suppose it is because it just grew, year after year, with additions and changes.”

“Like an old dead tree,” said Jim bitterly, “with fungus growing on it, and other fungi growing on the fungus. No. I’ll tell you the reason. If this income tax was simple the smart guys couldn’t pull any smart stuff. This income tax form is designed for the benefit of the smart guys of this world.”

“Oh, Jimmie,” I protested, “you’re tired. It’s getting on towards morning.”

“No, sir,” stated Jim emphatically. “This world is designed for the benefit and advantage of the smart guys. Nothing shows that to be true more dramatically than these income tax forms. I am willing to bet you one instalment of my taxes that an ordinary accountant could reduce this whole thing to the simplest arithmetic. So that it would be just and equal for all. Amount of tax. Amount of deductions. Then a plain percentage of it all. That is what they get anyway. So why don’t they simplify it?”

“This income tax form is the result of slow growth,” I explained.

“Don’t ever believe it,” retorted Jimmie. “It is complicated only so as to allow loopholes for the wise guys. Mark my words.”

“Don’t be cynical, Jim,” I pleaded. “We’re both tired. If it could be made simpler, why wouldn’t they make it so?”

“Do the wise guys want anything simple?” cried Jim. “Aren’t the ten commandments enough? No. The lawyers have built up a Tower of Babel² so they can act as guides and collect the fees. It’s the same with taxes. Somebody must be profiting by all this bunk.”

“Jim, you don’t understand that democracy is a slow growth,” I protested, “like a strong tree, ring by ring.”

We were checked by the sound of heavy footsteps out in the hall.

“Hello,” said a strange, deep voice.

“Who’s that!” cried Jim, leaping up.

“It’s the milkman,” said the voice, coming up the hall. Your side door was open and I was just wondering if everything was all right.”

“Come in,” said Jim, “and thanks very much. No, we’re just working on our income tax.”

“Oh, them,” laughed the milkman, appearing at the living-room door. “I’ve seen quite a lot of people doing them during my rounds this past couple of weeks.”

“It’s an awful job,” sighed Jim, ruffling all the piles of papers.

“Oh, it’s not so bad when you get on to it,” comforted the milkman.

“Do you know anything about it?” I inquired stiffly.

“Yes, indeed,” said the milkman. “I’ve helped a dozen or more folks with them. It’s really a question of knowing what to…”

“Come in, come in,” cried Jim softly, taking the milkman’s arm. He set down his wire basket of milk.

“If you want a real problem,” he said, as he sat down, “you take my milk accounts for a week.”

He took the form Jim had been working on and ran an expert finger down the sheet. He spotted errors immediately.

“Now,” he said cheerfully, “let’s take a fresh form.”

Filling out the spaces rapidly, he mumbled and buzzed and muttered.

“How do you know which Items to skip?” I demanded, laying down the Arithmetic in which I had been revelling in the Prime Factor.

“Just by experience,” explained the milkman. “You learn by experience which…”

“Yes,” I said sternly, “but why do simple people like us have to wander bewildered by the hour in all that maze of detail which applies only to business men, rich men, bond and stock holders, partners, receivers of royalties, annuities, premiums on exchange…?”

“I guess they leave it in,” said the milkman, “to make us happy. To make us realize how confused and complicated are the lives of business men. It does us good, I imagine, to get a glimpse of what it means to be well off.”

“Hm,” said I.

“Hm,” said Jim.

And in about four minutes he did Jim’s. And in three minutes he did mine.

And he got a figure far less than either Jimmie or I had got.

We don’t know if they are right or not.

But we’ve sent ’em in.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. This phrase means This means that one might just as well be punished for a big misdeed as a small one. This expression alludes to the old punishment for stealing sheep, which was hanging no matter what the age or size of the animal. ↩︎
2. The Tower of Babel is a parable in the Book of Genesis meant to explain the existence of different languages and cultures. ↩︎