Category: Greg-Jim Story Page 1 of 38

“If anything makes me sick,” declared Jimmie Frise, “it’s spring house-cleaning.”

“The law ought to be,” I agreed, “that spring house-cleaning had to be done on and not before May first. Then it would coincide with the opening of the trout season.”

“Perfect, perfect,” cried Jim. “Then the men could all go trout fishing for three or four days and leave the women to their frenzy.”

“Personally,” I submitted, “I can’t see the use of spring cleaning. It makes no difference. They’re always sweeping and dusting and using the vacuum anyway. They never rest. I think it is a kind of a spring disease in women, like trout fishing or gardening with men.”

“I wouldn’t doubt that at all,” said Jim. “They go kind of nuts, don’t they? They get all flushed and a wild look in their eyes?”

“It’s a form of spring fever,” I assured Jim. “Nature gives us all these deep instincts, like falling in love in June and feeling very industrious and saving in September, in order to keep us alive and going. This spring cleaning business probably dates away back to the cave man. I bet the caves were in a mess by the time spring came.”

“Old gnawed bones, and ashes and everything,” agreed Jim.

“So all the females of the cave man species,” I followed, “were suddenly filled with a furious fever of energy, and they got to work and held a kind of bone flinging and ash chucking orgy, to clean out the cave. It’s the same thing as in a wren, when she returns to the bird house in our gardens. She goes mad flinging out all the old sticks and debris of last year’s nests. If nature sends a lady wren nutty, there is no reason why it shouldn’t work with women.”

“Yet, the pity of it is,” said Jim, “that this fever isn’t necessary any more. Women keep homes clean all the year around, every day, sometimes twice a day. All this rumpus is sheer nuisance.”

“You can’t reason with them,” I warned.

“Naturally,” said Jim. “You can’t reason with a man in fever delirium. That’s what it is, spring delirium.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “we could talk it over with them and get them to put off until May first?”

“So we could go fishing until it’s over?” mused Jim.

“It’s a perfect arrangement,” I submitted.

“Yeah,” muttered Jim, “but there’s one little difficulty. My family has got me in a corner. They have it all arranged that I am to clean up the attic.”

“Do that in advance,” I cried. “Get it over with.”

“I might do that,” admitted Jim.

“It isn’t the work that upsets men,” I explained. “It’s the way the whole house is thrown into a wreck for nearly a week. That’s what gets a man’s goat. I don’t mind a little work.”

Antipathy To a Broom

“Would you help me with my attic?” inquired Jim.

“Why not?” I retorted. “What’s the trick about your attic?”

“Well, in a way,” said Jim, “the attic is mine, you see? All my stuff is up there. Guns, fishing tackle, decoys, work bench. I’ve got that old work bench up there. I’ve been tinkering at making decoys and things and there’s a lot of shavings and sawdust.”

“Aaaaah,” I said.

“That’s. why the women insist on me cleaning it up,” explained Jim. “I promised I’d clean it up last year. And the year before, I agreed to, and I did clean it up in a kind of a way. But they say it is my job and this year they’re kind of ganged up on me.”

“Of course, what you could do,” I offered, “is let it go to the bitter end and then one day you’ll come home and find they’ve done it in desperation.”

“They can’t,” said Jim. “I’ve got the key. I keep the attic locked ever since the days the kids were small. I didn’t want them going up and messing around my tackle and guns and stuff.”

“And you don’t want them messing around there now?” I added.

“Certainly not,” said Jim. “Even downstairs, where things are organized, I can never find anything I want after spring cleaning. It takes me about six weeks to get the house reorganized after spring cleaning. But if they ever got up into my attic, good heavens, I might never find anything again, ever,”

“I guess it’s up to you,” I sighed.

“I’m afraid it is,” said Jim. “The sawdust and shavings and things sometimes drift down through the cracks under the door. They are even saying that the sawdust is seeping through the ceilings. A man by rights ought to have a little cabin down at the foot of his yard, shouldn’t he?”

“After his kids start to grow up,” I agreed, “a man’s house is no longer his castle. It becomes only a sort of checker-board on which he plays a steadily losing game.”

“It was good of you offer to come and help me with the attic,” felt out Jim.

“Not at all,” I said, providing it’s not some night I can’t get away.”

“Oh, I’ll let you pick the night,” said Jim; which is a pretty low trick.

“I’m not particularly good at domestic work,” I submitted. “In fact, I have been told I am more a nuisance than a help.”

“Don’t you believe it,” cried Jim, heartily. “You’re a tidy little fellow. You can sweep while I shift the bigger stuff around.”

“Hm,” said I, neither positive nor negative; because there is some deep antipathy in my nature to a broom. Maybe some of my ancestors were stable boys.

To Clean Up the Attic

At any rate, Jim referred in a casual way to the cleaning of his attic from day to day, and finally, he tricked me.

“Did you hear about that short newsreel picture about bird dogs?” Jim inquired sweetly.

“No, where is it?” I asked.

“It’s at some theatre on Bloor St.,” said Jim. “I’ll look it up. It shows bird dogs pointing quail, and the gunners walking up to the point and flushing the birds and making lefts and rights. Boy, they say it is one of the most wonderful sport pictures ever produced.”

“Let’s go tonight,” I said promptly.

“Can you get off tonight?” asked Jim, pointedly.

“This is the first night I’ve got to myself in a week,” I assured him.

So Jim got up and pretended to hunt through the theatre ads for the picture and couldn’t find it. Then he telephoned one of the movie exchanges, and they said the picture wouldn’t be showing in the local theatres for another month.

“I must,” said Jim, innocently, “have seen the ad somewhere else. But say, look here, if you’re free tonight, how about coming over and giving me a hand with that attic of mine.”

“Er,” I said.

“Let’s get it over and done with. It’s only a month to the fishing season. You wouldn’t want me tied up with a lot of house-cleaning on May the first?” demanded Jim.

And since I couldn’t think of any graceful excuse, I was roped.

“It’s a perfect night for it,” continued Jim. “The family is all going to be out. We can have the house to ourselves. If we find any short cuts, we can use them, with nobody around.”

“Like chucking shavings, et cetera, out the attic window,” I instanced.

So waiting until around 8 o’clock to allow Jim’s family to leave the house and also to allow my supper to settle, I strolled around to Jim’s and he led me without delay upstairs and via the little stairway into the attic, which is just one big unfinished room, perfectly suited to a man’s needs.

It was a mess. No wonder Jim kept the attic door locked and the key in his pocket. One corner was full of decoy ducks, like coal heaped in a coal bin. Another corner had an enormous heap of what appeared to be old magazines, hunting coats, rubber boots and fish baskets. In the midst stood a small carpenter’s work bench, and a foot deep all around it lay a drift of shavings, sawdust, hunks of wood, and all the ingredients of a fine life devoted to making things of no particular value or success.

“Well, Jimmie,” I said, “quite an evening’s work.”

“Now,” said Jim, very energetic. “I’ve got it figured out. I’ll start shifting everything to a new place, like, and you follow me with the broom.”

“If your wife,” I said, “ever saw this place.”

“I’ve been scared stiff this last few months,” admitted Jim. “Haunted, by day and by night.”

I peeled off my coat and hung it on a nail. Jim handed me the broom.

“I’ll start here, with these decoys,” suggested Jim. “I’ll shift them all over to that corner, and you sweep. Then when you catch up to me, I’ll shift the decoys and what will be under them to another corner, and so on. We’ll keep going around and around, see, until it is all cleaned up.”

“That’s the way the women do,” I admitted. “Shift everything around.”

So Jim started picking up big armfuls of decoys and carting them to the next corner, and to fill in the time, I started batting with the broom at the dusty rough, unfinished planking and rafters of the attic wall and ceiling.

Suddenly, in the garish light of the naked electric light bulb, something fluttered out from the planks.

“A bat,” I shouted.

Jim dropped an armful of ducks and peered into the already dusty glare of light.

“Where?” he demanded.

We stood perfectly still, and heard a small scratching sound.

“Here,” I said, swinging the broom.

The bat leaped heavily into space and wobbled sleepily around, narrowly missing our heads.

“Swing it,” roared Jim, snatching up a long piece of scantling that lay in the debris on the floor.

I swung. The bat ducked. I ducked; the bat swung.

“Look out,” shouted Jim, charging for the narrow stairway. “It’ll get downstairs.”

But he was too late. The bat, attracted perhaps by the warm current of air coming up the attic stairway, followed down, and we were just in time to see it wobble on half-wakened wings, into the glow of light at the foot of the attic stairs.

“After it,” commanded Jimmie, fiercely. “The women would go crazy if they saw that bat in the house.”

Riot and Confusion

Down the stairs we thundered, and commenced a cautious search, in room after room, listening, holding our breath, waiting to hear the faint scratching of the bat hiding behind some picture or mirror.

“Prod around,” said Jim.

So we prodded around, shoving at pictures on the wall, shifting dressers and keeping a wary eye.

“Turn on the bright lights,” I commanded, “blind the beast.”

Suddenly, soundlessly, the little bat came staggering and wobbling along the hallway ceiling and darted into the room.

Jim swung. The chandelier crashed terribly and splintered glass flew in all directions. The bat darted out.

“After it!” shouted Jim, colliding his hunk of scantling along walls and doors.

I heard another violent crash. Jim had swung at the bat in the front bedroom and swiped all the ornaments off the top of a chest of drawers.

“Downstairs,” cried Jim, leading the chase.

“Be careful,” I begged. “Don’t wreck the house.”

“Better wreck the house than have that bat, in it when the folks get home,” gasped Jimmie, crouched and searching like a gangster in a movie.

We found the bat after we had disarranged all the pictures in the living room and shifted all the furniture and upset everything on the buffet. It was up in the chandelier.

“Poke with your broom,” whispered Jim. “Poke it out towards me.”

Jim poised like a baseball player, gripping the scantling mightily.

I poked with the broom at the poor little beastie. fluttered out towards Jim.

Jim swung. The chandelier swayed madly, tinkled into a thousand splinters of glass and then, slowly losing its wiry grip of the ceiling, came down with about a square foot of plaster.

“I missed,” moaned Jim.

“Like heck you did,” I said, from my shelter under the dining-room table.

The house was full of dust, riot and confusion.

“Where did it go?” I begged.

“I saw it go upstairs again,” said Jim wearily.

So we followed. After 10 minutes, we found under the bathtub. It eluded us again, and to our joy, it turned up the attic stairs again.

“Good,” said Jim. “Now we’ve got it on our own territory.”

So we went after it, and got into Jim’s private attic just in time to see the bewildered little creature alight flat against the rough beams of the ceiling and tuck itself cleverly and quickly in behind some great two-inch stringers of the roof.

“Aaaaah,” sighed Jim. “Leave him there. Leave him right there, still in his winter sleep, the little devil, and some nice spring evening, I’ll open the window and let him fly out.”

“It’s best to leave a bat alone,” I agreed. “Just let him fly away.”

“He sure has wasted the evening,” said Jim.

“We’d better quit this job,” I offered, “and go down and straighten things up the best way we can before the folks get back.”

So we turned the light off, carefully locked the door, went down and telephoned the drug store for a couple of dozen new light bulbs, and straightened all the pictures and dusted everything, and did the best we could with the fallen chandelier.

“There’ll be the dickens to pay,” I said, after we had worked for an hour and still everything looked disturbed, somehow.

“It’ll give them a taste,” said Jim, “of what we men have to suffer when they’re spring cleaning.”

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 30, 1946.

“Aw, the poor little tyke!” exclaimed Jimmie Frise.

As we promenaded along the neighborhood shopping street, we were halted by the screaming outcries of a baby in a perambulator parked outside a store.

The busy afternoon traffic, consisting of women mostly, went happily by, arms full of parcels.

And not one of them so much as cast a glance at the roaring baby.

“You’d think some of these women,” I said indignantly, “would at least take a look to see if a safety-pin is sticking into it.”

We went over and looked down at the child.

It was a boy child. You could tell that by the wide mouth and the general snubbiness and chubbiness of it. Its mouth was stretched wide enough to swallow an orange, its eyes were tight shut, tears flowed over its cheeks. And it screamed.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I leaned down soothingly “Hey.”

The baby seemed to shut off its wind. Opened its eyes wide. Took one agonized look at me and then seemed to have a convulsion. It turned a maroon color. Shut its eyes. Opened its mouth. Bent itself back deeper in the pram and–roared!

Jimmie and I moved on. We stopped a couple of doors farther along and looked back.

“Just look at those women passing by,” I gritted. “Not one of them paying the slightest…”

“Women,” explained Jim. “aren’t so sensitive to a baby screaming as men. They’re used to it They know it doesn’t mean anything. They realize it’s just a baby’s way of taking exercise.”

“Exercise?” I snorted. “That baby’s dying. That baby’s suffering. I bet a safety-pin is sticking two inches into it.”

“Pawff,” said Jim. “It’s just scared. Maybe it was asleep when its mother left it there to go into the store for a minute. The pram stops and the baby wakes up. It looks around and starts to roar for its mamma. Probably it is one of those bad-tempered babies.”

We paused and glanced back.

“Just look at those heartless dames,” I pointed out.

Right beside the baby, three middle-aged women, their arms full of parcels, had stopped to chatter gaily. They didn’t even so much as glance at the baby. They leaned forward towards each other and got off witticisms that must have been killing, the way they leaned away from each other and laughed. We could hear their voices from where we stood. They had to talk loudly to hear, each other above the howling of the infant. Yet not one of these kindly housewives gave the child so much as a sideways glance.

“You see?” said Jim. “Women don’t get all overheated over a child bawling. They know it’s just routine. It’s part of the scene. Perfectly natural.”

“Darn it,” I said, the piercing screams penetrating my nerves. “Let’s go on.”

So we wandered along the block, in the pleasant sunshine, locking at the shopping crowd and in the windows, and gradually getting out of earshot. In front of nearly all the stores, babies were parked in prams Some of them were asleep. Some were awake, looking solemnly at the moving figures of the traffic. Some looked scared and self-conscious, even at two years of age.

“I think a mother, Jim,” I enunciated, “takes an awful chance leaving a baby alone in a pram like this out in front of stores. I don’t mean for fear of having it stolen, nor even having something knock the pram over and injure the baby. What I mean is, a little baby can get a scare or a fright that might affect it psychologically all the rest of its life.”

“Not At Six Inches”

“Pawff,” scoffed Jimmie. “These women have to do their shopping, don’t they? Should they leave the baby alone at home? Should they burden themselves in the store with a big, wriggling, fat armful of baby?”

“Nobody knows,” I asserted, “at what age a human being begins to learn. We used to think that the age of seven was the beginning of the power of reasoning in a child. But lately, the psychologists are doubting this. They think a child starts to observe and learn from the hour of its birth.”

“So what?” said Jim, as we strolled.

“A baby,” I exampled, “is left sitting out here alone in front of a store. He is a little alarmed at being left. He sees his mother vanish. He observes all manner of queer strangers swarming by. He notes the rumble of motor traffic and the growing roar of a street car passing. All this excites him and makes him tense. Suddenly, a playful dog comes along, jumps up and puts his front paws on the edge of the pram and looks, with laughing tongue hanging out, into the baby’s face. At a distance of six inches.”

“So?” said Jim.

“Now, that baby,” I said, “has never seen a dog close up before. The glittering eyes, the lolling tongue, the white sharp teeth! Why, that baby is likely to get such a scare his whole future life will be altered, misshapen. possibly ruined.”

“What nonsense!” cried Jim. “Why, every child loves doggies…”

“But not suddenly,” I countered, “close up, at six inches, at a time the baby is already keyed up. I assure you, Mr. Frise, courage is largely a matter of never having been scared before until now. If we could get all children to the age of 10 without ever having known what fright is, we would have a noble race indeed.”

“I believe in treating ’em rough,” replied Jim. “Pampering is what softens us. Get a baby used to the rough and tumble of life, and he’ll grow up a useful citizen.”

“I don’t know,” I mused. “I’ve been reading all this stuff in the papers about tragic fires and children left by their parents alone in the house…”

“There I agree with you,” said Jim. “Little children should never be left alone…”

“How about all these kids being left alone along the street, right here?” I demanded quickly. “It’s exactly the same thing. Convenience. The convenience of the parents is what makes them leave small children alone in the house. It is convenience that leaves these babies out in front of the stores.”

“It’s a far different thing,” protested Jimmie.

“Nothing is different,” I explained, “when it is the same at the root. What we’ve got to get after, these days, is that whole business of the convenience of the parents It is not merely at the root of these fire tragedies. It is at the root of the juvenile delinquency problem¹. The convenience of the parents is the reason why a child has time or inclination to get into serious mischief.”

“Maybe not the convenience of the parents,” corrected Jim. “How about the convenience of the parents’ boss? Or the convenience of our present form of society, which permits parents of young children to work long hours in order merely to live and keep their children alive. What would you think of a law that forbade the mothers of children between infancy and 14 years of age working at any job that took them from their homes?”

“But thousands would starve!” I protested.

“Not if we paid a proper mother’s allowance,” triumphed Jim. “If a woman can prove she can earn $30 a week and has a baby, she would automatically get a pension of $30 a week until the child was 14.”

“The millennium!²” I scoffed.

“No, that’s a proper and rational system of pension,” stated Jim firmly. “We’ve got to have children. We’ve got to have good children. Okay, we pay the mothers what they have demonstrated they can earn, in order to free them for their proper job of motherhood.”

Educate the Parents

“You’ve got something there, Jim,” I ad mitted. “Only, it will come high on the taxpayer.”

“Things are going to come a lot higher on the taxpayer,” agreed Jim, “before the world is through with its present difficulties. We are all so busy trying to escape taxes that our taxes are rising all the time due to our stinginess. If we want good men and women, we’ve got to have good babies and good boys and girls.”

“What’s your solution,” I inquired, “of the juvenile delinquency problem?”

“It is not juvenile delinquency at all, it’s adult delinquency,” replied Jim. “If a child is brought up on a delinquency charge, it is the parents who should be tried. And if any punishment is meted out, it should be the parents who are punished.”

“Aw, an awful lot of parents of juvenile delinquents,” I protested, “are poor, weak, worried, helpless little women…”

“Okay, then,” corrected Jimmie. “If the parents are not punishable, for neglect, then they are fit subjects for education. The court should sentence such parents to a six months course in child care and child psychology. There should be a large school maintained, just the way we maintain jails and prisons. It would be a ‘corrective institution’ in the best sense of the word. An all-year-round school, night and day, for the correction of the parents of juvenile delinquents.”

“Jim,” I admired, pausing, “you’re in great form today. It must be the spring sunshine. Let’s turn and walk back now.”

We had come to the end of the interesting blocks of the neighborhood shopping district. Every neighborhood shopping district has an interesting stretch. But it dwindles off, at both ends, into dull and uninteresting blocks.

“I hope that kid,” I said, “has stopped screaming by now.”

“Nobody’d let it yell,” said Jim, “for five or 10 minutes on end.”

But, when we reached the first block again, above the racket of traffic, I thought I could hear faint piercing shrieks. We quickened our pace. And sure enough, ever louder grew the screams, and we came in sight of the cake shop, in front of which the same pram stood and the same ear-splitting uproar continued.

“Jim,” I cried, starting to double, “we’ve got to do something. This is unbearable!”

When we arrived, the same crowd of nice local housewives was hurrying smilingly along or stopping to chatter, in complete indifference to the riot right under their feet.

A small boy with a dog was standing looking into, the pram with an expression of quiet interest and enjoyment. He was watching the twisting and yowling of the blue-clad baby with considerable satisfaction. He was making his own mouth go in imitation of the contortions of the baby’s.

“Here,” I said, pushing the little boy aside, “let me have him.”

And I scooped the baby up in my arms. Now, it is 20 years since I last changed a diaper. But I remembered enough to make the necessary exploration to satisfy myself that there was no safety-pin sticking into him.

“What do we do?” demanded Jim, taking hold of the pram handles.

“I’ll hold it up,” I suggested, “to the cake store window.”

And I went and held the infant up high before the cake store windows and let it screech and yowl and wrestle and twist. There were six ladies shopping in the cake store. I elevated my eyebrows anxiously at all of them, one after the other, through the window: but they all shook their heads and shrugged.

The baby by this time was really having a fit, and quite a number of people began to slow down and start a small crowd of spectators.

“Where on earth,” I demanded, “can the woman be?”

I moved over to the windows of the self-serve grocery store next to the cake shop and held the child up at both its windows. Large numbers of customers came and looked, but none of them showed any maternal interest.

“Call inside,” suggested Jimmie.

So I went in to the turnstile inside the grocery and held the screaming baby aloft. This attracted silence.

“Is the mother of this child,” I bellowed above the baby’s clamor, “in this store?”

Several ladies came running from the back of the store, but none of them was the mother.

I went outside and joined Jimmie in front of the cake store, where he was hanging on to the pram.

“Put it back,” hissed Jim. “Stick it back in the pram and let’s get the heck out of here.”

“Jim,” I stated angrily, “this is a matter of public concern. This is something that has to be dealt with. This may be an ABANDONED CHILD!”

“That’s what suddenly occurred to me,” gritted Jim, “so let’s get the heck…”

“JIM!” I said very shocked, from behind the squalling brat’s bonnet.

“Let ‘Em Holler!”

At which moment, a shrill scream from up the street brought the attention of us all, including the crowd of loitering shoppers and the little boy with the dog, to a young woman sprinting towards us, her arms outstretched, emitting a short, high yelp at every jump.

She grabbed the baby from me and almost bowled me over.

“You brutes!” she choked.

“You brutes!” echoed two ladies in the rapidly growing crowd.

An elderly man with spectacles took a short jujutsu hold on Jimmie’s arm from behind and pinned him.

A lady stepped to my flank, drew a quart bottle of milk from a paper bag and assumed a threatening attitude.

“Don’t you move!” she warned, laying the bottle back to throw.

And at that exact instant, Constable Angus McLeod, a good friend of Jim’s and mine – we go jack-rabbit hunting – loomed from the back of the crowd, saying:

“Here, here, here, what goes on!”

“These brutes,” sobbed the mother, “stole my baby…”

Angus looked at us sternly.

“Angus,” I said, “for Pete’s sake…”

The little boy with the dog piped up:

“I saw two little girls,” he said, “wheel the baby from away up the street. They left it

here.”

“Good for you, boy…” I began.

“Just a second,” said Angus. “Now, boy, what was this?”

“I saw two little girls, their names is Minnie and Lana,” he said, “wheel the baby from up at the other end of the block. And they left it here.”

“And how did you get mixed up?” inquired Angus, turning to us.

“The child,” I stated hotly, “was having a conniption fit. It was screeching. I simply picked it up to see if a pin was sticking into it…”

“Uzzy mussies wuzzy,” cried the mother, clutching the child.

“Uzzy muzzy nothing,” said Angus to her. “It serves you right. Leaving a baby loose out on the public highway. It’s a mercy worse didn’t happen.”

“I was only in the store a minute…” protested the young woman.

“We’ve been listening to this baby yell,” I interrupted, “for 15 minutes…”

“I met a friend I haven’t seen for YEARS…” faltered the young mother. “It didn’t seem only a minute or two…”

“Let it be a lesson to you,” propounded Angus to her and with his arms brushed all and sundry on their way.

“Boys,” he said, as we sauntered back along the street, “let me give you a piece of advice from a professional policeman. Never interfere in a domestic situation, under any circumstances. Whether it be man or woman, old maid, mother-in-law or baby, never, never interfere in a domestic situation.”

“You mean.” I said, “let ’em holler?”

“Let ’em holler,” said Angus.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. During and after the war there was an increase in youth crime that caused a lot of hand-wringing. ↩︎
2. I’m not entirely sure what this exclamation means. At the time was the discussion over social security, old-age pensions, and family allowances. I think the idea was that these programs were new and “futuristic” and therefore bringing closer the new millennium where things would be better. It might also have been a derogatory term against those who were in favour of it. ↩︎

What chance has a heckler now? Half the audience are ex-hecklers who know all the tricks

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 21, 1942.

“With the way business is going,” said Jimmie Frise, “it is about time we began looking around for some nice juicy government job.”

“Why so?” I inquired. “There will always be newspapers, won’t there?”

“Maybe so,” countered Jim, “but will newspapers be bothered with the kind of stuff we can do? That’s the problem we’ve got to face. The world is getting more serious all the time. Everything is being rationed. Step by step, government is taking over everything. One of these days they’ll take over the newspapers.”

“Oh, yeah?” I demanded. “How about the freedom of the press?”

“Well, is that any more precious than the freedom,” retorted Jim, “of a man to buy what he likes and sell what he likes? Is it any more precious than freedom of speech? And there are a lot of guys locked up in concentration camps¹, right in this province, who speeched too freely. Ah, no, my boy. one of these days, they will ration newspapers and some chartered accountant will come in as administrator of our newspapers. And the first two guys he will throw out will be us. We’re only frills.”

“Frills!” I snorted.

“Sure,” said Jim. “We’re just a luxury, like ripe olives. What the newspapers will print, under government control, will be the facts. A newspaper will read like a Canadian National time table. You will get the weather forecast and the speech in full of the minister of justice. With applause after each paragraph.”

“How long would the people put up with such nonsense?” I scoffed.

“Quite as long.” submitted Jim, “as they would put up with gas rationing and wage and price ceilings, and rationing of sugar and tires and clothes and all else. In the name of war, my dear sir, we will put up with anything. There is only one good job to have nowadays; and that’s a government job.”

“Well, I never expected to live to see the day,” I heaved.

“Who do you know up at Ottawa?” asked Jim. “We ought to have some pull. Couldn’t you get the job of collector of customs or something for the Port of Toronto? Think of all the fishing tackle that would pass through your hands as collector of customs.”

“Those days are gone forever, Jim,” I sighed. “There was a day when a man with pull could wangle himself into a job regardless of what his qualifications were. But government is no longer merely political. It is becoming industrial, financial, social and everything else. It is becoming expert. There are no better bankers in the banking business than the government has working for it now. And no better industrialists working on their own than are working for the government. In the old days, a smart financial man or a smart manufacturer could make a million dollars as easily as rolling over in bed. But the day came when the government took it all off him in taxes and super taxes. Why should a man worry about his own business and the government’s as well? So all the smart guys are working for the government, making just as much as they had left over after the government was through with them in the old days; and having a lot of fun as well.”

The True Art of Heckling

“I guess,” admitted Jim ruefully, “we haven’t got anything the government wants.”

“We could do propaganda,” I suggested.

“Propaganda won’t be necessary any more,” explained Jim, “when the government controls everything. There won’t be any opposition to propaganda.”

“We could take an active part in politics,” I offered.

“Too late,” said Jim hollowly. “There are about 20,000 guys ahead of us.”

“I attended quite a number of political meetings this last two or three years, Jim,” I said earnestly. “I could get witnesses to prove it,”

“Did you heckle?” demanded Jimmie.

“Heckle?” I inquired.

“You don’t take an active interest in politics unless you heckle,” stated Jim. “When I was a young kid, I loved to go to political meetings to help heckle. Down in Birdseye Center, we had a School of Heckling. It was run by a bad old guy who owned the harness shop in the village. Whenever a meeting was scheduled for our community, old Sam, the harness maker, would start his school for hecklers and we would all gather in the harness shop and learn our parts.”

“You must have been very young,” I suggested.

“Ah, you think of heckling,” said Jim, “as merely asking questions. The true art of heckling is the art of putting a meeting on the bum whether with questions or marbles or chair legs…”

“Marbles?” I protested.

“Look,” said Jim. “The meeting is called to order and proceeds. All is quiet and orderly. The chairman makes his speech. The business of the meeting is disposed of. Then the speakers begin, warming up the audience for the main speaker of the evening who is not yet arrived, but who is momentarily. He, of course, is a prominent politician, making speeches in half a dozen parts of the riding in the one night.”

“It’s the same today,” I confessed.

“Now,” said Jim, “old Sam, the master heckler, is in the audience. And we, his pupils of all ages, from boys of 15 up to old gentlemen of eighty, are discreetly scattered over the hall in little groups. The best way to seat hecklers is this: put the main heckler of the group in the middle, with a guard on either side of him. In the row in front of him, two men, sitting directly in front. And in the row directly behind, three more, to keep people from beaning him.”

“That makes eight hecklers to a squad,” I calculated.

“Correct,” said Jim. “Now, when the candidate arrives, the applause and cheers break out and the hecklers let go a few boos.”

“Correct,” I remembered.

“He has no time to waste,” said Jim. “And as soon as he reaches the platform, the chairman introduces him and he gets going. The first thing that happens, right up near the front row, an elderly gentleman in the audience gets his foot caught in the rungs of his chair.”

“How do you mean?” I inquired.

“It’s very simple,” explained Jim. “As soon as the speaker gets nicely started, you see this old bird up near the front starting to squirm and struggle. Everybody around him tries to help him. He has got his foot twisted around in the side rungs of the chair he is sitting on. The more he struggles, the more excited he gets, and the chair starts banging and people stand up to help him and before they get his foot free, there has been a dandy disturbance. Everybody at the back is shouting ‘sit down’ and the speaker has had to stop his speech, and is looking embarrassed, the way all politicians in a hurry look.”

“Oh, boy,” I gloated.

“When quiet is restored,” went on Jim, “and the speaker gets nicely going again, the marbles start. From three or four different parts of the hall, you hear marbles starting to roll. You hear them fall ticking on the floor and then quietly rolling. At a little distance, you can’t hear them at all. But nearby you can hear them and you can’t help but look down at them and twist around to try and stop them with your foot. If you have four or five fellows with marbles scattered over the hall, and they all start at the one time, you have got people squirming and twisting all over the place.

“Gee, Jim,” I breathed.

“Oh, then there are the questions, asked by the squads,” said Jim, “and the lady who takes ill and jumps up, holding her hands to her mouth and running for the door. That’s usually reserved until right at the place the speaker starts his real oratory. Then there is the late comer. He should be a farmer. He comes in, right at the peak of the speech, and walks up the aisle, to the front, looking for a seat, stopping and looking up each row as he starts back from the front. He should even attempt to walk in two or three of the rows of seats, even when there isn’t a seat. That always creates a swell confusion.”

“Jim,” I interrupted. “You’ve got it. We will found a heckling school. Right here in Toronto. We can get hundreds of students enrolled. We can wreck any meeting in the country. The government would have to reward us with jobs. Maybe they would make us senators.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Jim, “I was noticing just the other day that they are having some sort of reorganization of the council up in George township. The reeve and half the council have gone to war and they are having trouble appointing substitutes.”

“Not a township meeting,” I protested.

“We’ve got to get some practice,” declared Jim. “There is no use starting anything without knowing a little about it. Maybe this heckling school idea is only another hare-brained enterprise. We ought to do a little experimenting, in a small way. before we launch out.”

So we found out that they were having a big meeting in George township on Thursday night. We got 25 cents worth of marbles. I borrowed an old press camera from Tom Wilson, our cameraman. It had no lens, which is the valuable part of a camera anyway; but it did have the flash bulb attachment which was what we wanted. And I loaded my pockets, in true press cameraman style, with the little flash bulbs they use.

The meeting was crowded for a fact. We got there at half-past seven in order to look the ground over, and even so, the hall was almost filled already. Jim got a seat in the second row. And I, identified as a newspaperman by the camera I carried open and ready in my hands, was permitted to sit at the edge of the platform.

By eight o’clock, the hall was full and all the space at the back taken up with standing room only.

The meeting was called to order at 8.05 sharp and the chairman, a very masterful looking gentleman in a blue suit, outlined the situation. He pointed out that two factions existed in the township. These factions had an equal right to be heard. He was going to see they received a hearing. And at this point of his speech, a very large policeman walked slowly down the aisle and wheeled and walked slowly back.

The first speaker was indignant looking gentleman. He was one of those people who was born with an indignant expression on his face. His manner of speech was indignant. He would utter a quick sentence. Then pause and glare around. Then utter another quick sentence. And a long pause, to let it sink in.

This was pie for Jimmie. He got his foot caught in the rung of his chair. He started to squirm. He started to struggle. He began to fight. The chair rattled and banged finally Jim and the chair and everything fell over, causing a great excitement. Fifteen people got to their feet in the first two rows to help him, and the whole hall got to its feet to see what the trouble was. The indignant man was now very indignant, because the pause was all of two minutes and he forgot what he had been saying.

Jimmie kept stirring and fidgetting and rubbing his ankle, which irritated the speaker terribly. Finally, Jim got up and hobbled out to the aisle.

“Is there a doctor in the house?” he inquired, in a hoarse whisper.

Ten rows back, he almost collapsed on his poor ankle, and a young lad of about 15 gave Jim his aisle seat. Jim sank into it.

The speaker had now wound up and was really pounding his fist into his palm. I stealthily slid down off the platform edge and crept along with my camera raised. I huddled there a few minutes, aiming my camera at him. Then I let fly. The flash bulb caused everybody in the place to rise half in their seats. The speaker forgot his argument. I crept back to my place and hoisted myself up on the edge of the platform again.

“Now,” rasped the indignant man, “in the first place…”

Up around Jimmie, in the tenth row, I saw people stirring and twisting in their seats. The marbles had started. Balloons at a hockey game are nothing to marbles. Everybody wants to kick a marble.

“Order, order,” warned the chairman, quietly.

The speaker had ceased speaking and was glaring redly at the meeting. People on the sides were standing up to see what was going on in the middle. I slid off the platform edge and began creeping, bent over, towards speaker again. I aimed the empty camera at him. Bang went the flash bulb.

“He’s a Fake”

“Order!” bellowed the chairman, hammering on the table.

When I turned away from dazzling the speaker, I saw Jim was surrounded by a struggling group of citizens.

All over the hall, people were standing and jumping on their chairs to see the excitement. I started to shove and fight my way up the aisle, my camera held high, as if to try to get a picture of the melee around Jim.

“Hey,” I heard a voice yell, “this bird has no lens in his camera! I know something about cameras..! He’s a fake.”

Hands gripped my shoulders. All was hubbub and riot. Strange angry faces swept around me and I was yanked this way and that. The policeman got me, and after one look at my camera, seeing the big gaping hole where the lens should be, hoisted me aloft and carried me out.

Jim was gripped by two large citizens who happened to find a pocket full of marbles on him.

We went out the door about the same time. And down the steps.

The policeman followed us down and out to our car, professionally.

“None of them tricks around here,” he said, not unkindly. “The minute you pulled that old trick with your foot in the rungs of the chair, there was at least fifty old-timers in that meeting who knew what was up.”

“Well, they didn’t need to get so rough,” declared Jim. “One of those big birds nearly twisted my arm off.”

“Who do you represent?” inquired the cop. “Henderson or Billings?”

“Never heard of them,” said Jim. “We were just out for some fun.”

“Well, times have changed,” said the cop. “People are taking an interest in public affairs now. It isn’t politics they’re interested in, any more. It’s themselves they’re interested in. And when people get interested in themselves, woe betide any monkey business from politicians or anybody else.”

“Have you any kids?” asked Jim. “Here’s some marbles for them.”

---

Editor’s Note:

1. Note that at the time, concentration camp would be a generic term for an internment camp of some type. Now the term is more associated with the Nazi interment and death camps of World War 2. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 14, 1936.

“March,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the most miserable month of the year.”

“Especially,” I contributed, “the middle of March. Because by the end of March you can smell April.”

“March,” went on Jim, “is like three o’clock of the morning of the year.”

“All my friends who are bums,” I stated, “tell me March is a terribly hard month for them. They can’t make a touch. Not a touch. It is as if, in March, people have come to the end of their kindness.”

“It’s like that hour,” continued Jim, “before the beginning of the dawn.”

“Well, I know that hour,” I cried. “For two years in the war I saw every dawn. Winter, summer, storm, or fine. I saw the dawn. In the trenches we stood to arms, every man jack, cook, bugler and all, at one hour before the dawn. And there we stood, millions of us, all nations, friend and foe, in league-long lines, hushed, waiting, watching, tense.”

“It was the hour of attack,” said Jim.

“Like some queer, pagan, ghastly worshippers, we stood,” I recited, “in those foul ditches looking up at the black and dreadful sky. Little winds moaned. It was cold, with a ghostly cold. It was the hour before the first cock crew. The hour when bones rise out of the ground in a danse macabre. And all around us were bones. Bones of our comrades, our companions, of only yesterday.”

“You know dawns,” admitted Jim.

“Aye,” I said. “I have no love for the hour before the dawn nor for the month of March.”

“The ancients said,” declared Jimmie, “that March was the season of disasters.”

“So it would be,” I explained, “because the blood in us is running cold and thin after the long winter. Our hearts are colder, our emotions checked and sluggish. Wars might start in March, massacres, pogroms. The best instincts of humanity are mere stubble by March.”

“And in September, at their full flower and fruit,” said Jim. “Ah, how I love September.”

“I love June,” I admitted. “June, about the sixth.”

“Let us watch our step this month,” said Jim, who was at the steering wheel, and we were nearly home. “Let us tip off our friends to be watchful. Let us try to be kind and friendly. Let us try consciously to inject a little warmth of heart into life in this exhausted and embittered season.”

“Maybe we could see a bum any minute,” I agreed. “I’ve got a dime¹. It would be nice to just pull up beside the curb and open the door and suddenly toss a bum a dime.”

“You’ve got the idea,” said Jim.

We drove along. How dirty the streets, with their foul shoals of ice and snow in the shelter of the houses all along the south side of the streets. The old tin cans, papers gummed into the slush and ice of a whole winter. The untidiness of March, the usedness, the second-handness.

The Little Brown Dog

A lady in her house dress was standing out on the sidewalk and as we passed her I saw she was weeping. Her face was screwed up and she was huddling her arms about her, clutching her elbows in her palms.

“Whoa, Jim,” I commanded. “What’s the matter here?”

Jim backed the car. I leaped out and hurried to the lady.

“My little dog,” she wept. “She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve been in all the yards. Not a sign.”

And she stopped speaking because her voice had gone up into only a squeak.

“Ma’am,” I said, “we’ll help you find your dog. What kind of a dog was it?”

“A little brown dog,” wept the lady.

“What breed, ma’am?” I asked.

“I forget,” said the lady, biting her lips. “A little brown dog. A dear little one.”

“Pekingese?” I inquired. “Pomeranian?”

“No, no,” wept the lady. “A little brown one, about like that. O-ho! I have had her six years and she never disappeared before.”

“A lady dog, ma’am?” I inquired.

“Yes, her name is Dollie.”

“We’ll drive around the block,” I comforted her. “We’ll find her. She hasn’t been gone long?”

“About half an hour,” the lady squeaked, wiping her nose in a small ball of hanky.

“We’ll get her in no time,” I assured her, starting for the car.

“What is it?” asked Jim eagerly.

“She’s lost her dog.” I explained, “so I said we’d drive around a block or two and find it for her.”

“Well,” said Jim, starting the car, “it isn’t exactly a disaster or a massacre. But after all it is the month of March.”

“It’s a small brown dog,” I informed Jim.

So we drove around a block, slowly, looking in all the side drives and stopping at each turn to look up and down all vistas. There were plenty of dogs. But no little brown ones. When we came past the lady again, she was still standing hugging her arms around her and looking down side drives and calling, “Dollie, Dollie,” in a high, anxious voice.

I waved reassuringly to her and called out the window:

“We’ll do a couple more blocks.”

And she said “Thank you” heart brokenly.

“Curious,” I said, as we turned to circle another block, “the way some women love a dog. Almost like a child.”

“Lots of men go kind of crazy over a dog, too,” said Jim.

We saw wirehairs and spaniels, police dogs and Bostons, but no little brown dogs. Then we saw a small brown spaniel, and slowed up, but it was named Joe, as a little boy told us. He hadn’t seen any dog you would call Dollie around.

In the distance we saw a flock of dogs romping on the street, so we drove away up and studied them. But there were no little brown dogs there either. Just to be sure I called “Dollie” out the window, but none of them looked at us. They were busy.

“Aw, let’s go home,” said Jim.

“There you go,” I said. “March has got you, too. We can do a couple more blocks without doing ourselves any harm, and think of the decent thing we would do if we could restore that lady her dog.”

“All right,” said Jim, and we turned another way and made a circle of two more blocks. We saw setters and terriers and Scotties; we saw a great big black Newfoundland and a dachshund, but no little brown lady dog.

Seized By the Collar

“Listen,” said Jim, “a dog always turns up. Let’s go on home, rather than go back and tell the poor woman we saw no sign of her pup. It will be kinder to leave her thinking we are still chasing all over creation looking for it than to turn up and say we haven’t seen it in ten blocks.”

“I suppose,” I confessed. “But it is a pretty Marchy trick just the same. I bet if this was June we’d keep on looking.”

“Forget it,” said Jim, and steered for home.

But hardly had we got into our stride before there, trotting down the sidewalk on little twinkling feet, with a plume of a tail curled back over her back, was the cutest little brown you ever did see.

“Dollie,” I hailed merrily.

And the little creature halted, wheeled, set its head on one side and looked up at us brightly. “Hello, Dollie.” I said warmly.

“Pick her up,” said Jim.

So I got out and went to Dollie. But Dollie, with large bug eyes pointing in two opposite directions and with a look of constitutional alarm in both of them, started to waddle off on her mincing tiny feet. I followed, coaxingly.

“H’yuh, h’yuh,” I wheedled, “Pfft, sktch, sktch, h’yuh, Dollie.”

Jim coasted slowly alongside of us.

“Jim,” I said quietly, “park and come and help me. She is naturally timid. She’s lost and nervous. We’ll have to corner her.”

So Jim, with a loud sigh, parked the car, got out and joined me. Dollie had halted at a side drive and was looking back suspiciously at us.

We walked casually closer. I turned in the side drive just as she did. I ran and got ahead of her and, spreading my arms wide, cut off her retreat while Jim, dashing from behind, swept Dollie up in his arms, and we walked out the drive.

“Nice Dollie,” I soothed, patting the head of the little gold-fishy looking dog, who wriggled and yapped in a silly little voice.

We tossed her in the back seat and got aboard. As Jim drove off, I thought I heard a shout, and looked back, and saw a man looking out the front door of the house we had been alongside. I naturally supposed that he was perhaps curious at what we had been doing in his side drive. But there was no use stopping and going back, just to satisfy idle curiosity.

We drove five blocks back to where the lady lived. But she was not in sight when we slowed up.

“Toot your horn a few times,” I said, “and I’ll try this house here, where she was in front of.”

Another lady answered the door. No, she said, there was no dog lost there. So I tried the houses next door, both sides.

“Would you know of a lady, a neighbor,” I asked at these houses, when they said they had no dog lost, “who would have lost a little brown dog?”

They thought, and looked up at the sky and put their fingers on their teeth, but couldn’t think of any such lady.

“Maybe,” called Jim, above Dollie’s loud and angry yapping, “she lives across the road. Try a couple of houses on this other side.”

So I was just asking at the third house when a car came up with a rush, pulled in just ahead of Jim’s car, and a man in his shirt sleeves leaped out and tore around at Jimmie. I heard loud shouting between them and hurried across. The stout, dark, shirt-sleeved man had Dollie in his arms and was standing with one foot inside Jim’s car, shaking his huge fist under Jim’s nose.

“Sir.” I protested, coming up.

“You,” he yelled. “You little dog-thief. I’ve got you both, eh?”

With his free hand, his fist hand, he seized me roughly by the overcoat collar and gave me a shake.

“Pardon me,” I said. “Pardon me, my man.”

“I’ll my man you,” he yelled. He was one of those stout dark men with black, sort of bloodshot eyes, who are usually retired around fifty years of age, and like to be in shirtsleeves, and mostly you see them working around their houses, putting up pergolas or making stone terraces.

Looking For a Lady

So I just let him hold my collar. I have found that if you just let a man hold your collar, he gets tired of it in a minute.

“No fines for you,” continued the man, and people were coming to their front doors, and home-goers were pausing on the sidewalk. “I’ve been watching out for you for weeks. This is three times you have stolen my dog.”

I heard an ominous mutter from the gathering spectators, and two or three men walked nearer.

“Dog thieves,” announced the coatless-man, giving me another swing by the collar and taking kick at Jim’s shins in the car. “You know the racket? Steal a dog and then collect the reward. Look at them! Well dressed, with a car, even if it is an old junk heap.”

“Just a moment,” shouted Jim. “We were helping a lady find her dog.”

“Oho,” roared our captor. “Listen to that for a tale.”

“I was just looking for the lady when you came along,” I informed him.

“Looking for the lady,” yelled he. “You were in the very act of trying to snatch another dog here when I came along.”

“I was calling from door to door to try to find the lady,” I declared.

“From door to door?” screamed the man. “Looking for a lady? You were helping her find a dog?”

“We saw her standing on the street, right along here,” I protested anxiously; “she was crying, and we said we’d help her find her dog. From her description…”

“Haw, haw,” bellowed the man, smiling fiercely around at the half a dozen spectators now closing rather tightly around us. “Haw, haw, they saw a lady crying on the street! Haw, haw! Gentlemen, what will we do with them? I see you are all dog lovers. Do we wait here and hand them over to the police, who will let them off on suspended sentence or something? Or…?”

And he grinned fiendishly around the circle of faces.

“Or,” he roared, “will we all take a kick at them that will be a lesson to these kind of birds never to show their ugly mugs in this neighborhood again? Hey?”

“A good idea,” muttered everybody, “that’s the stuff, deal with it, community spirit, that’s the stuff.”

Strange how a crowd – even a crowd of your own good neighbors – is always on the side of the accuser in a case like this. Around us, not a friendly eye showed. As far as these seven or eight gentlemen and ladies were concerned, every word our accuser had to say was true. Any dogs I have ever talked to have told me the greatest fear a dog has is to be down. A dog must keep his feet. For the instant it down, in a fight, every dog is against it. It is the same with humans. Accuse, and every eye narrows against the accused.

“Jim,” I said, quietly, “say something amusing and friendly. Don’t argue. Be witty. Attract a smile.”

But inch by inch and step by step, the kindly home-going citizens were edging closer, forming a ring around us, closing in for the kill.

And just as I felt fresh hands take hold of my collar, I heard Jim yell:

“There she is!”

And along the street, with a little brown dog in her arms, came our lady, weeping no more, but with her face radiant and her head up.

“That’s the woman,” I shouted. “Ask her, ask her!”

The lady came up and, on seeing us, announced gladly that we were two gentlemen who had offered to help her find her dog.

“I found her,” she added. “I found her playing along at the corner. The darling.”

And she kissed it.

Hands fell away from us. But faces did not relax. In fact, the man in the shirt-sleeves still scowled suspiciously at us.

“Well,” he grunted through his nose. “Maybe so. Maybe so. But I still don’t like your looks. I still think it was just a frame-up. If any more dogs are lost in this neighborhood…”

And h shoved out his jaw at us, menacingly. And mutters and mumbles from the rest of the neighbors accompanied me as I got back into the car.

“Thank you, all the same,” called the lady with the little brown dog.

“Don’t mention it, ma’am,” I assured her.

So we continued our way home.

“March,” said Jim, snapping his teeth. “I guess the less you do in March, the better.”

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on March 18, 1944 as “No Love for March”.

1. Ten cents in 1936 would be $2.20 in 2025. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 6, 1943.

“How about a movie?” suggested Jimmie Frise.

“That’s rationed, too,” I stated. “At the least, it’s as good as rationed. All the shows in town are war pictures. And that makes them rationed, doesn’t it?”

“There’s a dandy murder mystery at one of the neighborhood theatres up in the north end,” said Jim, studying the ads in the newspaper.

“Well, that’s rationed, too,” I insisted, “because we haven’t any gas to drive away up to the north end. And I’m certainly not going to spend two-and-a-half hours in street cars to go look at a murder mystery.”

“It’s funny how rationing rations far more than the item under control,” admitted Jimmie. “Now, I was going to suggest we spend tonight tying up a few trout flies. The season is only eight weeks away. Yet we would both feel ridiculous tying trout flies.”

“When they rationed gasoline,” I submitted, “they rationed a thousand other things besides. Trout flies are one of them. Because we certainly aren’t going to get any trout fishing this spring. We can’t drive. We can’t go by bus. And it would be sinful to take up space on trains…”

“Besides,” said Jim, “there are no hooks to be bought for trout flies.”

“And since nobody can get any shotgun shells,” I added, “there aren’t any duck feathers to be had for trout flies. Yes, sir. With a little skill in rationing, you can pretty near cut off all the normal activities of the human race.”

“Well, it’s a total war,” explained Jim.

“But they don’t have to make all the movies war movies,” I protested. “I think the moviemakers are a pretty dumb lot. Here is the biggest chance in their history to establish themselves as a great literary force. Now, more than ever in history, is the time to produce great literary masterpieces that not only will help the public escape from the woes of war, but will remind mankind of the greater, more eternal values of life. But what do the moviemakers do? They produce newsreels with a little story mixed up in them. Every movie producer seems bent on producing artificially a more realistic newsreel of war than the newsreels themselves. They don’t realize how hungry humanity is, right now, for a spiritual and emotional experience that will remind them of the depth of beauty and meaning of human life, and help them, escape from the idea that humanity is a pretty hopeless and helpless muddle.”

“The producers are all working hard,” Jim said, “at propaganda.”

All This Rationing

“Well, I sighed, “if they can all be lined up for propaganda as easily as they are now, we are going to see some fun when the war ends, and half of them are propaganding for the great social changes that are foretold, while the other half are propaganding for the old order.”

“Pshaw,” said Jim, “the social changes are as good as in already. What do you think all this rationing and control is but the training we are getting for the socialism to come?”

“Unless,” I submitted, “we get a good strong party that presents as its platform the getting rid of all the controls and rationings. They’d get a pretty terrific following.”

“Listen: “This rationing,” said Jim, “will have effects that never can be eradicated. When you put both the rich and the poor on one patty of butter per meal, do you imagine that will ever be forgotten?”

“Who by?” I inquired.

“The poor,” said Jim.

“My dear sir,” I cried. “I don’t know much about socialism, but I know enough about it to know you’ve got it entirely backside foremost. The idea of socialism isn’t to make everybody do with one patty of butter. It is to give everybody all the butter they need. It is not to give everybody the same. It is to make sure that a few don’t get all they want, while the many have to lead lives of quiet desperation in order to get what little they can.”

“You have to have some incentive…” began Jimmie.

“Don’t say it!” I cried. “Don’t say it, Jim. It is the worst blasphemy ever uttered against humanity. If the incentive of gain were the only thing that kept mankind alive, we would all have passed off the face of the earth 5,000 years ago. Any one of the hundreds of times in human history when no gain was possible would have wiped us out. No, sir; men work for the sheer love of work. And the greatest proof of it are those rich men who are among the most ardent preachers of that incentive stuff.”

“But we wouldn’t work so hard…” began Jim.

“Why should we?” I demanded. “That’s the whole question in a nut shell. Who says we have to work hard? Only the guys who, for no practical reason on earth, want to bully mankind into giving them a million times more than anyone else, and a million times more than they deserve, for all their brains, ingenuity and willingness to work themselves. Just because a guy is no unnatural and inhuman that he wants to collect a billion dollars, why should we let him make boobies and coolies out of all the rest of us?”

“Without leaders, in industry, finance, and…” tried Jimmie.

“Utter hooey,” I assured him. “Take those same guys and cut their salaries to $2,500 not $25,000¹, and they would still want to be boss, they’d still work like horses, they’d still use their brains, and energies exactly as they do now. They’ve been kidding us. We’ve let them get away with murder. They can’t help working. They can’t help being clever and ingenious. It’s the way they are born.”

“Do you mean to say,” scoffed Jimmie, “that if we cut the head men down to the same wages as us, they would continue to work as they do, while we go fishing…”

“Certainly,” I replied. They couldn’t be loafers if they tried. You are a loafer because that is your born nature. Or you are a working, scheming fool because that is your nature. If all the money in the world won’t change you and me from being loafers at heart, why do you imagine all the money in the world would change the boss from being the boss.”

“Then?” cried Jim, amazed.

“Take the money away from him, and watch him be himself anyway,” I triumphed.

“I don’t believe it,” muttered Jim incredulously.

“The real enemies of the big social reforms coming,” I submitted, “are not going to be the rich men. Not even the sons of rich men. The real body of public opinion which is going to fight the reform are going to be the gamblers. The guys who live moderately by their wits. All of us you see jammed into the Gardens to watch hockey games, and at the races. The hundreds of thousands among us who believe that winning is a matter of brute strength, skill and smartness. The worshippers of sport. Those are the guys who are afraid of social justice, not the rich industrialists. Every measly little bird you see in our city, with crafty bloodshot eye and a cunning shut mouth – he’s the enemy of reform. He’s the bird who doesn’t want to work. He wants to live by his wits. Very few of them are rich. Countless thousands of them, however, will fight with all the genius of foxes and weasels against any system that prescribes honest work as the basis of their livelihood.”

“You’re pretty tough on sport,” protested Jim.

“I just used sport,” I explained, “to make a quick picture for you men in the mass. You could say the same about the movies or a political rally. The next time you hear anybody talking about incentive and private enterprise, make immediate inquiries about him. And ten to one you’ll find he is a promoter, whose only work is chiselling a few dimes off the man who makes something and a few nickels off the man who buys it.”

“This is tough stuff,” complained Jimmie.

“Listen,” I said loudly, “a man likes to work if for no better reason than to escape, for a few hours a day, from his wife and kids.”

“Put that in a movie,” scorned Jimmie.

“How about a movie?” I demanded. “There is nothing else to do.”

“Will you even go to a war picture?” asked Jim.

“Yes,” I said bitterly. “And first will be a newsreel full of battle. Next will come a Canada’s War Effort short about making torpedoes². And then the feature, an unsinkable sergeant who shoots Japs out of every coconut tree and marries an heiress in the W.A.A.C.’s.”

“Aw,” said Jim.

But we went.

Behind Big Hats

And the theatre was jammed. And we went all the way down to the front, with an usher, and found no seats. And then we hunted for ourselves, and off to one side, we got two seats together, climbing all over twelve people’s feet at the very moment the hero of the feature was clutching the W.A.A.C.³ to his many medalled bosom.

And when we got seated, we found that two ladies sitting directly in front of us had those big pie-shaped hats that curve upwards in front.

“Madam,” I whispered between them, “would you mind taking off your hats, please?”

Both ladies turned sharply, sat forward so as to bring a sufficient hauteur into the gesture, and then slowly relaxed back, without touching their hats.

I bundled my coat up for a cushion and sat on it.

But still I couldn’t see past those two hats.

“Can you see, Jim?” I inquired loudly.

“If they’d sit still, I could catch glimpses,” confessed Jim.

The ladies had the habit of leaning together and then drawing apart, a habit not uncommon among those who, while not wanting to discuss the picture play by play, still wish to communicate to each other their appreciation of the finer points of the film.

“Usher,” I called modestly, to an usher, hustling up the aisle twelve seats away.

“Sssshhhh,” said six people. I looked around.

“Can you folks see?” I asked those directly behind me.

“We can see but we can’t hear,” replied a sour lady.

Suddenly, I had an inspiration. I took my hat from under the seat and put it on my head.

Jimmie looked at me with delight, and promptly put his on.

“Hey, there, hey, cut that out,” came several voices back of us.

“If these ladies,” I announced resolutely “can wear their hats, so can we.”

As I turned around, someone from behind swiped my hat off my head, and it bounced off Jimmie and went into the darkness three or four seats to the west.

Meanwhile, the two ladies had leaned forward slowly in their seats and turned equally slowly, and were surveying the disturbance with high disdain.

“Pass me my hat, please,” I requested.

Jim’s was still on his head. After a few scuffles, my hat came back to me and I placed it at once on my head.

Now fifteen or twenty people were standing up behind us and among the angry outcries were calls for “usher, usher.”

We sat grimly, holding our hats to our heads.

Deep-Rooted Customs

A social revolution is a sudden thing. At first, just a few angry outcries, lost amid a widening mutter and murmur of discussion. Then all of a sudden, everything explodes.

My hat was jerked from my head and I didn’t even see it depart. Jim’s I saw go sailing ahead fifteen rows. Ladies began screaming. One of the proud ladies in front, with the offending hats, rose to her feet and shouted into the darkness:

“George, where are you. Come quick!” And from three rows behind, two gentlemen, apparently the husbands of the offenders, came hurdling and grunting, and all was great confusion of shoves and hoists and bunts with knees, until I found two ushers helping me to escape, Right behind me, two more ushers were helping Jimmie along.

And without any delay whatever, we were hurried out the doors where the large elderly commissionaire at the ticket escorted us rapidly down the slanting parquet.

“Our hats, our hats,” I protested hotly.

“Inquire for them,” said the commissionaire, “at the box-office after hours.”

And he dusted us out on to the sidewalk.

This being a neighborhood theatre, we did not wish to attract the attention of any people who might know us by standing on our rights or even our dignity. So we pretended we were just leaving the theatre anyway, and we hurried a few doors east and went into the ice cream parlor and got a sheltered booth in which to recover our composure.

“Well, anyway,” I stated, “my hat was an old one, and I was thinking it was time I got a new one.”

“The same here,” said Jim. “But that just goes to show you. You can’t try innovations. You can’t easily upset old, established customs.”

“I’ll bet those ladies have got their hats off now,” I argued. “It takes a few revolutionaries like us to bring about social justice.”

“I bet they still have their hats on,” retorted Jim, “and I bet not only do they feel like social heroines, but half the people around them are looking admiringly at them.”

“If their husbands hadn’t been sitting back of us,” I stated, “I bet we would have won the argument.”

“Naw,” said Jim, “it is you that doesn’t understand human society. Things are too deep-rooted even for justice. It is an old, deep-rooted custom for ladies to wear their hats in movies, even if they constitute a public nuisance. But it is unheard-of for men to wear their hats in theatres.”

“But how about justice?” I demanded heatedly.

“Okay,” smiled Jimmie, smoothing his ruffled hair, “how about it?”

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $2,500 in 1943 would be $44,800 in 2025. So $25,000 would be $448,000. ↩︎
2. Not the same thing, but if you want to watch Canadian Army Newsreels, they are on Youtube. ↩︎
3. W.A.A.C. was short for Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, a term used in various wars and countries for women who volunteered to help free up men for combat roles. It became a catch-all term for women in the military, though there were other acronyms. In Canada in World War 2, they were the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWAC). ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, February 28, 1948.

“What’s eating you?” demanded Jimmie Frise.

“Pigeons,” I informed him dully.

“Ah, those beautiful creatures!” cried Jim, enchanted. “Symbols of peace and serenity! From the earliest times, doves and pigeons have been beloved of mankind as the inseparable harbingers of happiness and good fortune.”

I cocked a lack-lustre eye on him.

“Pigeons!” mooned Jimmie. “I used to keep them as a boy. In ancient days, every home that was a home had a dove cote¹ or pigeon loft as an integral part of the house structure. The pigeon…”

I interrupted him bluntly.

“How would you like,” I demanded, “to have a bunch of pigeons come every morning, at daybreak, and start yelling outside your window?”

“Yelling!” protested Jim.

“It’s the worst kind of yelling,” I yelled. “It’s subdued yelling. When you’re sound asleep, at the break of day, busy with the loveliest sleep of all – those couple of hours from dawn on – you suddenly become aware, through your dreams, of a horrible and mocking sound. It sounds like demons moaning. It sounds like lost souls, half a mile away, yelling in torment. It sounds like somebody starting to throw up.”

“Oh, what a horrible misrepresentation of the cooing of doves!” cried Jimmie, shocked.

“Jim,” I stated desperately, “for the past 10 days, a gang of rowdy pigeons has adopted my house. Somebody in the neighborhood, I suppose, has got sick of them and driven them off their premises. And they’ve squatted on mine. I won’t have it.”

“You’ll get to love them,” assured Jim.

“To me,” I glared, “those last couple of hours of morning sleep are precious beyond anything else I can possess. By daybreak, I’m really coasting in sleep. I’m deep, dark, down in such a bower of lovely sleep that I… I…”

I took a deep breath and went on:

“Jim, they not only yell and gobble and quack…”

“Not quack!” corrected Jim doggedly.

“They not only emit,” I declared, “the most insidious, penetrating and disturbing sounds with their beaks, but they scratch with their toenails. From the crack of day, they all start waddling restlessly around, back and forth, back and forth, like the feeble-minded creatures they are, just scratching their toenails on the galvanized iron eaves, on the raspy roof shingles. What’s the matter with pigeons? Why don’t they sit down and relax like anybody else?”

“It’s their nature to be active,” submitted Jim.

“Active!” I sneered. “Not only do they keep up this endless mooing and gagging, not only do they keep endlessly scratch-scratch-scratching back and forth on the roof: but every few minutes, they jump up and take a short fly, of about five yards, with a lot of whistling and whooshing of wings, only to settle right down again and start that lunatic toenailing back and forth, back and forth… And a poor guy trying to sleep…!”

“Look: why don’t you get up and shoo them away?” asked Jim kindly.

“I do; and they come right back!” I groaned.

“What are you going to do?” asked Jim – quietly, for he could see I was a desperate man.

“Jim, I’ve done it!” I informed him. “I’ve got a trap made. With slats and chicken wire. I’m going to set it up tonight, on a little shelf sort of place above my window. I can reach it from an attic window. I’m going to bait the trap with dried peas. And when I hear the fool “things in the trap, I pull a string. And bingo! I’ve got the pigeons!”

“And then?” inquired Jim, sternly.

“Well, they’re trespassers,” I asserted. “I could wring their necks. Or I could cart them down to the Market and give them to one of those poultry butchers.”

“Pardon me,” said Jim coldly. “But do you realize that pigeons come under the heading of livestock? How do you know that those pigeons aren’t the prized possession of some pigeon fancier in the neighborhood?”

“Any pigeon fancier,” I retorted, “who can’t feed his birds enough to keep them around home isn’t entitled…”

“Oh, yes he is!” assured Jim. “At this season of the year, the pigeons are beginning to feel the first faint notions of spring. They get restless and explore around. All I want to do is warn you that maybe those pigeons on your house may be racing pigeons, worth hundreds of dollars.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I said.

“I’m telling you!” insisted Jim. “You’ve got to be careful fooling with pigeons. There’s a lot of law involved…”

“Okay!” I announced. “You come with me. You know so much about pigeons. You come and help me trap them. And then, if I keep them a couple of days maybe the owner will come hunting them up. You know how kids will spread the news. If he wants them, he can have them: after hearing an earful from me. Otherwise, if nobody claims them..!”

Jim, shaking his head, got his coat on and we went over to my place. In the yard, I showed him my trap; an arrangement made out of an old box and some slats and bits of chicken wire. It had a simple flap front that fell when pulled by a string.

It was no trick at all to carry it to the attic and put it out on the ornamental shelf above my bedroom window. No trick at all to set the front flap to fall, by a yank of cord from my window below. And just as I said, all the kids in the neighborhood were gathered to watch the installation. Both girls and boys, they clustered from far and wide below while Jim and I worked out the attic window.

“What’re you gonna catch, Mr. Clark?” yelled one of the nosiest little girls of the neighborhood. “Pigeons?”

“No, muskrats,” I replied disagreeably. “Now, run along; beat it!”

Which brought all the more.

“Anybody who owns pigeons around here,” I muttered, “will know about this before tomorrow.”

When the trap was set, I sprinkled a handful of dried peas on its floor.

“Now,” I said, “at the crack of dawn tomorrow…”

“You won’t have to wait until the crack of dawn, interrupted Jimmie.

For like vultures wheeling came a flight of seven pigeons, their wings V-ed, floating and flapping overhead while they came to peer at the new contraption under my roof edge.

“Why, the blame things!” I ejaculated, as we ducked in the attic window. They can even hear the rattle of a few dried peas!”

We hastened down to my bedroom, where, leaning out the window, I reached the dangling cord of the trap and drew it tenderly within.

“They’re very trusting,” said Jim, “when it comes to food. Give them a little time. Let one in the trap. The rest will follow.”

The seven landed on my roof and came and peered, their heads bobbing as if on rubber necks, over the eave trough. True to their character, they anxiously and aimlessly waddled this way and that; bobbing, peering.

“Grrrr!” I growled, my hand trembling on the trap cord. “Listen to their toenails! See what I mean?”

“Those are fine birds,” commented Jim, as we crouched behind the curtains.

Without much delay, the leader of the flock, or its most foolish member – I don’t suppose there is much difference – flipped lightly off the eave trough down into the trap.

One, two, three – the rest followed. And slam fell the front flap. Seven startled, indignant pigeons were flapping frantically inside the box.

Jim and I galloped to the attic, reached down and secured the flap. And the wild yells of kids up and down the block spread the news that Mr. Clark had trapped 100 pigeons.

We lifted the crate in through the window. We carried it down to the back cellar, which is cool yet not cold; the ideal place, in Jim’s opinion, in which to keep the birds prisoner until such time as their owner was located.

We set the trap on an old washtub bench and I turned on the lights. The birds were still flapping and fluttering in bird-brained irresponsibility. The more tenderly we approached them, the more panicked they became.

“They’re so…” sighed Jimmie, “… so gentle, so timid, so childlike. Of all birds.”

As we sat, they quieted; though they kept twisting and turning among themselves. I had never bothered much to look closely at pigeons. They were things seen mostly, you might say, out of the corner of my eye.

“Man,” I said, “look at the colors on that one!”

He was not merely lustrous. He was opalescent. For all the indignity of his situation, he stood with a proud look: his breast high; his eye like a jewel. Over his beak there was a tiny white ruff like a comb.

“Jim,” I claimed, “he’s beautiful.”

“More than that,” amended Jim, “he’s valuable. See that ring on his leg? That’s his registered number, I bet. He’s probably a famous racing pigeon. Maybe worth $200.²“

“Holy smoke!” I muttered, getting around the side to look at some of the others. They were all characters. They were blue and gray and white. They were plump, strong, compact. They ALL had rings on their legs.

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “maybe I ought to release them this once, after a warning…”

We heard the buzz of the doorbell overhead in the kitchen; heard footsteps answering; and then a male voice – a loud male voice.

Then footsteps across the kitchen and the cellar door opening.

“You down there, Dad?”

“Yes.”

“A gentleman to see you.”

And down the stairs came large legs followed by a large bully, if ever I saw one.

He was a stranger to me, though I believe I had occasionally seen him around the corner drug store.

“Ah!” he barked, halting on the bottom step. “My pigeons!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I retorted promptly, being a great believer in taking the offensive with large men. “These birds have been trespassing on my…”

“Trespassing, eh?” sneered the bully. “Fine. That’s fine! Well, your dog has been trespassing on my verandah. So I’ve got him outside in a crate, too!”

“My dog?” I inquired lightly. “Oh, no. My dog doesn’t trespass on anybody’s verandah. Besides, she’s not a him. She’s a her. And she’s never out of our garden.”

“I think I know your dog when I see it,” declared the big bully. Advancing truculently and seizing the cage full of birds, he lifted it in his arms.

“You can come and see,” he glowered, marching up the cellar steps.

We followed. We went out the drive. In the open trunk of his car was a crate. And in the crate, very dejected, sat Rusty, Jimmie’s Irish water spaniel.

“Why,” cried Jim hotly, “that’s MY dog!”

“I always thought…” protested the bully, “I always took this for HIS dog!”

We hastily lifted Rusty and crate out of the car trunk and the bully set his pigeon crate in its place.

“When the children,” declared the bully, agitatedly, “told me about my pigeons being trapped, why, I just thought…I just… well, you see, this dog is always trespassing around my place…”

He paused, and took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

“No, by Jove, he doesn’t trespass!” he declared loudly. “He’s as welcome as the flowers in May; and has been for years! Many’s the time I’ve come near to making you a proposition for this dog, Mr. Clark. Many’s the fine visit we’ve had together and many’s the fine walk. I live ’round on the other block…”

“Well, now, Mister… Mister?” I replied.

“Hoogenbeck,” he supplied. “Joe Hoogenbeck.”

“Well, now, Mr. Hoogenbeck,” I said warmly, “about the pigeons. In the last few days, they’ve been coming onto my roof at dawn and waking me…”

“Pigeons,” said Mr. Hoogenbeck, with dignity, “can’t wake you if you’ve got an easy conscience. That’s an old saying.”

“I don’t think,” cut in Jim, hoisting Rusty out of the crate, “they’ll wake Mr. Clark after this.”

So Mr. Hoogenbeck and Jimmie shared Rusty for a few minutes while I went and peeked in at the pigeons.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. A dove cote is a structure intended to house pigeons or doves. Dovecotes may be free-standing structures in a variety of shapes, or built into the end of a house or barn. They generally contain pigeonholes for the birds to nest. Pigeons and doves were an important food source historically in the Middle East and Europe and were kept for their eggs and dung. ↩︎
2. $200 in 1948 would be $2,725 in 2025. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 20, 1943.

“Forty cents!¹” protested Jimmie Frise loudly. “Forty cents to develop a film!”

“Ah,” I explained, “but that includes printing the snaps, too. If they’re any good.”

“Forty cents,” muttered Jimmie. “I bet there isn’t two cents’ worth of chemicals used. In fact, the way they put through 500 amateur rolls of film at one time, in a bathtub, I bet the chemicals wouldn’t cost a fraction of one cent per roll.”

“There’s the overhead,” I explained.

“Some little old dirty damp darkroom,” snorted Jimmie. “In some back attic of some old downtown warehouse.”

“Okay,” I submitted. “Then why don’t you develop your own rolls? You say it used to be a hobby of yours when you were a kid.”

“As a matter of fact,” declared Jimmie, “everybody who takes pictures should develop his own. Not only is it a fascinating hobby. It rounds out the whole art of photography. All over this city are nice, happy people with cameras, shooting pictures for all they’re worth. Pictures of soldier sons or soldier sweethearts in their new uniform. Pictures of new babies. Pictures of new brides. A lot of happy, eager people doing their best to capture in pictures a moment, a mood, a crisis of joy or happiness. And then what happens?”

“I know,” I said. “They can’t buy any film.”

“No,” cried Jim. “Suppose they have a film. In 100 different places, at different times of day, by different lights, sunlit, dull or almost dark, these pictures are taken and then rushed to the corner drug store. From the drug store they are collected by the bathtub corporations that develop and print the pictures. The precious, hope-laden films, shot by all these expectant amateurs, are rushed downtown to some damp mass production darkroom, where the whole works are dumped into hog troughs, bathtubs and vats with 19 cents’ worth of chemicals taken from barrels. The whole lot is swished and whirled around for a few minutes and then fished out.”

We Shouldn’t Dogmatize

“What do you expect for 40 cents?” I inquired.

“Well,” declared Jim, “every one of those films in those hog troughs and bathtubs was taken under different conditions of light, under varying conditions of expertness. To get the best out of them, every one of them should, be developed separately, in front of a ruby light, the operator watching with expert care to see that the utmost value of the film is preserved, giving it neither too much nor too little development…”

“Maybe you can get that kind of developing,” I suggested, “by paying for it. But it would be a lot more than 40 cents for a roll all developed and printed.”

“I’ll bet you more swell pictures,” declared Jim, “are ruined by mass development than by amateur shutter snapping.”

“What do you expect?” I demanded. “This is democracy. This is not technocracy. Under our system, anybody is free to buy a camera and shoot pictures. Some buy cheap cameras and never learn how to run them. Others buy costly cameras and make a technical and intricate hobby of it. The ones who buy the cheap cameras and never learn how to operate them are perfectly content to take their films down to the drug store and let the bathtub boys develop them. If they turn out lousy, the least surprised of all is the owner of the cheap camera who doesn’t know how to run it. That’s democracy. It permits anybody own a $500 camera or a $2 camera: whatever you like. It also permits anybody to become his own amateur developer. It also permits a bunch of the boys to organize a little company and gallop around daily, by motor car, to all the drug stores, picking up rolls and pitching them into bathtubs.”

“Democracy,” agreed Jim, “gives elbow room for all the saps. Imagine a guy paying $500 for a camera.”

“And imagine a guy,” I inserted, “paying $2 for a camera and then not knowing how to run it.”

“The more money spent, the bigger the sap,” maintained Jim.

“False,” I decided. “Because maybe the guy who spent the $500 has plenty of money, and if he hadn’t spent it on a camera he might have spent it on a 10-year subscription to all the professional hockey games until the end of the season of 1953. You can never dogmatize about the way a guy spends his money. Maybe the sap who bought the $2 camera and then didn’t learn how to operate it spent $498 on a lawyer to get him out of a breach-of-promise suit. No, sir. You never can say one man is a sap and another isn’t. The safest course is to believe that everybody is a sap. Then you can’t go wrong.”

Sly Digs At Democracy

“Is this a veiled attack on democracy?” inquired Jim sternly.

“Not at all,” I assured him. “The question is: Does democracy breed saps? Or do saps breed democracy? Hitler tried to find out. So he’s finding out.”

“Look here,” exclaimed Jimmie, “you’ve been taking some pretty sly digs at democracy lately. What goes on? Where do you stand?”

“It isn’t democracy,” I explained. “It’s just humanity. Look: we live under a free, democratic system of government in which the elected representatives of the people sit in parliament. Is that agreed?”

“Correct,” said Jim stoutly. “Representative government.”

“Okay,” I submitted. “An election is coming along. So, in the riding in which we live a meeting is held to choose a candidate for the Liberal party. Is that meeting announced? Maybe. If it is, would you and I give up movie to attend it? Maybe. At any rate, in St. Hoosis Hall in our riding on the 27th a meeting is held of the St. Hoosis riding Liberal Association. Forty-seven guys turn up, of whom 16 are professional politicians, each bringing a friend, making 16 more, and the rest of the 47 are guys out for a walk to the corner to buy cigarettes who, seeing St. Hoosis Hall doors open, walked in.”

“Aw now,” protested Jim.

“Meantime,” I went on, “in St. Pollywog’s Hall, in the same riding, the St. Hoosis riding Conservative Association is holding its nomination meeting. It being Toronto, no fewer than 51 people are in attendance. Maybe the same night, in a church basement or in a dancing academy up two flights, the C.C.F. are holding their nomination meeting. It being a slightly northerly section of Toronto, no fewer than 60 people are present.”

“Aw,” said Jimmie.

“Now,” I explained, “besides these riding associations there are the provincial party committees. And besides the provincial and district committees there are the federal party headquarters, with big offices in Ottawa. Now, who do you think is the chairman at each of these three nomination meetings here in St. Hoosis riding in Toronto? Is it just some guy was on his way down to the corner to buy smokes? Or is it somebody they even know about away up in Ottawa, in those national head offices? Which do you think?”

“Aw,” protested Jimmie loudly.

“At any rate,” I pursued, “at each of these three meetings, you might describe as secret societies except there isn’t a tyler² at the door, highly successful nominations are arrived at. Speakers speak. The calamitous state of the country or vice versa, is dealt with. The candidates are introduced – that is, in case the local boys have fallen out – and then all those entitled, that is, the authentic and accredited members of the St. Hoosis riding Liberal, Conservative or C.C.F. Associations, are called upon to vote. Thus are chosen the people’s representatives in our free, democratic system of government.”

“Aw, that’s cynical,” protested Jimmie.

“Look.” I cried, “you can have your choice: three. The election comes along, and it’s like Christmas. We have three Santa Claus parades instead of one. The three parties parade their people’s choice up and down, and we line the thoroughfares, cheering madly and choosing our one true, genuine Santa Claus. And when it’s all over, the people’s choice is elected. The representative of the people. One of these three guys selected, very, veeeery cautiously, at a little semi-private meeting in a semi-private ward by a little gathering of professionals.”

“We could all attend if we liked,” cried Jimmie.

“So could we all develop our own films,” I submitted. “But it’s easier to just drop them in the drug store on our way past.”

“What you’ve just said upsets me,” muttered Jim. “You make it all sound so cynical.”

“What I’ve just said,” I retorted, “is not mine at all, not a all, not a word of it. It has been said by this country’s very best men, its greatest editors, its greatest preachers, teachers and statesmen for 100 years. If you don’t care for good pictures, okay: let the bathtub boys do your developing and printing. If you don’t care about government – which is how you and your children are to live – okay, leave it to the bathtub boys.”

Jimmie sat silent and grim for a long minute.

“I haven’t got,” he said at last, “a really decent picture of you in my whole album. I’ve got a few snaps of you up fishing at Lac Alexandre and a couple of deer hunting poses. But with that swell old camera of mine I’m entitled to a real, true, characteristic picture of you. We’ve been partners a long time now. I want you to quit at 4 today and we’ll call at my house…”

So we quit at 10 to 4, which is all right for creative workers like us, who are just as liable to run into a million-dollar idea, or a ten-dollar one, which is just as good, riding on a street car as sitting at a dumb desk; and we got to Jim’s before 4.30 p.m., with a fine, ambient winter afternoon light. And Jimmie got his camera and his light meter and sat me on the veranda pillars and made six shots of me at various angles, and I made six shots of him.

“Now,” said Jim, triumphantly, “surprise!”

Unknown to me, he had bought a supply of chemicals, developer and hypo³. And a box of print paper.

And, taking me down to the fruit cellar, he explored amid the barrels and boxes and emerged with a portable ruby light of ancient vintage and several old-fashioned black trays.

“Wonderful,” I crowed. “Why didn’t you tell me you had this equipment long ago. We could have had barrels of fun.”

“After I was first married,” said Jim, “I tinkered with photography. I haven’t even seen this stuff in 25 years. But I knew it was here.”

Jim washed out the trays in the laundry and brought them in full of water of the right temperature. A big tray for washing. lesser trays, one for the developer and one for the hypo or fixing bath. He set them all out in precise like a hostess arranging a table before the guests arrive.

“Orderly procedure,” he explained, “is the whole secret of the job. As a matter of fact, developing and printing pictures is childishly simple. Organize it and you can’t go wrong.”

He then explained to me the process. With the ruby light casting its warm and secret radiance around, we would unroll the spools and then immerse the negative in the developing tray, running it, by a process of up and down, through the chemical for a period of from three to eight minutes, watching all the time, in the glow of the ruby light, to see how fast the developer worked and how the impressions on the emulsion side were coming.

Then, rinsing the film in the water bath, which, under ideal arrangements not possible in a fruit cellar, would be running water, the film would be dipped and run up and down in the fixing bath until all the emulsion was good and hard.

“Then,” said Jim, “15 minutes in the water to wash, and we hang her up to dry. Tonight, after dinner, you come over and we print. Printing is the sport. You can really experiment for artistic results. You can enlarge parts of it. For example, that one I took of you in profile, I’ll enlarge just the head. If I’m any judge, there was a Byronic pose to that one…”

“Come on, come on,” I urged, removing my coat. “Which will I do?”

“I’ll mix the chemicals and you do the slow, even running up and down of the film through the bath.”

“Okay,” I said.

“One last look,” said Jim, checking over each tray, each package of chemical, each spool, all in readiness. “Okay.”

He turned on the ruby light and reached up and switched off the bright bulb.

In the dim ruddy glow, there was an air of mystery, of science, of exploration.

“Wait a minute,” cautioned Jim, “until our eyes get used to the light.”

Main Thing is Ideals

“Stand back a minute,” said Jim, leaning over the trays. And with a spoon he measured out the chemicals, smoothing off the chemicals like a chemist himself. With a stick, he stirred.

“Okay,” he said. “Unroll the first negative.”

I reached and got one of the spools and broke the seal. Carefully I peeled off the outer covering until I came to the film, which I detached according to Jim’s instructions. It was wiry and curly.

“Hold it carefully by the ends,” said Jim, “and now run it slowly and evenly through the bath.”

He stood, superintending. And I dipped the film in the tepid chemical and felt it soften as it slid up, down in the solution.

“How’s it coming?” demanded Jimmie, bending down to get the film between him and the ruby light. “Is it soft?”

“It’s getting wiry again,” I said. “It was soft at first.”

“Whoa,” commanded Jim. “Hold it still in front of the light.”

I held it dripping over the tray while Jim leaned close and peered at it against the red light.

“H’m,” said he.

And before I could utter a word, he reached up and turned on the bright light overhead. In his hand he held one of the packages of chemical, which he was studying intently.

“Just as I feared,” he said bitterly. “You put it in the hypo first!”

“I,” I yelled. “I put it in the hypo!”

So we agreed that, even if we do try to do things right, whether it has to do with representative government or merely developing photographs, it very often means only a lot of fussing, with little result.

“With saps like us,” I explained to Jimmie, after we had properly developed the second roll and found that I had had my finger in front of the lens each time, “the main thing is we at least have high ideals.”

“That’s what really matters,” confessed Jim.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. 40 cents in 1943 would be $7 in 2025. ↩︎
2. A tyler in Freemasonry is an appointed officer stationed outside the closed door of a lodge room to guard against unauthorized intruders. ↩︎
3. Hypo is is the traditional term for Sodium Thiosulfate ($N{a}_2{S}_2{O}_3$), which is used to fix, or stabilize, images as a final step in the photographic processing of film or paper. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 13, 1937.

“I may be a little late,” said Jimmie Frise, “coming back from lunch. Just tell anybody that asks I’ve gone up town.”

“Pool again, eh?” I supposed.

“What of it?” asked Jim, a little grimly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems a little odd to me that you can mix around with those pool sharks. They’re not your kind.”

“Oh, yes they are,” said Jim. “What do you know about it anyway. You’ve never even been in a pool room.”

“I go by what I hear,” I informed him. “Pool rooms are joints.”

“Call them billiard parlors,” said Jim. “See how that sounds.”

“Even so,” I disagreed.

“Listen,” said Jim, “some of the finest men in this country are billiard players. Many of the finest homes in Canada have billiard rooms. All the best and most exclusive clubs have billiard rooms where our leaders in industry and finance play every noon hour. In fact, the billiard rooms are the most crowded rooms of all.”

“I was referring,” I said, “to pool rooms.”

“What’s the difference?” demanded Jim. “Billiard rooms for rich guys. Pool rooms for poor guys. It’s the same thing.”

“There are better ways to employ your lunch hour leisure,” I declared.

“I suppose,” sneered Jimmie, “you mean I should come to lunch with you and listen to you and your fishing friends gassing about trout fishing and trout flies and four-ounce rods and 4X gut and so forth?”

“The trout season,” I stated, “is only eleven weeks away. It’s time you were thinking about your plans for the coming season.”

“I like a little action,” said Jimmie. “I never could figure out what all you thousands of lunchers have to gas about all through a long lunch hour. The sight of them mystifies me. Sitting blathering.”

“Many of them,” I advised, “are talking about sport, like us anglers.”

“The greatest modern sport,” announced Jim, “is blather. The reason golf, fishing, shooting and that sort of thing is popular is because it gives, for the least effort, the most amount of blather. Ten months you sit on the tail of your coat blathering about fishing, for two months of fishing, during which you actually fish about three or four times.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” I confessed.

“Give me action,” said Jim. “Even Russian pool. You can play it all the year round. You don’t just talk about it.”

“Of course, Jim,” I explained to him, “the age of action is coming to an end. The great age of action is right now in its last stages. The sooner we realize that, and take up conversation as the only course open to us, the happier we will be.”

“Do You Call That Action?”

“Why,” scoffed Jimmie, “there never was a greater era of action in human history than the present. What are you talking about?”

“Action?” I inquired. “Now?”

“Yes, action, now,” cried Jim. “Never in human history has there been such action as in these last few years. Think of the highways, boiling with traffic to the ends of the earth. Planes racing through the sky. Great cities towering into the heavens, filled with an action incomparable in all our long story.”

“My dear boy,” I protested, “how ridiculous. Come to the window.”

We stood at the window looking down into the street, with the traffic jamming past, hundreds of cars moving in a great parade.

“Do you call that action?” I inquired.

“I certainly do,” said Jim.

“Every man in that whole parade,” I informed him, “is sitting down.”

“What of it?” asked Jim.

“Do you call it action,” I demanded, “with everybody sitting down?”

“Er…,” said Jim.

“Only seventy years ago,” I told him, “and there are dozens of men in this building that old, when men wanted to do anything, there had to be action. They had to stand up and walk. You speak of aeroplanes streaking across the sky. Sure. They can cross the continent now in a day. Seventy years ago, when they wanted to cross the continent, that called for action. It took weeks to plan and organize the trip. Action. They had to drive covered wagons. Paddle canoes and row York boats. Action. They had to climb mountains and cut roads. Cross plains and deserts, carrying their supplies and water. Action. Action. Action.”

“What I mean by action,” began Jimmie.

“Just a second,” I interrupted. “When things were made, a few years ago, blacksmiths had to toil and labor. Now a skinny little guy turns a handle or presses a button on a giant machine. Action is already vanishing from the earth. In olden days, when Nelson wanted a ship, it took hundreds of men, toiling for months by hand, to make him his Victory. When Nelson sailed into action, it was action. They ran in close to the enemy, blew him to blazes and then boarded him with pike and cutlass. Action.”

“Ha, ha,” laughed Jim. “How about the last war? Twenty million men killed in action.”

“Killed in inaction,” I corrected. “Never was there a more dreadful example of the decline of action as that last war. Millions of men herded into trenches, where they stood, perfectly helpless, to be slaughtered by machines. Waiting in cellars and dugouts for death to come hurtling out of the sky. In old wars, there was action. Armies marched on foot. They met. They attacked each other with axes and spears and stabbed and jabbed and had some fun. Modern war is a dreadful thing of inaction. Men stand and wait. Machines do the rest.”

“Er ” said Jim.

“Never in the history of the world,” I insisted, “has action, by which I mean the activity of men, been less. We are marching steadily towards the end of all action. The day is not far distant when all mankind will have nothing to do but just sit.”

“And talk,” said Jim.

“Yes, sit and talk,” I agreed. “I am an angler. But the fish are vanishing. Presently, there will be no fish left for me to catch. But if I can talk about fishing for ten months of the year, it won’t be so hard for me to talk about it for twelve months.”

“I’ll play pool,” chose Jim.

“No, there won’t be room,” I explained. “The human race is multiplying so fast that in another couple of hundred years there will be no space left for action of any sort, least of all for idle pool players. The end of the picture is simply this-the entire human race, packed closely together, sitting talking.”

“Tough Game, Dis Russian”

“It’s a swell prospect,” said Jim.

“Come to lunch with me,” I said, “and meet the anglers.”

“Come pool shooting with me,” countered Jimmie, “and get a little action.”

“A lot of action,” I scoffed, “there is in poking a few oversize marbles around a table.”

“There’s a lot more action than you suppose,” said Jim. “Billiards is a real game. It can be played all year round. It can be played by young and old. Size or strength do not count. It trains your eye and mind. Develops your faculties. Teaches you control, judgment, caution.”

“I have all of those things I need,” I informed him. “I’m too cautious as it is. My eyes see more than I can take in. My judgment informs me it is better to sit and talk than to go around pool rooms and other joints looking for action.”

“You’ve never been in a pool room?” asked Jim.

“Never,” I said, proudly.

“I never took you for a man,” mused Jim, “who entertained prejudices, without knowing anything about the subject. I thought you had an inquiring mind. I thought…”

“If you put it that way,” I agreed.

So we went out and had a stand-up sandwich at a counter and then got Jim’s car at the parking lot and drove uptown to one of several pool rooms which Jimmie frequents in his almost religious quest of mankind. Jim says it must be dreadfully dreary knowing only one class of people.

We entered a shabby little tobacco shop, which from the outside appeared to be nothing more than a tobacco shop. But back of the tiny store, there was a large, dim, smoky pool room, with six green tables planing off into the foggy distance, green-shaded lights suspended above the table and a hum of human sound as, around each table, groups of men, with their hats on and their coats off, bent and straightened at this curious game of poking man-sized marbles around.

The proprietor, a cat-like little man with an eye shade, with a purring voice and a permanently crouched attitude, greeted Jim heartily.

“Chimmie,” he cried. “It’s a pleasure.”

As we walked back of the partition, and entered the big room with its tables, nearly everybody knew Jim and hailed him loudly and affectionately as Chimmie. Most of them held cigar butts clenched in their front teeth, and wore their hats on the back of their heads. We strolled along to the far end of the pool room and there we found a sort of high bench running along the wall like in a shoe shine parlor. Green plush. Up on to this we hoisted ourselves to watch the game at this farthest table.

“Howsa goin’, Chimmie?” cried a long limber man, with gold teeth, enthusiastically. “Play ya soons dis is over.”

“Okay, Smiler,” agreed Jim, pushing his own hat back and suddenly looking very tough. Jim shifted his cigar to his front teeth. Suddenly my amiable friend Jimmie was transformed, by these slight alterations and by a sort of inward change, into as hard-boiled an individual as there was in the whole place.

“Fine looking bunch,” I said quietly.

“What’s dat?” said Jim, and the expression in his eye caused me to overlook the matter.

We watched. The game was Russian pool¹. Jim explained to me, out of the corner of his mouth, and with sundry curious expressions and technical terms, that the white ball was the shooter, and the other four balls, red, blue, green and yellow, each had a different value. If you sunk each ball in its proper pocket, you made the number of points the ball was worth. If you sunk it in the wrong pocket, you were deducted the value of the ball and lost as well all the points you had so far scored.

“But dat,” explained Jim, “ain’t de woist of it. De game is a hundred, see? If you makes your hundred, see, you is okay. But suppose you is ninety-six and sinks de yellow ball which is woit nine points, see?”

“How interesting,” I agreed, sitting back a little from this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of my own intimate acquaintance.

“Well, den,” said Chimmie, “you busts. You goes right back to nuttin’ again. She’s a tough game, dis Russian.”

By the time the game before us ended, a good many of the players had finished their games at other tables and the pool room was emptying. The cat-like proprietor walked, crouched and purring, amid the tables, and as the crowd thinned, I noted that only the cream of the collection were being left, the cigar-buttiest, the hat-tiltedest, the side-talkers. A sinister air seemed to flow around me.

Jim’s turn finally came and taking off his overcoat, he jumped down and took a cue and chalked up, while the boy in the white coat came and set up the five colored balls for the new game between Jim and the curiously slender, gold-toothed man named Smiler.

Smiler won the toss and the break and caromed and pocketed a score of 22 in no time. And then accidentally sunk the blue ball in the yellow pocket.

“Cheese,” said Smiler, “I can’t hit an elephant with a scoop shovel. I been shootin’ like dat all week, Chimmie.”

Chimmie carefully hung up his hat. Slowly chalked his cue. Rolled up his sleeves. The yellow ball was hanging right over its pocket.

Chimmie leaned out and rested his entire upper works on the pool table. He set his cue against the white ball and made a few tiny, experimental passes with the cue tip.

A sudden sharp stabbed silence filled the room.

All eyes turned to the far end, at the doorway. Standing staring sternly at the partition were two very large men in fedoras.

“Nix,” hissed Smiler.

Chimmie, all in one graceful, snakelike motion, laid down his cue, withdrew his length off the table, swept up his coat, hat and me, taking me by the elbow. Almost without a sound and certainly without a single pause in one long continuous motion, Chimmie swept us backward where a door was already opening to the hand of Smiler.

“Come on,” said Chim.

Smiler led, with long legs flinging slush and mud, down a narrow lane walled with garbage cans and packing cases, around couple of bends, through a shed, around a stable, up another lane, and over an eight-foot fence. They boosted me over. I got splinters in my hand as I was flung into the yard of a surprised-looking little house. Down the alley we sped, and into the street where, suddenly slowing, we formed three abreast, walked, with unconcern, but with slush and mud on our coats and pant legs, down the street, like three citizens returning from lunch to their affairs.

“Well, said Smiler, “Chimmie, dat was a tough break.”

“It’s de foist time,” said Chim, “I’ve had dat yellow ball hung on de pocket like dat for munts. Munts and munts. Of all de luck.”

“Pardon me,” I said, “but what was all the excitement, if I may ask?”

“Poor old Hoibie,” explained Chimmie, “was pinched again. Tree times in a year.”

“Pinched. What for?” I demanded.

“A little hand book he runs,” explained Smiler. “Just a little book on de races, see?”

“Why did we have to run?” I demanded.

“If you is found in,” explained Smiler, “you is found in, see? Found in a gambling joint, see? Ten bucks and costs.”

Smiler accompanied us around about to our car and bade us adieu.

“Well,” said Jim, Jim once more, with no cigar butt and looking just the same as ever, “well, you saw a little action after all.”

“I got splinters in my hands. I nearly fell in that muck in the lane,” I admitted.

“You got action, though.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I suppose, in the field of morals, there will always be action. Even when there is no other action any more.”

---

Editor’s Note:

1. Jim has mentioned playing Russian pool before, but since there are many games with that name, I was not quite certain which he played. Since this story provides a description, it seems to be similar to the variant called Slosh. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 7, 1942.

“When this war is over,” enunciated Jimmie Frise, “this world is going to be a different place.”

“No, Jim,” I asserted, “you’ve just been reading the propaganda. What you’ve got to read is history. This world never changes.”

“Are you insinuating,” demanded Jim, “that our propaganda isn’t true?”

“Well, the German propaganda started all this stuff about a new and better world, a new order and so forth,” I pointed out. “Later, we took up the cry.”

“You had better be careful,” warned Jimmie, “what you say about propaganda.”

“Is it all right if I just think about it?” I inquired.

“It’s better not even to think about it,” advised Jim. “Then you can’t get into any trouble. In wartime, ours not to reason why. Ours but to do and die.”

“Very well,” I surrendered. “But all the same, I think we ought to read history. In times like these, it is good for the soul to read history. It gives you courage.”

“Does history suggest,” asked Jimmie, “that the world won’t be a better place after this war?”

“All history teaches,” I explained, “is that nothing ever changes. What happened to men in ancient Babylon is happening to men in modern Toronto and modern Birdseye Center. There is a wise old saying that history repeats itself. That is just a silly and high-sounding way of saying that men do the same things over and over again, forever and ever.”

“Then, you mean there will always be wars…?” questioned Jimmie darkly.

“I’ll tell you when there will be no more wars, Jim,” I declaimed. “There will be no more wars when no motorist tries to pass another motorist on the highway. When boys no longer fight in schoolyards, wars will end. When women no longer shove each other around at bargain counters, when hockey and baseball and golf are forbidden by law, wars will cease.”

“Puh,” said Jimmie. “No connection.”

“All the connection there is,” I declared. “I’ll tell you when war will end. When you turn the other cheek, war will end. If a motorist, trying to pass you on the street, cuts in ahead of you and bashes in your front left hand fender, and you get out of your car and go and shake hands with him and pat him on the back and plead with him to cease weeping – then wars will end. Read history, Jim. Read history.”

“If history is as cynical as all that…” uttered Jim.

Just the Form Chart

“History is just the form chart, Jim,” I explained. “You’re a racing man. You like horse-racing. How do you decide to bet on a horse?”

“I play hunches,” asserted Jimmie. “I stick a pin through my program and bet all the horses the pinhole punctures. Or else, if I see a guy run over by a truck on my way to the race-track and then find a horse named Smashem on the program, I bet Smashem for all I’m worth.”

“Do you win?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” confessed Jim. “But not often. It’s as good a way as any, though.”

“Better than the form chart?” I protested. “Why, Jim, that’s absurd. In the form chart, you see the full record of all the horses. You see who their sire and dam were, and what blood they’ve got in them. You see all the races they’ve run and how they did in them. You see all the conditions under which they ran: whether muddy track or track fast; whether they run best in the spring, summer, autumn or winter: whether they are due for another win any day now, or whether they’ve had too many wins lately to be likely to win again. That’s what they call form. That’s history. It’s the record.”

“I play hunches,” insisted Jim. “Form charts give me a headache.”

“So you’ve got a hunch,” I followed up, “regarding the war. You’ve got a hunch that the world is going to be a better place after this war?”

“Well, what do you think?” countered Jimmie.

“To tell you the truth, Jim.” I surrendered. “I think so too. But it is not going to be a better place for the rich and powerful. It is not going to be a better place for comfortable guys like you and me and our families. It is not going to be a better place for kings and dukes and barons. It is not going to be a better place for millionaires and smart guys and clever people. It is only going to be a better place for the mass of mankind.”

“And what’s the matter with that?” demanded Jimmie.

“Nothing,” I assured him. “But it does sound kind of funny to hear you, a comfortable cartoonist, making good money for just sitting at a drawing board twiddling your fingers lazily, talking about a better world that is coming. It won’t be better for you. The world that is to come won’t be able to afford to pay fancy wages to cartoonists any more than it will be able to pay a hundred thousand a year to some clever guy who can operate a factory so smartly that he puts all other factories out of business.”

“When I say a better world,” explained Jimmie, “I do not refer to dollars and cents.”

“Most people do,” I assured him. “When public men speak over the radio about the new world that is coming, 99 per cent. of the listeners automatically translate that, in their thoughts, to better wages, a nicer house, more clothes, a new car…”

“Look,” interrupted Jimmie, “if I am going to be paid truck driver’s wages for being a cartoonist, then I am going to be a truck driver. Because it’s a lot more fun to drive a truck than to have to sit here, week after week, year after year, thinking up a new idea every day.”

“Okay, you be a truck driver then,” I agreed, “and let somebody do the cartooning that really loves being a cartoonist, who gets more kick out of drawing a cartoon than out of drawing a fat pay envelope.”

“That would have been me, 30 years ago,” sighed Jimmie. “When you are young, you don’t worry about the wages. You work for the thrill, the adventure of it. Then, as you grow older, your fingers start to crook.”

“History teaches,” I stated, “that men never change, that men will go to war for one cause or another, every generation. The cause is always high and holy. But whether the cause is the natural one that makes boys fight in schoolyards, or whether it is the one that makes you want to knock the block off the guy who cuts in ahead of you on the highway, fight we must.”

“I don’t like that,” declared Jim.

“Fine,” I said. “Then go ahead sticking pins through programs. But history also teaches something else. There is only one central core, one backbone to all history, Greek, Roman, European, Asiatic, ancient, modern-one thing upon which all historians can agree. And that is, that with the passage of time, freedom, power, happiness and privilege is broadening out, ever and ever, from the few to the many. More and more of humanity is being set free from slavery and bondage with every century. Come conquerors, come tyrants, come Charlemagne and his Holy Roman hosts, come Philip of Spain with his world conquering Spaniards, come Elizabeth of England with her Drake and Raleigh and Hawkins and Frobisher… only one thing is eternally true through all the million pages of history: and that is, that the common man, the plain, happy, hungry, insignificant common man is freer, happier, more powerful, has a greater share in life than he had in the 50-year period preceding any page you like to delve into in history, all across the ages.”

“Weelllll,” cried Jimmie heartily, “what more do we want?”

“All right then,” I concluded, “but 10 years from now, don’t expect any sympathy from me when you start complaining about the fact that street car motormen earn nearly as much as cartoonists.”

“When I think of the better world to come,” said Jim, “I have in mind a world where people will be more secure not only as regards money, but as regards life itself. After this war, there is going to be a terrific reaction. There is going to be the most gosh- awful uprising of League of Nations sentiment and humanitarian enterprises. After all this insane slaughter not only of fighting men but of harmless bystanders, there is bound to be a terrific kick-back in human nature. Disarmament, world peace organizations, international brotherhoods…”

“There will also be a powerful group,” I pointed out, “who will insist on keeping big standing armies, and more battleships and war factories.”

“They will be snowed under, as usual,” stated Jim. “The mass of mankind will be thoroughly sick of war. As we all were after the last war. Our whole generation will be ashamed of itself, for having gone mad. We will settle back to cultivate the better human qualities within us. Maybe a golden age will dawn, a golden age of art and beauty and literature and music.”

“During which,” I interpolated, “somebody else will be secretly arming with shovels and wooden practise tanks against us.”

A Perfect Example

“You’re terribly cynical,” accused Jim.

“No, sir,” I protested. “I’m childishly simple. I read history. And believe it.”

“Aw,” groaned Jimmie, “how soft and how hard we humans can be! One minute, we are up with the angels, gentle, kindly, filled with humane and lofty ideals: destroying slums; passing mighty legislation to free another vast group of our fellow men from injustice and cruelty; dreaming splendid dreams; writing sublime books, plays, music. The next minute, we are down with the devils, destroying one another like wild men. I am weary of war. I am hungry for gentleness. I just want to go and stand in the streets and watch children at play. I want to take my old dog on my knees and fondle his ears. I… I …”

“Which reminds me,” I interrupted, “of the purpose of my visit, this fine Sunday afternoon.

“By the way, yes,” agreed Jim. “Take your coat off. What have you got in the bag?”

“This is bread, Jim,” I said, opening the bag. “I’m on my way down to Sunnyside Beach to feed the wild ducks. I called to see if you’ll come for the walk.”

Jim was already up on his feet.

“And I’ll get some bread crusts, too,” he said.

So from Jim’s bread box we filched all the crusts and odds and ends of bread and filled the paper bag full to the top. And then we went forth into the fine winter afternoon and walked down to Sunnyside, only five blocks south. Old Rusty, Jim’s feeble-minded Irish water spaniel, joined us.

“Get that dope on a leash,” I warned, “or he’ll chase all the ducks out to sea.”

“He wouldn’t harm a duck,” scoffed Jim. “He’d love to see them.”

“He can see them, all right,” I said. “But get a leash.”

Which unfortunately Jim did, and when we neared the lake, Jim put Rusty on the leash and we walked over the trodden snow beach to the icy water’s edge, where numbers of people, with children, were tossing bread and corn to the mallards, black duck, and a few species of other wild duck which find a winter haven in the open water off Toronto’s pleasure beach.

At first, the ducks were scared of Rusty, even though he was on a leash, and they swam to visit other people who were tossing bread. But with friendly and wheedling calls, Jimmie and I both tossed bread far out and coaxed the ducks toward us. Rusty whined softly.

“The old fool,” said Jim, “He goes to sleep in the duck blind when the hunting season’s on. But now he is all of a tremble.”

“Isn’t it strange,” I mused. “Less than 15 weeks ago, when the duck season was open, we were risking our lives out in harsh blizzards, crouched down in wet, sodden swamps, trying to shoot these beautiful creatures. And here we are, tenderly feeding them.”

“It is a perfect example,” agreed Jim, tossing bread to the ducks now only five feet out from the edge of the ice, “of what I was saying about human nature. One minute, we are full of tenderness. The next, we are shooting guns.”

“I Didn’t Laugh Once”

“Quaaack, quack, quack,” I soothed, tossing broken particles of the bread to the lustrous mallards and the handsome proud black ducks. “You never see ducks like this in the shooting season. When you are hunting, a duck is a wild, racing creature out in the wind going 50 miles an hour. Just a dark swift pattern against the gray sky. Tempting the sporting instinct. But here, on the water, they are queer, comic, greedy little beautiful creatures…”

“It’s quite possible,” said Jim queerly, “that we might actually have shot at these very ducks, up north. And here we are, feeding them like pets.”

“Aw, they’re cute, Jim,” I cried. “Look at that mallard. Look at the expression. Why, he’s smiling!”

“Your attitude towards ducks,” said Jim, “and towards men, depends largely on where and how you see them.”

“I’m almost ready to say,” I said, “that I have nothing against ducks.”

“Hyah,” yelled Jimmie suddenly.

For Rusty, who had been lurking us while we tossed the crusts, whining faintly, gave a violent leap, leash or no leash, in an attempt to break Jim’s hold and make a grab at the nearest duck, a handsome mallard busy with a large hunk of bread.

The leash caught me around the knees, and before Jim could get a proper jerk, Rusty had rounded me and hauled my feet from under me.

The ice, bathed not only by the lake but by the fine sun, was wet and horribly smooth. I felt myself sliding even as my feet went up.

“Whoa, don’t go in there,” warned Jimmie.

But what good are warnings? In a sitting posture, I went in. It was not deep. In fact, it was quite shallow. I raised my feet in the air and was able to hold my upper portions fairly upright, with the result that only my least dignified portions were immersed in the bitter and icy waters of Lake Ontario.

Rusty splashed me a little and the ducks made a great outcry which caused many of my fellow citizens, who might otherwise not have seen me, to witness what they thought was an attempt on my part to snatch a duck.

“I’ve a good mind,” yelled one gentleman who, with his wife and baby, were standing nearby, “to call the cops.”

Jim assisted me out. I was wet only amidships, though it trickled icily down my legs and into my boots. But a brisk walk up street for home soon removed the chills.

“You’ve got to give me credit,” said Jimmie, when he left me at my sidewalk, “I didn’t laugh once.”

“Damn all ducks,” was all I replied.