The Work of Greg Clark and Jimmie Frise

Category: Other Story Page 1 of 9

Easy Come Easy Go!

“We wanted to find out if we could borrow some money,” I began. “We want two thousand dollars each.”
We turned to our typewriters and worked furiously for a few minutes.
“We ought to be able to get some capital,” I said. “I know lots of bankers.”

By Gregory Clark, February 4, 1928.

Charles turned from the telephone, where he had been carrying on a guarded and excited conversation, and his face was flushed with excitement.

“By George!” he exclaimed.

“What’s up?”

“You know that stock? Kaflooey Gold?”

“Yes?”

“I told you about Eddie getting in on it?”

“Yes!”

“Well it’s up forty points!”

“Yes!”

“Do you see what that means?” Charles was flaming with excitement. “Eddie got it at seven cents a share. He bought seven hundred dollars’ worth. He has just cleaned up four thousand dollars!”

We stared at each other in silence.

“What luck!” I murmured.

“Luck nothing!” cried Charles. “It is courage. Daring. Enterprise. The readiness to seize opportunity when it arises.”

I thought of Eddie, a rather down-at-heel acquaintance of ours. It was hard to visualize Eddie with four thousand dollars1. I could not see him in my mind’s eye at all:

“But here’s the point,” said Charles. “Eddie is pyramiding. He is buying another big block of Kaflooey Gold Mine at 47. He expects to make fifty thousand dollars in a month!”

Again we both stared in stunned silence.

“Where is he getting the money to buy the new lot?” I croaked.

“He is using his present stock to borrow the money on.”

“Lucky devil,” we both said together.

“I wish we had some capital,” said Charles. “At this time.”

“We ought to be able to get it,” I said.

“How?”

“From the banks. I know lots of bankers.”

“Do you own your house?” asked Charles in the practical, business-man tone. “Do you own a single bond? Have you any assets whatever that a bank would look at?”

“Oh, banks don’t always want assets.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Charles, “that you don’t possess a single bond in this age of bond owning, when every stenographer from the Atlantic to the Pacific owns a bond?”

“Well, I said apologetically, “I bought bonds when I was in France, but I had to sell them to buy furniture when I got back home.”

“Furniture!” said Charles coldly.

“But banks don’t want bonds,” I said. “There is orfe thing that bank presidents and bank general managers have always impressed on me. And that is that they would rather have character than security. We have no security, out we’ve got plenty of character between us. I mean what you lack, I’ve got.”

Calling on a Banker

Charles adopted the shrewd, executive expression.

“How well do you know a banker?”

“I go fishing with three or four of them.”

“But I mean bankers who would lend you money.”

“I know one.”

“If we went to see him, what would you say?”

“I would tell him that we had some inside dope on a gold mine and we wanted a couple of thousand dollars apiece.”

“What security could you offer?”

“Character.”

“Whose character?”

“We would give him our notes, and I would endorse your note and you would endorse mine. What more could he want?”

Charles gave me a pitying look and returned to his own desk.

During the morning. he was called to the phone four times, and all he said, in these conversations at the phone, was – “Well!”  “You don’t say!”  “Isn’t that remarkable!”

After the fourth call, he came over to me and said:

“Up ten points more!”

“Look here,” I exclaimed, “we’ve got to do something!”

“Well!”

“If Eddie can get away with this, what fools we are.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m going to see a banker. Will you come?”

“Yes,” said Charles.

So I phoned a bank manager in one of the biggest downtown banks and he said he would see us.

He was sitting easily in his large office when we came in.

“We wanted to find out if we could borrow some money,” I began. “We want two thousand dollars each.”

“What do you want it for?” asked the manager.

“We have a tip on a gold mine, and we want to buy two thousand dollars’ worth of stock in it, each.”

“You have bonds or some other security?”

“No, we have not. We have no security. But Charles is willing to endorse my note and I will gladly endorse his.”

The bank manager looked curiously at me. I thought I saw Charles wink at him.

“Let me see: what gold mine is this?” asked the manager.

“The Kaflooey Gold Mine.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No, it’s not listed. It’s a new one, and it la going up at a tremendous rate. Likely to be listed any old time.”

“Suppose this stock does not go up. Suppose it goes down. How would you pay back the two thousand dollars?”

I looked at Charles. He said:

“I suppose we would have to work.”

I thought this was a good time to put in the remark about character.

“It is an old saying amongst bankers,” I said, “that they would rather have character than security.”

That Character Question

“That is true,” said the manager. “You say that if this stock went down instead of up, you would work for the money and pay it back. Save it, in other words.”

“Yes.”

“And you have not saved anything up to the present?”

“Well, we have no surplus just now.”

“I was merely trying to get at an estimate of your character,” said the manager, mildly.

“Then you would not be satisfied with our notes, each endorsed by the other?”

“If it were my own money, I might,” said the manager. “But bank money is not our own money. It is everybody’s money, entrusted to us to conserve and invest. It is rich men’s money and poor men’s money. It is money earned and saved by hard work and foresight, by labor and genius. We have no right to play with it. To risk it. You may risk your own money. Not other people’s.”

“Then you would not take a chance on two young men’s ability?”

“To guess the mining market?”

He had us.

“Now,” said the manager, “if you were two young men in some manufacturing business and had proven yourselves efficient and displayed promise, and you came to me with a proposition, backed with the orders and support of the trade, we would listen with interest to your demand for a loan. In that case, we would be interested more in your character and less in your security.”

It was nice of him to listen to us and to show us so genially to the door.

“It was a wild goose chase,” said Charles, as we walked back to the office. “I knew beforehand that he would say exactly what he did say.”

“A fellow has got to distinguish,” I said, “between what a banker says in his office and what he says in his annual report.”

“Or in after-dinner speeches,” said Charles.

“Or in his autobiography.”

“Easy come, easy go,” said Charles. “If we could have got that money as easily as that, probably Kaflooey Mines would have dropped as soon as we placed our orders.”

“Personally,” I said, “I’m just as glad we didn’t get the money. I have enough to worry about as it is without taking on a bank loan.”

“In fact,” said Charles, “the only reason I went with you was my absolute certainty that we wouldn’t get it. Because it is against my principles to gamble in mining stocks.”

“They certainly are a risky thing. A man shouldn’t touch them except with surplus money he was going to play with anyway. Eddie had nothing to lose. He was always broke. He will probably lose this in a couple of days.”

“Let’s get him to pay back the fives and tens he owes us before he loses it,” said Charles.

At the office, on our return, there was a message to call Eddie.

“You don’t say!” said Charles, at the phone. “Well, well! Isn’t that astonishing!”

He walked slowly over to my desk.

“Eddie bought all he could get at 58 and sold it all just now at 70. He has made $14,0002.”

“$14,000,” repeated Charles.

“Impossible.”

“That’s what he says. And he says he is through with stock gambling forever.”

“No!”

“And he is going to take a trip to Europe on his $14,000.”

“Europe! Oh, man! He’ll see the Strand again, and maybe go for a bicycle ride along the Arras-Bethune road, and see Cambligneul.”

“And Houdain,” said Charles sadly.

“And St. Pol and maybe Poperinghe.”

“I wonder,” asked Charles, “if there isn’t some way a couple of young fellows could make a few thousand dollars?”

“Well, there’s the stock market.”

The phone rang and it was for Charles.

His conversation was inaudible.

“That was Eddie,” he said. “He just phoned to tell me that Kaflooey Gold had suddenly dropped to 40 and was still descending.”

We turned to our typewriters and worked furiously for a few minutes. Then the phone rang again, for Charles.

“Eddie,” said Charles, after a short conversation. “He says Kaflooey is down to 10.”

“A brief and glorious flight.”

“Yes,” said Charles. “It went up like a skyrocket with enough force to shoot one man clean to Europe!”


Editor’s Notes: This is a good representation of the stock market craze before the start of the Great Depression.

  1. $4000 in 1928 would be $70,350 in 2024. ↩︎
  2. $14,000 in 1928 would be $246,000 in 2024. ↩︎

A Christmas Tale

December 24, 1920

By Gregory Clark, December 24, 1920.

Once upon a time there were three wise men living in a hole in the ground.

The hole was deep and dark and cold. In the light of one guttering candle the walls of the hole shone wet. And down the steep, rotting, stairway ran little streams of icy water of melted snow. For it was winter, up above this hole in the ground.

In fact, it was Christmas Eve.

And the three wise men crouched close to an old tin pail, which was punched full of holes to be a brazier, and in it burned a feeble fire.

“Cold!” said the first wise man who was wise in the matter of bombs and knobkerries1 and of killing men in the dark.

“Bitter!” said the second, whose wisdom was of maps and places and distances: a man who was never known to be lost in the blackest night In Noman’s Land.

“Cold as Christmas!” added the third, who was wise in the way of food, who had never let himself or his comrades go hungry, but could always find food, no matter how bright the day or how watchful the eyes of quartermasters or French peasants.

“Christmas!” exclaimed the first. “Why, let’s see! Why, to-morrow is Christmas. To-night, boys, is Christmas Eve.”

And the three wise men stared across the brazier silently at each other; so that only the crackle of the feeble fire and the trickle of the icy water down the stairway could be heard.

They stared and stared. Strange expressions came and went in their eyes. Tender expressions. Hard, determined expressions.

“Right now,” said the first man, finally, “my girl will be putting my two little kiddies to bed. And a hard time she is having. They want to stay down stairs to see what all the mysterious bustle is about.”

He paused to put his hands over the little glow of coals. Then added:

“I sent the boy one of them blue French caps, and the girl a doll I got in Aubigny2–“

The second, who had been staring into the glow intently, said softly:

“I haven’t any kids, but my mother will be hanging up one of my old black cashmere socks to-night. She’ll probably fill it with candies and raisins, and send it in my next box. She’s probably now sitting in the red rocking chair, with my picture resting on her knee, humming the way she used to–“

The third wise man, whose eyes were hard and bright, probably thinking of the Christmas dinners he had eaten of old, drew a sharp breath, stared about him at the wet earth walls, at the rotting stairway and the water and filth all around him.

“Christmas!” he cried, in a strained voice. “Think of it! Peace on earth, good will towards men. And here we are, like beasts in our cave, killers, man-hunters, crouching here in this vile, frozen hole until the word is passed and we go out into the night to creep and slay!”

“Steady,” admonished the first.

For the sound of someone slowly descending the rotting wet stairway could be heard.

And into the hole in the ground came a Stranger. He was dressed in plain and mud-spattered uniform. He wore no rank badges or badges of any kind. In fact, he had neither arms nor equipment, which was odd, to say the least, in the forward trenches.

“I heard you talking of Christmas,” he said, “so I just dropped in to wish you the compliments of the season.”

When he removed his helmet, they saw he was fine looking man with kindly face, but pale and weary.

“Thanks,” said the first, moving over. “Edge up to the fire. It ain’t much, but it’s warm, what there is–“

“What unit are you?” asked the second, as the Stranger knelt by the brazier.

“Oh, no particular unit,” replied the Stranger. “I just visit up and down.”

“A padre?” asked the third, respectfully but doubtfully, as he eyed the Stranger’s uniform, which was a private’s, and his fine, gentle face.

“Yes, something of the sort,” replied the Stranger. “You boys were talking about Christmas and home. Go on. Don’t stop for me. I love to hear that sort of thing, once in a while.”

And as he said it, he drew a breath as if in pain; and his face grew whiter.

“Here,” exclaimed the first wise man. “Let me give you a drop of tea. You’re all in.”

And he placed on the brazier his mess tin to warm over a little tea he had left.

“And eat a little, of this,” said the second wise man, handing the stranger a hard army biscuit. “Dry, but it’ll take away that faint feeling.”

“Say, here’s an orange,” said the third, producing a golden fruit from his side pocket. “The last of my loot, but you’re welcome to it.”

The Stranger accepted these gifts with a smile that touched the hearts of the three.

“I am hungry,” he admitted. “And weary. And sick, too, I expect.”

And as he ate and drank, the three wise men continued, with a somewhat more restraint, their talk of Christmas. The Stranger listened eagerly, drinking in each word, each bashful, chuckle of the three.

And at last, the third, reverting defiantly to his original theme, exclaimed:

“But think of it! Christmas, peace on earth; and here we are like wolves in our den! How can we be here, and yet celebrate Christmas? It is unthinkable. What do you say, sir?

And the Stranger, with an expression of pain and a light on his countenance replied:

“The ways of God are hidden from us. But remember this: out of all this suffering, by every divine law, good must come. On Christmases still to be, you men must recall to-night, so that the sacrifice be not forgotten, and a mocking world again betray those who died for ideals.”

The Stranger rose abruptly.

“I must be on my way,” he said. “I have a long way to go to-night.”

And he handed the first wise man the mess tin.

“Hello,” said the first, remarking an ugly scar on the Stranger’s hand. “I see you’ve been wounded.”

“A long time ago,” said the Stranger.

“On the head, too,” observed the second wise man, eyeing a series of small scars on the Stranger’s brow.

“My helmet,” replied the Stranger, “presses heavily.”

And he bade the three good-night.

But as he stepped up the rotting stairway, the three were staring speechless at one another.

“An hungered and ye gave me meat!3” whispered the first. “A stranger, and ye took me in!”

And the three leaped to the foot of the stairway.

But the Stranger had gone.


Editor’s Notes: This is an earlier version of the story published on December 23, 1939, The White Hand.

  1. A knobkerrie is form of wooden club, used mainly in Southern Africa and Eastern Africa. ↩︎
  2. Aubigny-sur-Nère is a town in France. ↩︎
  3. This is from Matthew 25:35 in the Bible. The New International Version has it as: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” I’m not sure what version has it as “an hungered”. ↩︎

The Unmentionable Gift – A Christmas Tale of the Trenches

The ghostly figure, with a boost from his two companions, climbed softly over the parapet beside Horse Alley.

Those who care to will remember that Christmas Eve of the year 1917, in France, was a perfect Christmas card.

When “stand-to” was passed along from dugout to dugout, the boys came up out of their deep dens, muffled and yawning, to find the evening glorious with softly falling snow.

Not a breath of wind disturbed the huge, feathery flakes as they dropped, silently twirling, straight to the ground. And the hideous pale chalk of that mangled Hill 70 region was hidden by a pure blanket that lay like a blessing under the soft evening sky.

Snowballs flew. Like a gang of boys released for recess, the clumsy figures emerging from dugout entrances into the trench scuffled with each other, their half-suppressed shouts rising into the silence. From across the white waste of No Man’s Land, from the German trench, came an interested shout:

“Hi!”

As much as to say: “Hi, you Canadians– don’t you know there is a war on?”

Weaving his way through the trench now rapidly filling with men, came the major, second in command of the battalion, on his regular nightly prowl, to oversee the formality of “stand- to.” the regiment’s awakening.

“Merry Christmas!” cried all the troops to him. He was a jovial favorite. A snowball clanked smartly off his tin hat.

“Merry Christmas, boys, dammit!” called the major.

At the junction of the main communication trench to the rear, the major halted. A dozen of the men were gathered there.

“How about Christmas?” said a corporal. “When do we go out, major, and are we going to celebrate this year?”

“Yes,” replied the major. “It’s all fixed. We will be out in Mazingarbe1 in three or four days, and the Christmas dinner will be held in the big red brick mine building there. Orders were sent back to the quartermaster this evening to have tables and benches got together in readiness, and he has been given leave to go back as far as he likes in search of pigs, turkeys, chickens, and so forth!”

“Jake!” muttered the boys, standing about. “Jake-aloo!2

“We have the usual gift,” said the major, “of Christmas puddings from the Red Cross. There will be roast pork, roast fowl, vegetables, fruit and nuts. I have spent some of the canteen fund on a supply of bottled beer – Bass’s3…”

“Have you got it? Is it got?” asked the corporal, eagerly.

“The canteen sergeant is sitting up, getting no sleep at all, guarding it. One thousand bottles,” said the major.

“That’s one bottle all around and two for corporals,” said the corporal.

The Promised Dinner

“Go on, sir,” said another dark figure in the falling snow. You got as far as fruit and nuts.”

“Well,” said the major, “then will come Christmas pudding hot, with hot sauce on it.”

“Rum sauce?” asked a voice wistfully.

“No. We are saving the rum for punch made hot with lemons, oranges and red wine.”

“Put a little stout in it, major,” said a thick voice, “and it will have a little more body.”

The voice pronounced it “boady.”)

“The sergeants will be the waiters,” went on the major. “The regimental sergeant-major will be the head waiter, and when the punch is served the officers will come in to the big hall and drink the King’s health with the troops.”

“No officers present during the dinner?” exclaimed another.

“Nary a one. And the band will be present throughout the show to play, they having their dinner afterwards with the sergeants.”

A silence fell. The still snow dropped in noiseless clouds.

“When’s this for?” asked a voice.

“The night after we go out – I hope, four days from now,” said the major. “Well, cheerio, and Merry Christmas, boys!”

“Merry Christmas,” said they all.

And the major, with his runner at his heels, crunched away down the white trench.

“I don’t believe it,” said one of the clumsy figures at the trench junction. “It will be just the same old skilly4.”

“No,” said the corporal. “I was here last Christmas and it certainly went over good. Half a platoon to a table. Turkey, roast pork, potatoes, carrots–no, no, them little cabbages, you know–“

“Brussels sprouts.”

“And pickles, fruit; they had oranges, apples and some tinned fruit,” said the corporal. “The padre had decorated the place, the band kept banging away, everybody was merry and the officers came in at the last – I remember Dunc McNeil made the major take a drink out of his glass.”

Again the boys stood silent, thinking of the prospect.

“Well, said one, suddenly. “It’s Christmas Eve!”

“All right,” exclaimed the corporal, recalling his duty. “Get back to your places; here comes the Captain.”

And, except for the spotless coverlet over all that desolate world in which they dwelt, the men went back to the old routine of standing in the trench in lonely pairs, one man up on the firestep5, gazing silently to the east, his partner down in the trench, stamping his feet, hunching his shoulders, and moodily waiting his turn to mount the fire step above.

But the snow, Christmas Eve, seventeen, was enough of a marvel in France, where they have slush, which they called neige – and that precisely describes it – to create an illusion of the Christmas spirit in the hearts of some seventy-five thousand Canadians manning the trenches and the guns, the Vickers and the Stokes, the telephone wires and the supply dumps in their little section of the Great War.

Captain Brings Disturbing News

The captain commanding the company, with his sergeant major, came through the trench. He met the officer of the platoon, and they stood listening.

“Quiet as a church,” said the lieutenant. “No patrols to-night, of course.”

“Yes. One,” replied the captain.

“What! On that white snow? Surely not,” exclaimed the lieutenant. “It couldn’t be done.”

“It’s got to be done,” said the captain. “You know that little concrete box they found, out from Horse Alley?”

“It can’t be done,” said the lieutenant, doggedly.

“There’s a listening set there, they believe.”

“A listening set?”

“The scout officer was out near it last night. He heard talking and sounds as of some one adjusting some sort of an instrument. They think it is some new type of listening set for intercepting either our wire messages or actually overhearing conversations in the trench. Anyway, they are going out to get it to-night.”

“They? Oh, that’s different.”

“Yes,” said the captain. “But we’ve got to give them a covering patrol.”

“Oh, but it’s folly! On this snow? They will be barn door targets.”

“They can sneak up the old trench, right to the concrete shanty. All we need is a couple of men out on the flanks.”

“And they,” said the lieutenant, “will be brought in flat, with their heels dragging. I know that game. For Heaven’s sake!”

“You provide four men to stand by for orders from the scout officer,” said the captain, in his official voice, starting to move off.

“Oh, say….” began the lieutenant. Then he stood alone in the white trench, stabbing his stick into the snow.

The hours wore on. Not a shell disturbed the silence of that Christmas card night. Not a rifle cracked. Faint sounds of singing could be heard far back in the German lines. A couple. of young officers from battalion headquarters returned the singing, as they moved, boisterously, from company headquarters to company headquarters in the maze of the battalion’s trenches, paying Christmas visits to the officers of the companies.

But so spread-out was Christmas in France, there was little evidence of it that might in any of the numerous deep caves in which the thousand soldiers of the battalion lived. Christmas parcels, mailed by loving folks at home in November, kept arriving in batches all through December. And as fast as they came, with their contents of cake, tinned and bottled dainties, shirts, gloves, sleeping caps, they were opened and their prizes disposed of. A few of the boys had saved bits of cake, bottles of peanut butter or pickles, for Christmas Day.

The Proposed Patrol

The men on watch in the trenches may have spent their loneliness dreaming somewhat grimly of other Christmas eves. Those down in the dugouts awaiting their turn on top, for the most part slept huddled in dirty blankets on the bare, damp boards of the dugout floor, in the dim, guttering light of a candle.

At midnight, a slim, quiet young officer from headquarters, known as scout or intelligence officer, the master of maps, the searcher of mysteries, the commander of patrols that required more expert knowledge than the ordinary company patrols could apply, appeared in the front line trench. He had two men with him, members of the battalion scout section, specialists in the job of securing information.

The scout officer sought out the captain of the company, and a messenger was sent to bring the platoon lieutenant with the four men he had been ordered to detail for covering patrol. They all assembled in the captain’s dugout, around the rough table lighted by candles set in empty bottles.

“Horse Alley,” said the scout officer, when all were gathered, “as you know, continues on out from our front line into No Man’s Land, but there it peters out, neglected and fallen in. We have found, as you also know, a mysterious concrete hut, about the size of a piano, out in that old trench. Some of you have been close to it. Last night, with these two scouts here, I got within a few feet of it. There were Germans talking in it, and sounds as if they were handling or adjusting some sort of instrument. We have now been ordered to raid that box. It will be simple. Such wire as there is in front of it can be got over with a piece of matting I have up in the trench. The actual raiding will be done by myself and my two scouts here. But we want to prevent anybody coming up the old trench from the German end, and catching us in the act. There may be – there will likely be – a couple of Heinies in their bit of the old trench, guarding whoever is in the concrete box. You will have to handle them.”

“How?” asked the lieutenant, “do you expect us to work in this white snow? We will show up like ink spots on a table cloth.”

“It is unfortunate,” said the scout officer. “We will be down in the old trench. You will have to get out on the sides, for we can’t use bombs in there. The door of the box is towards the Germans, and bombs would hit us as we work at that door. It will have to be a rifle and bayonet job.”

“Well, to be frank,” said the lieutenant, “I don’t see why we can’t put it off one night; for this snow will ten chances to one be gone tomorrow.”

“And again, it might last for a week,” said the scout officer.

One of the four men brought by the lieutenant, a comical, good-natured farmer by the name of Adair, begged pardon and asked if he might speak.

“Well, excuse me sir,” said he, “but if one man was able to hide himself, what I mean is, camouflage himself, couldn’t he do all the covering necessary for you scouts to do your job?”

“I had thought of camouflage,” said the scout officer. “But I was unable to get a thing.”

Private Adair’s Camouflage

“Well now,” said Adair, reddening and embarrassed, “I have a thing that would cover me from head to foot in white, and if I could get out there on the snow, beside that old trench, I could prevent anybody coming out to disturb you, and nobody could see me, and one man could do it as well as five.”

“What have you got, Adair?” asked the lieutenant.

“Well, sir, it’s just a thing I have; I’d rather not say, sir. But if you think one man, all in white, could get up there and do it, while I’ll do it.”

The scout officer sat thinking.

“All in white?” he said to Adair. “Head and all?”

“I can tie ordinary bandages around my head and boots and rifle,” said Adair.

“Of course!” cried the scout officer. By jove, I believe one man could do it, if he were not visible on the snow. I only counted on two, if it hadn’t been for the snow I admit it is a tough job, out there in the white.”

“May I go and get ready?” asked Adair.

“We’ll meet you in the trench in ten minutes,” said the scout officer, “and see if it will work.”

The group sat making their plans, agreeing that, in perfect silence, the scout officer would himself go first up the old trench, and if there were any signs of Germans on the watch he would rush the box, his two scouts with him, perhaps throw one bomb beyond the box, in doing so, and then swarm around or over it, loot it of whatever it contained, while the covering party would be responsible that nobody got out from the German end to disturb him. It was only to take a moment.

Then they went upstairs. And with two uproariously laughing companions stood Adair, a ghostly figure in snow-white from head to feet. The only dark spot on him was a slit where hist eyes showed.

“Ordinary shell dressing bandages on my head, feet, legs, hands and rifle,” said he in a muffled voice. “The rest is unmentionable.”

His companions chuckled.

“Great!” said the scout officer.

“Let me go out,” said Adair, through the bandages over his mouth, “and look the ground over. If you don’t hear any sound in ten minutes come on out to the trench. I will be up on top, near the box, and when you approach make a sound, and then if there are any watchers to shoot I will do the shooting.”

“You can be seen against the skyline,” warned the officer.

“It’s a gully in front,” replied Adair.

“Look out for our wire,” admonished the scout officer.

And without another word the ghostly figure, with a boost from his two companions, climbed softly over the parapet beside Horse Alley, and stooping over marched straight for Hunland.

“Hope it works,” said the lieutenant, stiffly. The moments passed. Not a sound came from in front. The scout officer was standing up, looking over the top.

“I’ve lost him,” he said. “Can’t see a sign of him.”

After ten full minutes of perfect stillness the scout officer, and his two scouts, with pistols drawn and cocked in their hands, and their roll of matting slung between them, slipped quietly into that piece of Horse Alley which, shallow and broken down, rambled across No Man’s Land to the Germans. A few feet behind followed the lieutenant and his three men.

Grandma Makes Him a Hero

Horse Alley twists, changing direction about every fifteen feet. At the last turn. of all, before coming upon the mysterious concrete box, the lieutenant stamped smartly on the frozen earth.

Instantly, ahead and a little to the right, a shot rang out. And instantly, from the same place, another.

And bending low the scout officer and his two men rounded the curve on the full jump. They had feared a sentry would have been peering over the top of the concrete box, as he had been the night before. That was but one of the chances of a scout officer’s life. But there was no opposition as the three flung, with practised swiftness, their piece of cocoanut matting across a tangle of wire this side of the box. In another instant they were upon and around the concrete box, where, on the far side, they found a little door, letting into the concrete. There, half out of it, was a German, clutching frantically in his arms a square box that seemed to be infinitely precious. Meantime a rifle, somewhere up above and to the right, continued to crack. And muffled shouts and cries came from the direction of the German trench.

“Ah,” said the scout officer, tapping the bended German on the cap with his pistol, “that little box is what we want. Up! Over! See, follow this man. I’ll carry your little box.”

Inside was another German, waiting his turn to get out. In his tight grasp were sundry ear phones and wires, coils and a flat leather case.

“Come out,” said the scout officer. “Make it snappy. I guess you speak English.”

And indeed the German seems to. With the long black nose of the scout officer’s pistol touching his teeth, the second German handed over his armful of gear to the waiting scout and clambered heavily after his comrade over the concrete box towards the Canadian lines.

The scout officer was bending down to take a quick survey of the interior of the box when a voice above him said:

“You had better get back now, there’s a bombing squad coming out.”

Looking up, he saw the ghostly form of Adair standing on the edge of the trench. And at that moment, a German bomb, with its unmistakable rending crash, burst out somewhere on the side.

“Where I was,” said Adair, stepping into the box, “but not where I is.”

He and the lieutenant scurried back down Horse Alley to the waiting group of the lieutenant and his three men.

“Coming down with bombs. Give ’em a few yourself and then come back in,” said the scout officer to the, lieutenant.

A mighty racket of conflicting bombs disturbed the beautiful quiet of that Christmas Eve. But not for long. The Germans found their cave deserted, a couple of dead sentries lying near it, shot through the head by an unseen foe, their two precious engineers with their more precious instruments spirited away. When the news reached High Command, back about fifteen miles, they ordered their guns to fire a little hate. So Christmas morning found a number of large, round, black and grey smears on the pure white garment of the snow.

Adair was the hero of the day.

“The credit,” said Adair, to the officers who were pouring him a friendly libation, “goes to my dear old grandmother, her affection for her soldier grandson, and her total ignorance of a soldier’s life. Her Christmas box first filled me with alarm, then fright, then shame. I hid what it contained in the very bottom of my packsack, wondering how to get rid of it. Now it has been the means of me being a hero. Dear old grandmother!”

And Adair was one of the feature performers at the Christmas banquet of the regiment, four nights later, in the mine building of Mazingarbe, when, amidst a storm of cheers and waving of steaming mugs, he rose on top of a table to make a speech, clad in a snow-white flannel night shirt.


Editor’s Notes: This is another variation of the night shirt story that was also written about in 1929 that was covered here.

  1. Mazingarbe is a is a commune in the Pas-de-Calais area of France. ↩︎
  2. Jake and Jake-aloo is a slang term that means something is excellent or great. ↩︎
  3. Bass is a popular brand of beer from Britain. ↩︎
  4. Skilly is slang for a thin porridge or soup (usually oatmeal and water flavored with meat). ↩︎
  5. A fire step was built into each trench, cut into its wall some two or three feet from the trench floor. It’s purpose was to enable each occupant of the trench to peer over the side of the trench through the parapet into No Man’s Land in the direction of the enemy trench line. ↩︎

Small Packages

“Hyaaah!” roared the policeman. And about fifteen cars screamed their horns / “All right,” said the huge Bozarius, “I’m goin!”

By Gregory Clark, December 12, 1931.

“If you were a little bigger,” said Griffin, thoughtfully, “I could sock you for the things you are writing about me in the paper.”

“That,” said I, “is just one of the advantages of being small. Some of the greatest men in history, like Napoleon and Lord Roberts, have gone boldly ahead because they know perfectly well that nobody would sock them.”

“You have to be careful not to get into a row with another little man, though,” said the Griffin.

“To other small men,” said I, “I am always polite. It is only the big men I insult.”

“You say that is only one of the advantages of being small. What are some of the others?” asked the Griffin, politely.

“Too numerous to mention. You can get around so easily. You take up no room. You always have a front seat for everything.”

“You mean,” said Griff, “that you’ve got to have a front seat for everything.”

“We small men,” said I, airily, “who run the world, hire most of the really big men as policemen to see that the big fellows keep their place.”

“I’ll bet you,” said Griffin, “that you can’t take me out on the street now and demonstrate a single instance of your big advantage in being small.”

“Hah!” I laughed.

“Are you game?” asked Griff.

So we put on our hats and coats.

“The first demonstration,” said I as we got out onto King street, “will take place right here at Bay and King. When the red light comes on I will step out and walk right across against the light in full view of the cop. You wait until the next red light before you come across. And you watch what happens.”

We stood at the corner until the red light came against me. Then I stepped smartly out into the cross traffic. The policeman was on the far diagonal corner.

“Hyaahh!” roared the policeman. Fifteen motor cars honked their horns at me. Two trucks blew their wild whistles. It took some fancy stepping, as a matter of fact, to get across at all.

And when I got to the far side there was the cop waiting for me, very red in the face. He grabbed my shoulder.

“For two cents,” he roared, “I’d lock you up for trying to get yourself killed!”

When I looked back Griff was smiling broadly at me. And when the green light changed for him I signalled for him to come on across, because the cop was still standing at my corner and I had no desire to see Griff get into a jam.

But Griff shook his head and waited.

Again the red light came on.

And Griff stepped forth into the traffic, with slow, measured tread, stalked across right into the arms of the cop. No horns blew and several cars politely paused for Griff to pass.

Picking a Victim

I watched the cop eagerly.

“Hello, Sullivan,” said the cop to Griffin. “Did ye see this half pint here try to get himself kilt? If you’ve nothing on your mind follow him. I think there’s something phoney about this little guy.”

“Sure,” said Griff. And turning to me, in a loud Irish voice, Griff said: “Come on, get along there! No loitering on this corner.”

The cop looked after us with an appreciative eye.

“What the heck!” said I.

“He mistook me,” said Griff, “for some plainclothesman by the name of Sullivan.”

“Well,” said I, “that’s one indignity that I will always be spared.”

“True for you,” said Griff. “You have to be content with other indignities.”

“That was not a fair test,” said I.

“Well, try something else then,” said Griff.

“All right, then, we’ll try the bump test. I’ll deliberately bump into somebody on the street. See how they take it. Then you bump into somebody.”

“Pick your victim,” said Griff, as we strolled toward Yonge.

A mild-looking gentleman was walking briskly toward us. As he passed I pretended to turn suddenly to look back, and collided heavily with him.

“What the dickens do you mean?” shouted the mild-looking gentleman, who had a voice several sizes too big for him. “Why don’t you watch where you are going?”

“Sorry,” said I.

“Sorry my neck!” yelled the mild one. “I don’t care if you’re sorry! I’m telling you to be careful!”

“All right, all right,” said I, anxious to drop the matter.

“It isn’t all right,” yelped the kindly-looking man. “I tell you you can’t go barging around the streets like that!”

A crowd was pausing.

“Here,” said Griffin to the other. “Leave him alone!”

The mild-looking gent folded up and hurried on his way.

“I wish,” said I to Griff, “that you hadn’t butted in like that. I was dealing with him.”

“Yes, you were dealing with him,” said Griff. “Now, let me pick one.”

“Pick a small guy if you want some action,” said I.

“I’ll do my own picking,” said he.

Toward us, slowly striding close to the tall buildings of King street, came an enormous truculent looking man. His head was down. He was staring bitterly at the sidewalk. He was as broad as a door and six feet high.

“Nix,” I hissed to Griff as I felt him edging over toward the inside.

To give him a good clear field I edged toward the outside.

Griff deliberately walked into him and slammed him with his shoulder.

I covered my face.

And when I looked at the pavement Griffin was not tying there.

“Why don’t you look where you’re going?” shouted Griff, glaring at the big man, who was backing away, with a horrified expression.

“I’m sorry,” said the big fellow. “I got something on my mind. I’m awfully sorry.”

“I don’t care if you’re sorry!” shouted Griff. “I told you to be careful!”

“Now I’ll Show You Something”

“Here,” said I stepping forward smartly and tapping Griffin on the chest, “you leave him alone!”

I said it to Griff.

But the big fellow took one look at me and gave me a shove.

“What’s this to you?” demanded the big stranger, advancing toward me.

“Lay off,” warned Griff, thrusting his arm out.

“O.K.” said the mystified stranger and hurried on his way.

We walked silently to Yonge and turned up.

“I am picking tough spots,” said I. “I’m doing it deliberately. But to make an honest. demonstration I ought to select normal instances of how the world favors and respects the small man. We’ll go in here for lunch. Now you watch who gets waited on first.”

“I’ll watch,” said Griffin. “How much did we have up on this bet?”

“We didn’t have anything,” said I. “Now, to be fair, I don’t want you currying the favor of the waitress. You just act naturally. No cheating.”

I selected a table at which the waitress was not a young chit of a girl who might be influenced by Griff’s Clive Brook1 style of manly beauty. I picked a nice, motherly waitress with a cheery countenance.

I do not admit that I was cheating when I smiled at the waitress. It is my nature to be merry and bright. I just acted myself.

I’ll be jiggered if she didn’t serve the soup to Griffin first

I ordered my meal in a friendly way. I asked the old girl’s advice on what was the nicest thing.

“What would YOU eat?” I asked, in a homely and natural way.

Griff, on the other hand, didn’t even speak. He just grunted and pointed at the things he wanted on the menu. He never even looked at the waitress. She was not there, as far as he was concerned.

And when she brought the soup, despite the fact that I smiled at her from a distance as she arrived, I’ll be jiggered if she didn’t lay Griff’s soup down first.

And the fish. And the meat. And the dessert.

Every course, she served Griff first.

“She’s afraid of you,” I said.

“Possibly,” said Griff.

“Or else,” said I, ingeniously, “maybe I look to her like the host. I have that indefinable air of being the one who is buying the lunch. And naturally she waits on my guest first.”

“Are you paying for the lunch?” asked Griff.

“Dutch as usual,” said I, narrowly.

“You don’t even live up to appearances then,” said Frederick.

As we sat smoking there dawned on our mutual gaze a monstrous sight. It was the back of the neck of the hugest man you ever saw. He had a small bullet head. His ears. were cauliflower ears. His neck was as big as my waist. His shoulders were four feet across.

“That’s Bozarius,” said Griff, “the wrestler.”

“There you are,” said I. “Now I’ll show you something. We’ll wait and follow this Bozarius out and I’ll pick a fight with him. Just you watch what happens.”

“I’ll stand close,” said Griff.

“You’d better if you want to see everything that happens.

We sat smoking, while I revolved in my mind plans to display my theories on the huge person of the half-ton wrestler.

Very Hard to Demonstrate

He rose monstrously from his table. He waddled out of the restaurant with a leisurely air. He paused in the lobby to employ a toothpick in a large way.

I stepped up to him.

“Cut that out!” I commanded, sharply.

I could feel Griff close behind me.

The vast Bozarius slowly lowered his gaze and stared at me in alarm.

“Cut what out?” he asked weakly.

“Cut out using that toothpick in public!”

“Oh, dat’s all right,” said Bozarius, smiling timidly.

“Here” said I, and I snatched the toothpick from him and threw it away, “who do you think you are?”

Bozarius looked after the toothpick, then slowly at his enormous hands and then back at me.

“Vell,” said he, “whatever you say.”

“Come on now,” I commanded, feeling I had the upper hand of him. “Get out of here and don’t come back if you are going to stand around chewing toothpicks.”

Bozarius backed nervously away from me.

“All right,” said he. “I’m going.”

This was a demonstration that exceeded even my greatest expectations.

I followed the huge Bozarius menacingly and he backed away from me.

I looked about to see if anybody else besides Griffin was witnessing this masterpiece of the control of mind over matter.

There was a large mirror on the wall of the lobby in which I beheld Bozarius backing from me, next came I, in tense and menacing attitude, and close back of me appeared Griffin, who, with warning look on his face, was looking over my head at Bozarius and making signals, tapping his head, making circles with his finger around his head and indicating that I was off my nut.

I turned fiercely to Griff and Bozarius made a headling exit from the lobby.

“What’s the idea?” I rasped.

“It’s all right,” said Griff, amiably. “Bozarius has no sense of humor whatever. He would have squeezed you with one hand until you were six feet long if I hadn’t saved the situation.”

“Maybe,” said I sadly, “it would have been better if he had squeezed me a little bit.”

We strolled back to the office.

We walked up to one of the elevators, of which the chauffeur is a man I have known for twenty years. I call him by his first name. I have given him rabbits, fish, cigars and tips on the market. I have even given him passes to athletic events. I may say that nobody in the place has put himself on a basis of friendship and understanding with these men more consistently than I.

Griff entered the elevator ahead of me. And the elevator door slammed in my face.

And as I stood in the foyer. I was forced to the conclusion that, while good stuff may come in small packages, it is one of those things you have to take on faith, because it is very hard to demonstrate.


Editor’s Notes: This is one of the pre-Greg-Jim stories that featured Fred Griffin as Greg’s partner. It was also more common at the time to do “stunt stories” where they purposefully went out to try something out or test a theory.

  1. Clive Brook was a film actor. ↩︎

Deer Hunting! Never Again!!

November 15, 1919

By Gregory Clark , November 15, 1919.

Of the false joys of deer hunting, several hundred Toronto men are by this time wholly aware.

As far as one can make out, deer hunters are like drink addicts or dope fiends. After each hunting trip, they swear off. Never again for them. Nevermore will they desert the comforts of a large city for two November weeks spent amid slush, sleet, and vast uncultivated areas of fallen timber and prickly underbrush.

But when the first hint of sleet is in the air, the confirmed deer hunter seizes his rifle, some old clothes and a dunnage bag, and jumps the first train north.

To-day and for the next few days, however, they are returning with the “never again” expression on their faces, tired, starved, weak and unshaven. However, they try to disguise their real feelings, they are as fed-up as troops coming out of the line after a twenty-one day tour.

Jimmy and I know, for we have just returned from our first hunting trip.

Back in September, egged on by the boasting of certain confirmed deer hunters around the office, we started to make plans. We invited half a dozen others to join our party, and all these gave a delighted acceptance. But on the eve of November fifth, the opening of the deer season, to our astonishment, they all advised us in regretful accents, of their inability to come with us. It isn’t our astonishment now.

Alone and full of high hopes, Jimmy and I set off for our summer cottage for the hunt.

Passing over as immaterial our arrival at a Georgian Bay town, our wrestling with dunnage bags, rifles, and those odd articles of baggage that always seem to get themselves carried at the last moment, our early rising in a frost-bitten hotel and our journey by gasoline launch (at twelve dollars1), over the Arctic expanses of the lower Georgian Bay, we arrived about noon, at our summer cottage. Gone were all the balmy green trees, the warm rocks, the soft blue waters. Our summer cottage was a draughty, bleak little building standing forth naked amid a few bare trees, with frost on its roof. There was ice along the beach where, four short months ago, I was wont to paddle my feet.

After a short inspection of the inside of the cottage, inhospitably packed up for the winter, we decided to shift a couple of camp stretchers into the kitchen and there to cook, eat, live and sleep.

We carried a half-ton rowboat out of the dining room to the water and rowed down to the farm of a French family, about a mile away, to arrange about going after deer. After due consideration, the French family agreed to quit work on the stone foundations of a new house and come hunting with us.

Jimmy and I had vague notions that in hunting deer, we walked through a pleasant autumn forest, with hounds stepping gracefully in front of us, ever and anon scaring up startled deer, which ran in terror from us like young cows, while we stood back and fired carefully aimed shots after them, killing them in their tracks.

What deer hunting really is comes as follows:

Three hours before dawn, the kitchen fire having been out some hours, the frigid breezes blowing through the cracks of the cottage wake us from our fitful slumber. We rise in very grumpy spirits, put on a fire, sit disconsolately around while we prepare a breakfast of canned beans, brittle bacon and tea. Then we array ourselves for action, go down to the rowboat and crack the ice in the bottom of it and row, on chilly seats, down to our guides just as dawn pales the east.

At our guides’ they remove our dashing khaki hunting coats and give us old blue coats several sizes too large.

“No good being mistook for a fawn,” we are told.

Then we commence to walk. Up hill down dale, over rocks, through swamps and impenetrable forests we go. And although it is a bitter November day, with sleet biting us, we perspire richly.

After tramping for an hour and a half, till our fine new hunting boots are scraping the flesh off our heels, we are halted on a high, open stretch of rock, where the wind howls in freedom, and the fine sleet spins and eddies past us. We are told to stand very still and watch up this stretch of rock. Jimmy is placed across a gully on a similar ridge

The hound has meanwhile been taken in a long detour away off in the distance.

We stand in a position of readiness, our rifle at the alert. The perspiration soon freezes to our skin. Our fingers grasping the metal of the rifle grows numb and senseless. Our feet feel like blocks of ice. But we Keep a stern eye up the ridge.

Quarter hours pass that seem like hours. An hour passes that seems like a day. We commence to shiver quite violently, and stamp our feet on the rocks, while our attention wavers.

Suddenly, far in the distance, we hear the baying of a hound.

Our shivering turns to a regular shaking. It is uncontrollable. Our hands seem like feet. We make a pitiful attempt to come into a position of readiness. The hounds’ barking grows, nearer and nearer.

Then, with no sound and with no movement of the bushes a greyish brown form trimmed with white appears ahead of us.

It moves like a wind-blown leaf. It does not seem to touch the ground. Nothing on earth moves so swiftly or so gracefully or so silently.

Like a streak of lightning it passes us within twenty-five feet, a great white tail waving bravely.

The howling dog appearing at the far end of the ridge wakes us from our trance. A fine big buck has passed!

We are still shivering violently and in a mental daze when our guide dashes up out of the underbrush and yells–

“Why didn’t you shoot! Why didn’t you shoot!”

“Shoot what?” you ask weakly.

“That deer! It went within a few feet of you!”

“Shoot that!” you cry indignantly. “Say, what do you think. I am? An aviator?”

Well, after four or five repetitions of this tramping through wildernesses designed for mountain goats and cringing on bleak Alaskan plateaux till our bodies feel about to fall to pieces and a warm fireside seems the furthest thing in the universe; and after four or five deer have gone past us or over us before our feeble minds could grasp their presence, we finally control our mechanism sufficiently to pull the trigger viciously just at that furious moment the great, soaring buck sails past. And by some miracle, he leaps fair in front of your bullet and crumples pitifully and tragically into a slim little brown heap on the ground.

A live deer is a big, splendid, graceful, beautiful creature. A dead deer is as pitiful a little thing as a dead rabbit.

But when you tie his four knees together and lift him up on a pole to carry him two miles to the nearest water, he is neither little nor pitiful. He weighs over two hundred pounds. He sways and swings on the pole as you walk. The first fifty yards is the dickens. The second fifty yards is an inferno. After that you lose consciousness of all human feelings and just struggle along. Where the rocks and bush were rough before, they are mountainous when carrying out your deer. Where there were open spaces to pick your way before, these all magically close up into jumbled ravines and frozen wet swamps, as if in protest against the killing of a king of the forest.

Scarce remembering our names or standing, we at last reach the river and a motorboat. In it we sit and freeze on the journey back to the summer cottage. How warmly we pictured this return with the venison! How cold the actual performance left us!

Ah, well, it may have cost us something in pride to find what deer shooting was. But we didn’t do as badly as the three American hunters, who came up to these parts to shoot moose. No silly little deer for them! Moose or nothing. And hardly had they entered the bush when they saw three large dark brown animals on the shore of a lake. With deadly aim, all three hunters fired, and killed our French settler’s three horses. To avoid aspersions on their reputations as hunters rather than to account for the damage to the Frenchman’s property, these three New Yorkers paid five hundred dollars each2.

As for Jimmie and I, we will go deer hunting never again.

But when we do, we are going to take valets along to carry fur lined garments for us; and a larger party, to help bring in the meat.


Editor’s Notes:

  1. $12 in 1919 would be $195 in 2024. ↩︎
  2. $500 in 1919 would be $8090 in 2024. ↩︎

A Comedy in One Reel

“He was following me and humming.”

By Gregory Clark, November 10, 1923.

The prisoner had a ruffled look: perspired: had lost control of his eyes, which shifted helplessly; trying to hide; trying not to see; trying not to comprehend.

“Not guilty, he says,” roared the policeman on guard at the prisoner’s side: it was nothing to the policeman; a policeman twenty-one years. It was everything to the damp young man in the dock.

He compressed his lips; squeezed his pale fingers into knots; tried to concentrate his wild gaze on the iron rail a foot from his nose; but couldn’t.

“Evidence?” said the magistrate absently. He was thinking of this and that.

“This lady,” said a policeman with a jovial face, but with a scornful voice, “informed me the prisoner had been following her on the street – singing under his breath –

“Singing,” repeated the magistrate.

“So I arrested him.”

“What did the accused say when arrested?”

“He denied the charge and tried to break away.”

“Ah! Did he use violence?”

“He broke a bag of eggs he was carrying.”

“That’ll do,” said the magistrate. To the lady he said:

“Did this prisoner follow you on the street?”

“M’hm!” said the lady who was just out of her youth, and had rarely if ever been pretty. “He walked along behind me all the way from Bathurst to Spadina, and kept humming –

“Singing?”

– “Singing all the time – right behind me!”

“Did you molest this lady on the street?” demanded the magistrate.

“No – no! I saw no lady – I was going home there was no lady – I was hurrying along – “

“Were you singing?”

The prisoner clamped the iron rail with both hands.

“Yes,” he said, hoarsely.

“What were you singing?”

The prisoner rolled his eyes, licked his lips, made a fearful effort to smile: turned whiter than death.

“Home Sweet Home,” he replied.

Seven persons in the court sniggered. The other sixty-three hadn’t heard: were paying no attention.

“Home Sweet Home,” repeated the magistrate.

The other sixty-three in the court began to pay attention.

“Yes, sir. That was it.”

“Was that it?” asked the magistrate.

“M’hm,” replied the lady,

“Why were you singing? Had you been drinking?” asked his Worship.

“No-no! It was five o’clock – and after – I was going home – you see – I had the eggs and the ribbon and the white wool-“

The policeman on guard looked sharply at the prisoner and drew one pace further away.

“Is he quite right?” asked the magistrate, sotto voce, of the policeman at the witness box.

“I doubt It,” scornfully replied the jovial policeman.

“What’s the matter with you?” demanded the magistrate.

The prisoner bowed his head and his mouth trembled.

“I saw no lady – nobody – I was going home,” chanted the prisoner: “and the policeman took my arm – I broke the eggs. Yes, I was singing: I remembered that. But what about my wife -“

You should have thought of that first, my man,” put in the magistrate.

“-she is only a girl,” went on the prisoner, head down, chanting, “she’s little and afraid and she’s – she’s – she’s not very well – she’s making little clothes – and I was not to forget the Beehive1 four-play – white wool – now I’ve been out all night – maybe I’ve lost my job – and she’s been sitting at the front window – maybe – maybe – “

A great light of comprehension lit up the magistrate’s face.

“Discharged!” he cried.

The lady looked indignant, What should she tell her friends now, for goodness sakes?

The policeman on guard had been a policeman twenty-one years; he opened the gate of the dock and automatically roared “Order!” to fill in the time.

The prisoner, without a hat, feeling in his pockets for the wool and the ribbon, ran out the door of the courtroom exclaiming –

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!


Editor’s Notes: I’m not sure what the point of the story was, don’t sing or hum suspiciously?

  1. Beehive wool is a brand, that still exists. ↩︎

Five and Nine

October 25, 1930

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Eileen Wedd, October 25, 1930.

“What makes the leaves fall off?” asked the five-year-old.

The two were staring up at the oak tree. With every sigh of wind, leaves drifted down.

“It’s God makes them fall,” said the elder.

“Why doesn’t God make them stick on?” demanded the small fellow with mild indignation. “They are prettier sticking on. It would be summer then, and we could wear gym shirts.”

“God makes the fall off,” said the elder, who, being nine, speaks with a fine note of scorn in making these explanations of life’s mysteries. “He makes them all fall off, and pretty soon the trees are bare naked. The way you are in the bath.”

“And you, too,” put in the small boy.

“I bath myself,” corrected the elder. There was a distinction. “Anyway, God makes the trees naked. He turns the grass brown, it rains and gets cold, and then comes the snow.”

“Sometimes He leaves it summer,” said the little one.

“Never!” said the elder. “It always comes winter. He never leaves it summer.”

“I remember when it was all the time summer,” began the lesser, about to give reminiscences.

“Haw!” snorted the big brother. “You’re only five. What do you know! God never leaves it summer. It just goes round and round, winter, summer, winter, summer. You’ll find that out.”

“If Dodo asked God to leave it summer, He would,” said Five.

“No, He wouldn’t.”

“For Dodo He would.”

“Dodo wouldn’t ask Him,” said Nine briefly.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“For fear He wouldn’t,” said Nine. “But you don’t know about things like this. All you do is see the leaves fall down. Then comes winter. Wait and see.”

“Well,” said the small chap, “why does God go round and round like that? Why doesn’t He make it summer for a long, long time, and then winter for a long, long time?”

“Because,” said the elder, patiently, “God is just like Daddy. God is a man only very, very old. He is far older than granddad. He is older even than the world. Now you see daddy every morning. What does he do? He gets up, he goes downstairs and turns on the heater. Then he comes up and shaves.”

“First he looks in at me,” said Five.

“All right, but listen. This is how God is. Daddy shaves, and he stands there in front of the mirrow, putting powder on his chin, and he brushes his hair over and over, and puts on a clean shirt and then he goes in to mother’s room and says, ‘How do I look?'”

“He says,” cried Five, “’How does the old man look?’”

“Sometimes he says that,” proceeded Nine. “But anyway, he looks all fresh and shiny and his hair is wet and curls on the front. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” said Nine, “he goes to work. And when he comes home, how does he look?”

“At me,” said Five.

“But how does he look? He isn’t shiny any more. His hair isn’t smooth. If he scrapes you, he has whiskers, even little ones. He doesn’t jump around. He just goes and sits down. Doesn’t he?”

“I sit on his knee,” said the small chap.

“Oh, you aren’t listening!” cries the elder impatiently. “Listen, will you? I am telling about God.”

“All right.”

“Well, God is the same way as daddy. Daddy has to shave all over again, every morning. He goes to work, and then he comes home all tired. God gets tired. He makes the world all beautiful and shining, with green leaves and grass and flowers.”

“And gym shirts,” said Five.

“Don’t talk!” commands Nine sharply. “And the world is lovely and new, like daddy in the morning.”

“Does God shave?” asked Five.

Nine favors him with a long, grim stare. Five looks abashed.

“But after a while,” continues the elder, “the world gets all used, the grass is used, the trees are used, the flowers get tired and lean over. So God just lets everything go. He just lets the leaves fall off, the grass turn brown, the flowers die, and He lets the winter come, so that He can get up in the morning and start all over again.”

Five had not been entirely attentive. He was only half watching the oak leaves fall. But Nine was carried away by his own philosophy.

“Every day,” he mused, “daddy tries to make himself all new. But every day he comes back and he didn’t stay new. Every year God makes the world new, but it doesn’t stay. So He just lets it go and starts again the next morning.”

“When will it be morning?” asked Five.

“After the winter is gone.”

“And do we go to bed now until the morning?” asked Five.

“Yes, and miss Santa Claus?” demanded Nine with a knowing smile. “And miss hockey in the back yard, and sleigh riding out at Lambton, and snow men and forts?”

“We could do that,” said Five.

“While we sleep all winter?” cried Nine.

“We could be dreaming,” said Five.

Whereupon he abandoned his philosophic brother and dashed down from the steps to get another acorn that had fallen.


Editor’s Note: The nine year old is Murray Clark, while the five year old is Greg Clark Jr. Daughter Elizabeth had not been born yet.

Ruins Amid Muskoka’s Gaiety Tell Pioneer Epic

August 4, 1923

By Gregory Clark, August 4, 1923.

Hundreds of Abandoned Homesteads Throughout the Lakes Region of the Great Summer Resort Bear Witness to a Past of Hardship and Despair.

To the world Muskoka means gaiety, ease and joy.

It is a bit of the earth, it seems, set aside at the creation for the delights of summer.

But in back of those bright shores that are studded with hotels and cottages are evidences of an epic struggle in former days.

Muskoka and winter, Muskoka and grim hardship, Muskoka and dark despair seem absurd contradictions in terms.

But back over those splendid hills of light green and dark green, on little side roads where lovers stroll, throughout that beautiful region now largely given over to the summer resort, you will come across hundreds of ruined and abandoned homesteads, the mute records of at least one defeat Ontario dealt her pioneers.

The lake region of Muskoka is peculiar in this respect, there is no average farmstead. As you motor through the district you pass some small areas that appear to be excellent farm lands. But when you leave the highways and the neighborhood of the larger towns you strike the great contrast. For miles you will traverse hills and dales of wilderness, with infrequent clearings where a pitiful, tumbledown little shanty, new or old, scrabbles a meagre existence from a small patch of ground. Then you will emerge all of a sudden on a wide and beautiful clearing of hundreds of acres, and in its midst a modern red brick house, large barns and out-buildings, in perfect repair, every evidence of being a very successful farm.

There is no average. Either they are very well fixed or very poor.

And to add a sinister touch to the poor ones, the wilds are filled with hundreds of these ruined and abandoned homesteads, most of them the log houses and rough barns of the pioneer, the picturesque, hand-made homesteads of the builders of the province.

The reason is simple enough. That part of Muskoka consists largely of sand and rocks. It is fine soil for pines and hollyhocks, but poor for potatoes and other fruitful crops. Scattered all over the district are deposits of better soil, valleys where great forests have stood for ages, flats where swamps have been easily or naturally drained away.

When the pioneers came thrusting into Muskoka from the south they knew not which was good soil and which was stones. The forest hid that vital fact. The shrewdest were rewarded with a hundred or two hundred acres of loam over and in the sand. The less shrewd came wearily into some gorgeous valley filled with the sunset which Muskoka alone can devise and proudly and gladly they made a camp and, unladed their ox-cars and cried to the dark hills:

“Home!”

And when with gigantic toil which this older part of the province has forgotten, even when it looks at its endless fields, the forest was torn down and laid in piles and burned, these less shrewd pioneers found under the strong and sturdy forest only hummocks of sand and countless boulders, and here and there outcroppings of the fundamental rock which lies shallow under the whole of that northern country.

If you look at some of these abandoned homesteads with a recreative eye, you will be able to reconstruct the whole tragedy. For the clearings about the log shanties are not regular and ordered, spreading out squarely, but are in patches, a couple of acres cleared here, and over a ridge in a neighboring gulley, a couple of acres more, and so on, as the pioneer, finding rocks and sand in this dark valley where he so gladly cried “Home!” searched each autumn, with fire and axe, for that stretch of hidden earth which would be black and smooth and soft to the plow.

You don’t have to travel far in from your cottage or hotel to find one of these tragedies clearly written in logs and boulders and brushy meadows already falling victim to the enfolding forest. Fate has played a pretty trick with Muskoka. For fifty years it was the scene of a thousand failures made more bitter by the few successes. To-day, it is a nation’s playground, full of ease and music and brightness. Its million dollar breezes dimpling lakes and driving light sails and cooling ten thousand screened verandahs, have touched far different scenes.

The opening up of the west and its prairies and the arrival of the summer resort saved Muskoka from being a tragedy for those who had pioneered into it. Hundreds who had struggled faithfully to find the black acres under the forest gave up and went to the west, from which, twenty-five to forty years ago, fabulous reports were coming into the east. Far away were boundless acres of black soil covered not with forests, but with grass. To select your homestead you had not to cruise a wilderness and trust to luck for what the clearing would show, but merely walk over your hundred and sixty acres and feel it with your feet. No clearing but to drive the plow through the sod and burn a little swale of willows.

And by the hundred from Muskoka, as from all other parts of the province where disappointment had sought out the pioneer, they packed up and set forth for the west.

Those who remained, either from doubt or from poverty, were persuaded to remain by the arrival of the summer resorters. The exploitation of Muskoka as a summer resort is thirty years old, and yet it has only begun.

When the first cottagers came they brought relief to the poorest settlers. Garden crops could be sold at the best of prices. Milk, butter and meat were in demand. The labor of the man was needed for clearing, building and well-digging about the summer cottages.

Other settlers took in a few summer boarders and so were put on the first step towards the summer hotel. The majority and many of the best of the Muskoka hotels are run by the descendants of pioneers. From keeping a few visitors in the homestead to the erection of a small hotel and from the small hotel to the modern Muskoka hotel were logical steps.

There are golf links in Muskoka on pastures that were regarded as hopeless by the pioneer who cleared them. There are farms in Muskoka found to be more profitable as pleasure grounds for two months of the year than as farms for twelve months.

One old lady in her eighties told me the story of her pioneering in Muskoka. She came as a girl of eighteen by ox-cart into the country now the heart of the gayest resorts. A party of fifteen entered the district. They cleared their acres and found sand and stones. But they added to their income by cutting lumber for the markets at Bracebridge and Gravenhurst. Winter was desperately hard. They were cooped up for five months, while wolves possessed the forests.

They lived poorly and lonely, and the men went off in the winter to the lumber camps and in the summer added small patches to their clearings and tended sparse crops of hay and wheat and a limited garden.

When the west boomed her brothers and brothers-in-law and other men of the community promptly abandoned their clearings and went west. Everyone of them proved successful farmers in the west, died, well off, and deeded over their little Muskoka clearings to their sister, who owns hundreds of acres of bush and scrub.

Yet she still dwells in a small and poor farmhouse amid about forty acres of cultivated soil, growing corn and vegetables for the summer resorts, and pasturing a herd of cows for milk for the same market. She is poor, but quite happy. Her grandchildren own and operate several tourist hotels throughout the lakes.

Not far out of Bracebridge I talked to a settler in his seventies. His two chums, after five years pioneering beside him in Muskoka, gave up and went to the legendary west. They sold him their clearings for three hundred dollars each, no cash down, to be paid in instalments as the remaining man found convenient,

Both the wayfarers settled out of Winnipeg and became very wealthy wheat farmers and cattle-raisers. Both are dead now. But for many years the two of them made trips every other year to Muskoka for fishing and hunting. They came and stayed with their old chum who stuck to Muskoka. In this way, be paid off the three hundred dollars each for the clearings, the westerners paying part cash for their accommodation and part the old debt until it was wiped out.

You would think they would have given him the clearings. That they would have persuaded him to give up his miserable stone acres and come out west with them.

“This is good land,” said the old man to me, “I have been very happy on it. I have more fun than those chums of mine. They died before me. They had to come back here for their fun. Ther coaxed me to come out west, but they knew I wouldn’t budge-“

Those two well-off westerners wouldn’t have insulted their chum by offering him their abandoned land for nothing.

“Still you have had to struggle hard for what you’ve got here?” I asked, waving at the little unpainted home, the rock bound pasture, the undefeated forest all about the clearing.

“No harder than anybody else. I had a strong time. My sons are doing well, some in the towns, some at the resorts.

“Nobody can dig a well like me. I have doctors and lawyers and millionaires coming to me for advice and help all the time. They would be no good without me. There was a bank president just drove up here to this clearing an hour ago to get me to tell him where to build his new boat house. Big blue car. I am going with him to-morrow to show him where-“

So it wasn’t a tragedy altogether. They had a strong time. The desolate homesteads you will find everywhere in the lake region of Muskoka were the original settlings of men who went west or moved out to the lake shores to meet the cottagers and the tourists.

Still, for all the joy and the fame and gaiety that have made Muskoka a beautiful, byword there has been a grim contrast of bitter struggle and disillusionment which somehow hallows the district and justifies the compensation of these days of dancing and idling and making merry.

The Terrible Corn Eating Problem

Someone high in the public esteem ought to go about to all the restaurants and give a frank and lusty exhibition of corn eating.

By Gregory Clark, July 30, 1921.

The corn-on-the-cob season is here; and, as usual, the souls of countless thousands of hungry but proper people are filled with perplexity.

It is a terrible thing to go into a restaurant and see great platters of beautiful golden corn and at the same time be afraid to order it for fear of your neighbors’ eyes.

It is too much to have to sit in a cafe and see some brave, courageous person across the aisle ecstatically sliding his face along the cob of corn, his eyes rolling dreamily, and melted butter dribbling down his chin; while you, over-civilized, hyper-socialized, are afraid to make a similar spectacle of yourself.

Thousands of people in Toronto alone, it is estimated, are either bringing their lunch downtown in a package or are lunching at home solely because this is the corn season. Their stomachs crave the corn, but their moral courage is not equal to eating it in public.

Cannot the medical officer of health or some other authority on eating issue a public announcement standardizing the eating of corn-on-the-cob, and thereby sanction it even for the most finicky?

A neat poster could be got out, in colors, showing with diagrams the proper way to hold the cob, whether one or two or three rows should be bitten at once, how far along the row the eater should go before coming up for air, and so on.

It seems as if corn was created to set at naught our most sacred table manners. A few years ago, some hostess, endeavoring to admit corn into the most conservative menus and at the same time to preserve the table manners, set a fashion of cutting the corn off the cob with the knife, to be then eaten with the fork, like peas. But treated this way corn loses all its charm, its savor.

To mock us, Nature has made corn-on-the-cob the most delicious and at the same time the awkwardest of foods. It is taboo to rest the elbow on the table. But on the best authority, it is stated that if you don’t rest both – both elbows on the table while eating corn, you get butter all over your necktie.

Then the cob is round. Two, or at most three rows are all that can be reached at one bite, yet one bite is not a fair mouthful. There fore, the eater must take two or three bites sideways. This manoeuvre constitutes one of the most absurd exercises ever required of the human face. When the mouth is opened, the eyes open with it, the eyebrows are raised, and the same muses which elevate the eyebrows cause the ears to move.

Nature has undoubtedly provided corn to prevent us taking ourselves too seriously.

Timid and proper people, of course, resign themselves to suffer when tempted by corn in public. Then they hasten home and have a private gorge on corn. At this season of the year, if you go to your back windows towards bed-time and look across the yards at the kitchen windows opposite, you will probably see half-a-dozen proper citizens indulging in an extra corn feed before bed, by way of reprisal for the day’s self-denial.

No new methods need be sought. There is only one way to eat corn, and someone high in the public esteem ought to do a great public service by going about to all the different restaurants and giving frank and lusty exhibitions of corn eating to set at rest the minds of the pure and proper.

An Englishman just arrived in Canada was horrified at the first corn-eating exhibition he saw. It appeared a heathen sort of practice. After observing for a moment, he decided to demonstrate an improvement.

He ordered corn, and ostentatiously commenced eating from – the end, as one eats asparagus.

History tells that he made slow work of it, cob and all. But with true British doggedness, he stuck to the end.

His case is a warning to corn reformers. He is buried in Halifax.

Innocent Handbags

June 18, 1927

By Gregory Clark, June 18, 1927.

Mr. Bodkin, who works in our office, carries a handbag.

He has carried it for years, and with his handbag, umbrella and his rubbers on, he is so serious and dignified a personage, none of us has ever ventured to jolly him about the bag.

As far as we know, he never carries anything in it. It just seems to be a habit of long standing, and he would as soon go out with no collar and tie on and come to business without his faithful old handbag.

Now it so happens that he parks his car three blocks away from the office, half a block from one of the new liquor stores.1

And that handbag has taken on a new and horrible significance.

The first day liquor was on sale, Mr. Bodkin came down Church street and saw the line-up. And being an old newspaperman, the instinct to stop, look and ask naturally halted him.

He is a shy sort of man, however, who depends on his powers of observation rather than his tongue, and he stood about for all of five minutes before he spoke to one of his neighbors in the crowd, to ask what the line-up was for and where everybody was going, because everybody was carrying a bag of some description.

“Booze,” replied the neighbor. “This is the opening day.”

You can imagine Mr. Bodkin’s horror. He has been a prohibitionist since birth, a tremendous worker for the dries, the author of many a strong article and influential pamphlet on the liquor traffic.

And here he had been standing, bag in hand, in the liquor store line-up for five long minutes while curious crowds of onlookers stared.

He got out of there so fast, he was limp when he reached the office.

We helped him out of his coat, and he flung the old handbag to the floor.

“If it hadn’t been for that!” he cried, with a mortified air.

We gathered around him.

And he told us of the tragedy.

“Five long minutes I stood there!” he wailed. “Goodness knows who saw me. Hundreds and hundreds passed by and paused to look. Amongst them must have, been scores of acquaintances, and probably the telephones wires are at this moment being burned up with the scandal that Bodkin, the great prohibition worker, was amongst the first to line up for his liquor!”

We soothed him.

“Boys,” said Bodkin, “do me a favor. Help me out of this mess, will you? Pass the word around amongst your friends that I was standing there in all innocence, as a newspaper man. That’s good fellows!”

“But,” said Jimmie, “that handbag. It will be hard to explain away that handbag.”

“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Bodkin.

For two days, he came to work without the handbag, but he was like a lost soul. He wandered around like a man who has forgotten his pipe. The rest of us could do no work, with him wandering around. He would sit and stare moodily at the place beside his desk where he used to park the handbag.

“I don’t enjoy the walk anymore.” he confided to me. “I have carried that bag for twenty years, and I think it has become part of me. Little did I dream the liquor business would ever strike me in a vulnerable spot. Its ramifications are so insidious, reaching into a man’s most sacred life. Curse the liquor traffic, I say!”

Jimmie had the inspiration.

“Look here,” said he to Bodkin, “just have the words ‘MSS Only’2 inscribed in gold letters on the bag, good and big.”

So Bodkin has his bag again and all is well. He has the words “MSS Only” in letters two inches freshly gilded on the faithful old bag. And he comes down Yonge instead of Church street now.

“It’s a much finer way to come anyway,” he says.

There must be hundreds and hundreds of people who have been made self-conscious since the liquor stores opened, lawyers, doctors, salesmen, who have to carry bags in the daily vocation.

But they can all follow Mr. Bodkin’s lead. Doctors can quite excusably work in a little free advertising for themselves by inscribing their name and title on their bags in large characters. Lawyers can put “Legal Documents Only.” Travelers can have the name of their firm or commodity emblazoned.

Or, to put another interpretation on the idea, although this is hardly fair to Bodkin, now that he has employed the idea in self-defence, could not those who do line up at the liquor stores camouflage their bag’s contents by all sorts of disarming inscriptions such as “MSS Only.” “Dr. Smith. horse doctor,” “Use Squkm Gramophone Needles,” “Hokem and Pokem, Barristers, Etc.”

The clever concealment of the true function of a handbag that is solely employed for the purpose of carrying two crocks from the liquor store will now be one of those things that will tax the ingenuity of a necessarily ingenious section of the public.


Editor’s Notes:

  1. The Liquor Control Act overturned prohibition as legislated in the Ontario Temperance Act and established the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), through which the province managed liquor distribution with government-run stores taking effect on June 1 1927. ↩︎
  2. MSS is an abbreviation for manuscripts.  ↩︎

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