The Work of Greg Clark and Jimmie Frise

Tag: 1922 Page 2 of 3

Clara and the Traffic Cop

January 14, 1922.

This illustration went with a story by Mary E. Lowrey about a police officer admiring a mannequin in a store called “Clara”. This is the same writer who would later get married in 1924 and be known as Mary Lowrey Ross.

Grandmothers vs. Science

“No,” cried Grandma, in a strong voice, leaping to her feet with sudden violence and picking the boy up in her arms. She placed herself in front of the mantel.

By Gregory Clark, December 30, 1922.

The struggle now going on between science and grandmothers is really stupendous.

In my household I happen to be referee between science and grandmother. And while prejudiced, as a member of a generation fed on science and efficiency must be, in favor of the experts, I have to admit that in the case with which I am familiar science spends most of its time with its back flat on the mat with a grandmotherly shoe placed on its neck.

For some time before the subject of this colossal struggle between science and grandmother put in an appearance, science had a little the better of the first encounters. But he was not more than three weeks old before grandmother got in a vital blow. That was in regard to the question of regularity of meals. Science frowningly laid down the rule that he should be fed every four hours – and no oftener or sooner.

But he cried and cried so pitifully, and with so hoarse a tiny voice, about the third hour, that grandmother insisted that he was hungry, and she raised so whole-hearted a row that the boy was fed -though his parents stood fearfully by expecting the scientific heavens to fall.

Nothing happened except that the wee morsel leaned back luxuriously after his meal, rolled his eyes with contentment, and looking intently up at his mother’s face, as if seeing her for the first time, distinctly enunciated his first word on earth —

“Bgloobl!”

I shall always remember that remark. It seems to me to contain the complete refutation of all science.

From this incident onward, grandmother has won most points in the fifteen-month battle that has been waged. The “baby book,” a little manual which contains the cream of science’s pronouncements and which is to be found in most modern nurseries, grandma soon found to be the source of most of her difficulties. She has hidden the book in all possible places. She has loaned it to people. It has mysteriously fallen behind radiators, bookcases, and once I rescued it from under a whole year’s accumulation of magazines in the cellar. How it got there, grandmother had no idea. She advised me to call in a scientist to solve the mystery.

One thing we had our mind made up on, however, was candy. No candy should ever pass our boy’s lips until he was grown well out of babyhood. Grandmother solemnly agreed.

“There is nothing worse for a little child,” said she, “than candy.”

And I secretly rejoiced that here at least was one point on which grandmother and science were one.

For some weeks, I have observed a most touching relationship growing between the small boy and his grandma. First thing in the morning, when he is released from his coop, he rushes to his grandmother’s door and thumps heartily upon it, shouting his eloquent self-made words, and dancing up and down from the knees in most comic way. All day long, he pays her most sedulous attention. He comes when she calls and ceases his tumult when she admonishes him. If she tells him to eat his dinnie, he at once stops his favorite sport of seeing how far he can blow a spoonful of porridge.

They have a language of their own, too. There are words that only they two can comprehend. I have been just the least little bit jealous of this private little world of theirs into which I could not enter.

Coming into the living room the other afternoon, I interrupted a quaint little scene.

The boy was over at one end of the fireplace, dancing furiously up and down and exclaiming a sound that seemed to be

“Pease! Pease! Pease!”

And he was stretching himself up towards the mantel.

Grandma was sitting motionless in the shadow of the corner.

“Come here, my pigeon,” she said tensely. “Come to Dodo!”

“Pease! Pease!” cried the pigeon, reaching one little hand up towards the mantel.

I looked at grandmother and she seemed to be holding herself as with a leash.

“What is it, boy?” I asked. “Is there something up here you want?”

And I approached the mantel.

“No,” cried Grandma in a strong voice, leaping to her feet with sudden violence and picking the boy up in her arms. She placed herself in front of the corner of the mantel.

“What is it?” I exclaimed, alarmed.

Grandma looked at me with bright, excited eyes.

But the boy, the little pigeon, solved the mystery and betrayed his grandmother. Over his shoulder, he reached to the mantel, threw a photograph to one side and seized and triumphantly flourished – a barley stick!

A barley stick, partly gone!

I stared at grandmother with shocked eyes.

“Barley sugar,” said she in a soft dangerous voice, “is not candy.”

“What is it?” I retorted. “A vegetable?”

At this moment, I was reenforced by Science, in the form of the boy’s mother, coming into the room.

I held up the barley stick, which I had seized from the pigeon’s hand.

A long, tense, and most quiet battle then ensued between science and grandmother, quiet save for the voice of the pigeon shouting, “pease, pease, pease,” in a most compelling and persuasive tone.

Science won.

Grandmother walked over to the fire place and tossed the barley stick ostentatiously into the ashes.

“It’s all nonsense,” she stated. “Candy is chocolates and gum drops and those pink and yellow creams with scalloped edges. But barley sugar! My dear girl, you have eaten tons of it!”

But did science, win?

You don’t buy barley sticks one at a time. It seems to me, you buy them in a bottle, about twenty small sticks to the bottle.

At any rate, grandmother assisted her pigeon to bed. And, before retiring that night. I went in to see him.

On his rosy cheek, just beside his month, like a yellow jewel, there stuck a small, smooth, well polished little nugget of barley sugar.

Insurance & Life

November 11, 1922

By Gregory Clark, November 11, 1922.

There are, it is rumored, 5,081 life insurance agents in Toronto.

The 81 don’t know about me.

The other 5,000 have me in their pocket diaries as a promising prospect.

They come in to see me at the office, at home, in church, on the street car, at the club, on the street, in twos, fives, and tens. When there is a measles epidemic, or an outbreak of the Spanish flu in Honolulu, they pursue me in scores and hundreds.

For it seems I am of the blond, impressionable type, fearful of calamity, frightened of death, a family man – having all the qualities, in short, of the ideal insurance prospect.

There has been a great change in the insurance business in the last few years. It is a science now. There are magazines devoted to the science. You can read how to tell a prospect at a glance. How to read character in relation to selling. Whether to use the “scare-him-to-death” method, or the “appeal-to-his-widow” method, or just the plain hard-headed “investment” method.

You see, insurance hasn’t escaped the “science” bug that has got into the business world the last dozen years. There are no more insurance agents now. They are insurance salesmen, or life underwriters. Selling insurance is no longer merely a matter of a fellow with nothing else to do bothering the life out of all his relations and friends until they buy some protection.

Life Insurance is a SERVICE.

“I’ll be the best friend you ever had, if you take that policy.” says the modern insurance salesman, with the air of a grave but kindly tipster. “You’ll thank me all your life. I don’t want you to take out the policy. It’s nothing to me. But it is my duty to show you the value of insurance.”

Word must have leaked out that I was married, had a child, was buying a new house, and was going deer hunting.

In addition to that, I was classified at a glance as blond, impressionable, soft-hearted, soft-beaded, and immensely wealthy, because I wear spats to keep my feet warm.

Anyway, seventy-eleven life underwriters got on to my trail.

“I can’t take out any insurance,” I said with assurance, “because that baby of mine has set me back about five hundred dollars.”

“Aren’t you going to provide for that baby, in case anything happens to you?” retorted the underwriters, in gloomy voices.

“All the money I can scrape together is going into a new house,” I said, desperately.

“You should protect the mortgage with a life policy,” countered the salesmen, with hard glances. “If anything should happen to you, where would your wife live? Eh?”

“Happen! Happen! What’s going to happen to me?” I asked, with my healthiest expression.

“Ah, Bill,” said the one life underwriter, turning to his assistant, “remember that poor fellow we tried to sell that policy for $20,000 to? The one that died from the pip two days after?”

And then the senior drew a blue book out of his pocket and said:

“Are you aware of the number of hunters who are killed annually?”

What is the use of struggling against such science as that?

With my sidekick, Griffin, they use another method, the business man’s method. They never try any sentimental stuff on him. They can tell by the color of his hair and the shape of his nose that he would simply tell them to go to blazes and provide for their own wives. So they put it up to him as an investment. They assume he is saving so much per annum – quoting a figure five times as great as he is really saving. Then they show him how much better an investment insurance would be on the same terms.

One way or the other, it is a SERVICE.

Every insurance man to-day thinks his predecessors must have been terrible types. For if you talk to one of them long enough, ho Is sure to branch off from that SERVICE line to tell you of the high grade of men who are now going into insurance as a profession or calling.

And they are having a hard time with a public that still thinks insurance agents a nuisance They can’t seem to set it across on the public that SERVICE is the whole philosophy of the insurance man, and that the way to receive him is to welcome him with open arms and an open check book.

If they keep at it long enough, and keep stressing the fact that superior men are going into the game out of pure love of mankind, and if they to their shoes shined, finally the public will get over the old obsession that insurance men are trying to sell them a set of the works of Sir Walter Scott, complete in thirty volumes.

The last time we poked a little fun at the insurance boys, the entire underwriters’ origination of the world rose up in arms and protested against The Star Weekly, seventeen insurance publications, weekly and monthly, replied with what to the baseless slanders, and the number of salesmen calling on me increased from 2,700 to 5,000 – an increase of nearly 100 per cent.

Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.

‘Way up the River

June 17, 1922

Bobbing It

May 20, 1922

By Gregory Clark, May 20, 1922.

Every girl would like to bob her hair.

It is the irrevocability of the act that deters her.

Even marriage is not so final and therefore not so fearful a thing as bobbing hair. With marriage one can still change one’s mind. One can return to live with Mamma.

But bobbed hair puts a girl into the unbearable position of not being able to change her mind. There is no retreat, no evasion, no camouflage possible.

Every girl, as soon as she has her hair bobbed immediately wishes she hadn’t. Some of them cry. Some of them have what used to be called conniption fits. But that is merely the violent revulsion of the female mind on discovering that it is in a predicament from which it can devise no escape.

If she doesn’t like her hair bobbed, there is only one thing she can do – wait for it to grow. And that means months of weary waiting while the hair grows straggly and stringy, and nerves wear out in the desperate effort to make the hair look as if it were either bobbed or put up, and knowing that it looks like neither.

But that thousands of girls in Toronto have had their hair bobbed is proof of an ability to make up the mind which is enough to confound the bachelors.

The appointment with the bob barber, or coiffeur as he describes himself, is invariably a terrible ordeal. When the shears take their first bite into the long locks that have been the subject of a traditional and life-long care, every girl nearly dies in the chair. One bob barber says that ninety-eight per cent of them emit a moan at the fall of the first gob of hair onto the floor.

When they see themselves for the first time in the glass, before the curling irons have made it look frizzed out, they are filled with dismay. After it is curled they are reassured, for bobbing invariably makes a girl look years younger, and that flatters all of them over eighteen.

This bob barber tells of one girl who made three appointments with him for the fatal operation, and canceled them all. Finally, after several weeks, she made a fourth appointment and came. At the barber’s she went through the motions of changing her mind four times more. She would sit in the chair and then leap up with a scream as soon as the barber picked up his scissors. She actually put her hat on to go home. And when the barber held out her coat for her she took her hat off again, and with pale set face seated herself in the execution chair.

Pitying the poor young lady the barber decided to get the ordeal over as quickly as possible. So he made one vicious swipe with his scissors and cut off about a pound of hair at one snip. Sure enough, the girl had one more opportunity to change her mind, and she leaped up screaming, glanced at herself in the mirror, and fled home. She came back an hour later with her mamma and had the lobsided effect removed by a nice short bob.

There are no hairpins with bobbed hair, no putting up, no fussing with it. But there is curling. Not one girl in a hundred can wear bobbed hair straight. They all think they can until they see themselves in the glass and curling bobbed hair is a daily necessity. The bob barbers and hair-dressers make a great business out of curling bobbed hair. Not only the regular hair-dressing establishments, but numerous of their employees who have cut loose and gone into business on their own, are crowded with curling appointments. It takes a week to get an appointment with many of these public and private hair-dressers. By private is meant certain of them who won’t take a client unless she is introduced by one of his older customers. That’s how good the bobbed hair curling business is.

Bobbed hair is another evidence of the emancipation of women. It is more significant than votes, and the privilege of sitting in parliaments and the councils of men. It is a step in spiritual progress.

It is a voluntary sacrifice of the immemorial right to change their minds.


Editor’s Note: Women bobbing their hair as the new style was an iconic symbol of the 1920s.

Six Bottles

“And there on the bed, in a row, lay six gleaming amber bottles.”

By Gregory Clark, March 11, 1922. Illustration by E. G. Dinsmore.

This is the story of six bottles of whiskey.

Harry, the hero, was one of those upright, fearless young men who never have liquor in their possession but who find a manly pride in letting all their office acquaintances and not-too-Intimate friends assume that they had salted down a fifty year stock in 1920.

He was the kind of fellow who never took a drink except when among strangers. His friends knew he didn’t like it and that he was no gay dog. But Harry loved to toss off a drink whenever it created on strangers the impression of a man-about-town.

And on those rare occasions when he did take drink, Harry would hasten around a sort of circuit of people he wanted to impress before the smell wore off. When they, scenting the breath that Harry was careful not to conceal from them, jocularly said –

“Aha! Where do you get it?”

Harry would blush deprecatingly and say – “Oh, just a little business drink – you know.”

As if he had been dickering with those princes of finance who are popularly supposed to keep decanters on their desks.

Well, Harry got himself into a jam.

The reputation he had accumulated as a devil of a fellow with a cellar could not but work him ill.

A bunch of the executives of the sister company in the States came up on a visit to the big Canadian plant in Toronto. And Harry’s boss called him in and said:

“Now, Harry, these boys will want a little fun. But you know my house – strictly prohibition. So I was wondering if you could stage a little party up at that well-oiled bachelor apartment of yours, eh?”

And the boss winked jovially.

Now Harry should have sidestepped right there. He could have said his stock had run out; that he had been hitting it too hard; or some similar excuse that would have been quite sufficiently man-about-townish.

But to have the boss approach him thus intimately – the president! – and wink and chuckle.

It was too much for Harry.

“Certainly, sir! De-lighted! How many will there be?”

“Well,” said the boss. “There’s five of them from the other side, and a couple more of the boys from the office, and us; that’s eight. Tonight. Can you handle us?”

“Oh, sure!” said Harry. “Tickled to death, sir.”

“That’s the boy! Have dinner at the hotel with us, then, and we’ll all drive up to your flat after.”

“Right,” said Harry, man-about-town.

And he went to his own desk outside and sat down with a buzzing head to figure out how he’d get the means for the boss’s “party.”

After about ten minutes’ thought, he felt he should go out into the fresh air. He walked up one side of Yonge street and down the other, and finally decided to telephone all the people he had got a drink from the past month or two, and try them for a half-dozen bottles.

Dropping into a soda fountain, he sat down and commenced a list.

Two names he got at once. And then no more! Two! Surely there were more. He racked his brains, but all he could recall were numerous discussions of booze, but no material evidences of it.

In the pay ‘phone booth, Harry called up the two who had actually given him drinks in the near past. Both replied in the negative.

Harry then decided he would have to disclose himself to others as a man who had no cellar. It was a sore trial. He hated to abandon his pose. But he called up eight in a row, eight bright young men-about-town – and drew blanks with all.

Harry began to wonder if they were all bluffers like himself.

Then he remembered a pimply-faced lad in the shipping department who boasted a wide acquaintance with bootleggers. Hurrying to the office, Harry went back and sought this worthy out and said –

“Say, give me the address of a good bootlegger, on the q.t., will you?”

“Say, by golly, this is too bad!” said the pimply-faced one, disgustedly. “But all my friends have been pinched. This is too bad. It’s just at the moment – perhaps some other time -“

Harry looked at his watch. Three p.m. He hastened out to the street again.

It was about 5 p.m. that it began to dawn on Harry that Toronto was perhaps, after all, a prohibition city. At noon that day, Toronto had been billowing in booze, if you could believe everybody. At 5 p.m. it was as dry as a pine cone!

So he ‘phoned the boss to say that a sudden emergency would prevent him from dining with the party, but that he would be up at his apartment ready to welcome them at eight o’clock.

“Right,” said the boss.

Then Harry hurried home to the fashionable three-roomed bachelor apartment in a select apartment house to telephone to doctors.

Doctors could only produce one bottle. But one was better than none.

First he called a doctor who was also a brother-in-law. Over his limit! Next a doctor who was a member of Harry’s canoe club. Sold out! Then three doctors in a row who had attended him at various stages from infancy up. All sold out.

He called up the canoe club. Perhaps some of the boys would be hanging around. There were three, two of whom had no end of liquor ordinarily, if you could judge by the conversation, but were just out, and didn’t know where their next crock was coming from, at the moment.

Six thirty!

Harry felt himself losing weight.

Now we must pause to introduce the villain.

Harry’s telephone was on the wall in his apartment hallway.

Six feet along the hall was the dumb-waiter.

The dumb-waiter door was open.

In the bachelor flat above a lonely gentleman was getting himself a lonely supper.

He opened his door to the dumb-waiter shaft to see if the grocer had sent the sardines. And then he overheard Harry in his pathetic quest of hooch.

The lonely gentleman listened with interest. He kept on listening, as he ate a quiet repast of sardines and a bottle of milk.

Harry’s telephone bell rang.

He leaped from the chair where he sat in anguish, and answered.

It was the pimply-faced lad in the shipping room.

“Say,” he said, “I can get you some of that goods you was asking about –“

“Can you?” Harry shouted. “Good!”

“How much did you want?”

“Oh, six bottles,” said Harry.

“All right. A fellow will bring them up to you to-night.”

“Look,” said Harry. “I must have them before eight o’clock. Before eight, sure!”

“All right,” said the pimply one.

Upstairs, the lonely gentleman withdrew his head out of the dark dumb-waiter, softly closed the door, and went over to his telephone.

At eight o’clock the boss, accompanied by the five gentlemen from over the border and two of the senior men of the local office, arrived gladly and well-fed at Harry’s apartment.

And Harry was modestly beaming.

He helped them dispose of their coats, accepted their amiable, brotherly jests – even the boss’s – and then drew aside the green curtain that hid the alcove which was his bachelor bedroom.

And there on the bed in a row lay six gleaming amber bottles.

The excitement and whooping had barely died down, and the first cork had scarcely opened the musical program of the evening, when there came a loud, peremptory knock on the door.

The bottle was instantly recorked and hid in the waste basket. The curtain of the alcove was re-drawn. And Harry opened the door.

Two large, stern men were standing without.

“Excuse me!” said the foremost, stepping solemnly into the hushed, crowded little room. His companion followed.

They sniffed the air.

“Excuse me,” said the leader again. In a sepulchral voice. And he walked past the eight frozen gentlemen, pulled aside the curtain of the alcove, and stood in a dramatic posture, gazing at the five bottles on the bed.

“Bill,” he said, “take those.”

“Gentlemen,” he said, turning mournfully to the company, “there is one more bottle. Produce it!”

“But,” cried the boss, who was first to regain his voice, “what do you mean? This is a private house! Can’t a man give his friends a drink?”

“Gentlemen,” said the stranger sadly, “this Is bootleg liquor.”

“Go on!” cried several together, the boss loudly, Harry tremulously.

“Gents,” continued the severe big stranger, “this liquor was delivered to this apartment not ten minutes ago.”

All turned to Harry for denial; and there he stood, his head down, the picture of guilt and dejection.

“Come, gents,” said the stranger. “The other bottle.”

And the boss himself fished it out of the waste basket.

As the big man stood at the door, he said to Harry:

“I won’t take you along. I have your name and address. I can get you if I need you.”

And he closed the door.

The party lasted about ten minutes longer. The boss’s nerves were shaken.

“What did you want to get bootleg stuff for?” he demanded angrily of Harry. “I thought you had a supply of your own. You can’t tell where this thing’ll end now –“

He and his seven friends departed in an air of strained joviality about 8.30 p.m., and left Harry all alone, to lie on his bachelor bed and cuss.

Later in the evening, through the fog of remorse and vain regrets, Harry found time to wonder what all the racket was about on the floor above.

But the lonely gentleman in the flat above was no longer lonely. He had six friends in with him. And six bottles of amber hue stood upon his bachelor table.

Two of his guests were big men.

One of these was saying, as he gripped a glass with one hand and dabbed a handkerchief to his tearful eyes —

“But the fun of it was, we never mentioned the word ‘police’ once; did we, Bill? We just walked in and glared around. And there they stood – nine of ’em – and took it for granted!

“‘An, gents.’, I says, ‘If you please, the sixth bottle!'”


Editor’s Note: A “gay dog” is slang for a man given to self-indulgence.

Camaracum

By Gregory Clark, January 7, 1922.

“What has happened to your friends, the French?” asked my editor the other morning.

He tossed across to me the newspapers containing the dispatches of France’s demands in respect to submarines. France was “rattling the sabre,” they said; the new “mailed fist in Europe.”


Let’s see…

The last place I saw action was at Cambrai, the end of September, 1918.

We were lying in the Marcoing Line. Through the mist of dawn the towers and spires of Cambrai stood up before us a mile away – our goal, our proud objective.

It was as if we were in High Park, advancing on Toronto. A meadow valley lay between. A few advance troops were plodding across, like workers bent cityward at break of day. But over our heads swept an endless succession of wheezy shells which thumped and crashed on to the edge of the misty city ahead of us. And far and near the air pulsed and jiggled and hissed with machine gun fire, ours and his.

In the sky the first aeroplanes were greeting the sun. They circled and slowly swooped earthward, peering, seeking, bursting off their machine-guns occasionally, or dropping bombs on to stealthy Germans scuttling through the streets of Cambrai. As I lay, belly tight to earth, I watched these airy ships; for in one of them, I knew, was a small brother of mine, wearing a white and scarlet helmet that I would recognize if ….


And while I lay there, aching my eyes against the misty dawn, I beheld a strange vision.

The towers and roots of Cambrai faded, and I saw instead a queer, walled town the name of which was Camaracum, and it was one of the cities of a people named the Norvil.

It seemed to be a scene from the very long ago, for the walls were heavy and crude, and the people moving about them were clad in rough and primitive garments.

A procession approached the city of Camaracum: soldiers in short kilts and sandals, armed with spears and shields, and after a great advance of these soldiers into the walled city came men on horses, one of whom was the emperor of Rome, visiting the outposts of his empire.

That scene fades: and now I see groups of rough, savage men swarming at the walls of Camaracum. These are the Franks, barbarians from the north. The time is 445 Anno Domini. And after a brief struggle the Roman garrison is driven from Camaracum: and Clodion, chieftain of the Franks, makes it his city.

Along time passes, for I see Camaracum greatly changed. A spire rises from within its walls. And into it rides a cavalcade of men in armor with banners, at the head of whom rides Charlemagne, Charles the Great, emperor of Rome. The thing is about the year 800 A.D., and Charlemagne makes the city or Camaracum one of his bulwarks against the heathen Magyars and marauders from the north and east.

Then down the Scheldt and the rivers from the seas come ghostly craft, the long ships of the Norsemen, fierce pirates who slay and destroy wherever their long ships will carry them. And they come, in the year 870 A.D., to this same walled city of Camaracum and burn it, sack it and destroy it.

But it rises again, its castles and spires and strong walls. And the vision shows it, all through the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, being stormed and captured, burned and sacked by the factions of various bishops. For Camaracum, since the fifth century of our Lord, has been a bishop’s see.

The vision moves swiftly. It is the year 1595 A.D., and the Spaniards are besieging’ the castled city of Camaracum. Charles the Fifth fortifies it with a great citadel.

The years fly. in 1793 It is the Austrians laying vain siege to this ancient city. And in 1793 the revolution comes: the mob, in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, destroys the old cathedral, burns castles and palaces, and ruin descends still again upon Camaracum.

At last it is the years 1815 to 1818, Napoleon has just fled, and Camaracum, the city of the Nervil, the city of the Caesars, the outpost of Charlemagne’s empire, is headquarters for three years of the British army of occupation under Wellington in France!


Indeed, you have guessed it, reader.

Camaracum is Cambrai. Cambrai, as it lay before us in the hands of the Germans, is the Camaracum of old, that ancient and embattled city.

As we crouched there in the dawn the destroying shells were simply renewing a destruction already as old as history. The long ships of the Norsemen and the strange ships in the sky which I so tenderly watched were of one purpose.

My men, tense beside me in the trench, were plying an ancient trade: Roman, Frank, Viking, Goth, Magyar, Spaniard, Austrian – all had, through the thousands of years, lay thus with grim faces turned upon Camaracum.


And Cambrai is one of the lesser historical cities in France.

So I said to my editor:

“It is a thousand years since William of Normandy brought an invading army against our forefathers.

“But in France they have known war and the sack and pillage through unbroken centuries.

“If I do not agree with their militaristic policy, I can at least wholly sympathize with their caution.”

And I can still see the pillar of black smoke that rose vastly out of Camaracum as the Huns of 1918 fled before us into the north.


Editor’s Note: The Washington Naval Conference was held between November 1921 and February 1922., which resulted in the Washington Naval Treaty. The goal was to prevent an arms race by limiting naval construction. The British wanted the abolition of the submarine, but the French opposed. The conference ended without an agreement to restrict submarines.

Swish, Thud, SMACK-!

By Gregory Clark, (Illustrated by James Frise), November 25, 1922.

“Come,” says Pontius Pilate, “let us go down to the amphitheatre and see a couple of men pound each other into a purple pulp.”

“Right-o,” responds his friend, J. Cassius Brutus, “maybe they’ll poke a few teeth out of each other, or an eye.”

And the two citizens hasten down into the city.

Roman citizens? Nit! Citizens of Toronto, ratepayers, voters on prohibition, radials, supporters of a sporting city council. I changed their names just to make it hard. Their real names are William D. (“Bill”) Skillett, and P. Christopher Munch.


Swish, swish, thud, thud!

Swish, swish, thud, thud, SMACK!

This is music.

Danse music. Man music. This is the music of prize ring, the soft, barbaric music of the box-fight.

Swish, swish, is the sound of crafty feet sliding over the resin on the floor. Thud, thud, is the sound of heels as the two game cocks dance their weird dance about each other, circling, panting, lunging, skilfully poised as Pavlova, pretty, guileful, light as feathers, heavy as down.

SMACK is the sound of a fist, padded with ounces of leather and hair, as it crashes like forked lightning on to the bared teeth of a hurling boxer.

Swish, swish, thud, thud, SMACK!

Music in the foetid caves of our fathers, how many thousand years ago. Music still in the smoke haze of the Gayety Theatre, under the white dazzle of nitrogen bulbs.


The theatre is dark, save for this one blaze of white light on the stage. The audience is not a theatre audience, not even a Gayety theatre audience. It has a quality all its own. It smokes, belches smoke. The air is bitter with smoke. The eyes sting with it. It swirls in the dazzling spot of light on the stage.

There is a continual heavy murmur and mutter of sound filling the house. A fight crowd is a noisy crowd. The murmur is broken by load shouts of praise or blame, scattered shouts of encouragement, long wails of disgust.

Under the blazing lights, the ring is squared in with three heights of white-washed rope. And huddling in close to these ropes, as many as the stage will hold, are the ringside seats with a hunched, intent mass of men, ducking and moving their heads as they watch every move. Every step, every punch of the contestants in the ring.

Three figures in the ring – the two fighters, naked save for light silk running trunks, shining with sweat, lithe, smooth, clean, dancing and swaying elusively even in that glare. The third figure is the referee in a white shirt, who glances closely about the fighters, breaking them apart, bending to watch their hands in batches, barking and bellowing at them.


The first round is nearly always pretty.

It is like some barbaric dance. The noise of the crowd dies down. The fighters jut and poke and jab. You can hear the hissed breaths drawn in by a thousand watchers as some blow fails to go home. You hear the out-blown sniffle of the fighters – a peculiar venomous sound. Swish, swish thud, thud.


Somewhere in the second or the third or the fourth round, it loses its prettiness.

The dance goes out of it. The measure falls slower. The smoke-shrouded crowd out there in the dark becomes louder, there is a buzz of blood in their cries, some madman keeps bellowing an indistinguishable word over and over.

The fighters are losing their grace. They prance not at all. They cling heavily to each other. They are mussed up. Their hair hangs over their eyes. They have blood on their faces. They wipe their bleeding noses on each other’s shoulders in the clinches.

The referee’s white shirt has a stain on it.

The bell —

Tong!


The last round – if there is a last round – is no dance. It is only a fight. A terrible, weary, heavy fight between two broken men. They have been evenly matched, these two. But one is more weary than the other.

He can’t guard his face so smartly. He takes a terrible wipe on the eye. Another on the nose. His eye sockets are both green in this vicious light of the nitrogen bulbs. Blood Is falling from his chin.

His tired adversary will have no mercy though. He makes a desperate effort to prance. It is pitiful. A blow takes him on the chin.

He falls, clumsily, helplessly, piteously. He reclines on one arm, his breath coming in sobs, spitting blood heedlessly before him, while the referee counts loudly to eight ….

He heaves himself to his feet like a stricken thing.

The tired adversary is not too tired to be there, however, and to smash him another on the face.

His arms fumble vainly to guard.

SMACK.

All agleam, white and red, under the shrieking lights, he lies in a huddle on the resined floor.

The white shirt referee reaches out and holds on high the bloody gloved hand of the swaying victor.


“Aaaahhhhhh” breathes the mob out in the gloom, cheers, claps its hands as ladies at a matinee, shouts, swaps money on bets made.


Is this the end?

No. It’s the end of one fight.

There are five fights on the bill to-night. A great big generous bill.


So much for the fighters – marvelous, clean, brilliant boys, brave to the last merciful smash.

But what of the mob out there in the smoky gloom?

Sizing up the fighters, backing their opinions with cash money, turning in their seats, between rounds, to argue heatedly over the merits of fighters.

A queer crowd – dudes and toughs, refined and in the rough, regular fellows and irregular fellows, plain men and fancy men, your neighbor and strange strangers, normal profiles and odd, unbalanced profiles, and stunted faces of men you wouldn’t want to deliver the groceries at home…..

A church crowd has a certain look, a theatre crowd us a quality of its own, a spiritualist seance has a something different from the rest. A fight crowd has that same distinction of quality. You will see these men all assembled no place else.

Among them are some fighters. But the vast majority of them are not fighters. They are fighters by proxy.

What I am going to get at can very easily be expressed in the language of science, of the psycho-analyst. But that murky, fuddly language.

In all men is the instinct to fight. But with the passing of civilized generations, the will to fight has become weakened.

The most Christian and law-abiding of gentlemen knows at least a half dozen men he would like to kick the living daylights out of. But he lacks the will to do it, either because he is successfully civilized or because he has not been handed down the necessary nerve by thoughtless ancestors.

But he can do it, by proxy, as far as the satisfying of his own soul is concerned.

He can sit at this prize fight and get in some terrible smashes at his enemies – by proxy.

BIFF! There’s a stinger for that blankety blanky street car conductor!

SMACK! Aha, what smash that is for that blinkety blank foreman, eh!

He projects himself into one or the other of the fighters before him. You can sense that in the uncertainty at the beginning of a fight. The onlookers are trying to decide which of the two battlers they will be!

Just as in reading a story, you project yourself into the part of the hero or heroine, and thrill to all the adventures and love scenes depicted, the average fight fan – you can see it In his eyes – secretly or even sub-consciously, projects himself into the part of his favorite in the ring.

It is easy to take punishment by proxy.

It is glorious to be a victor by proxy. Such is the talent of the human imagination.

All the pent-up fury of a hundred encounters with overbearing men that you could not lick, can be released in three hours at a box-fight…


Civilization has forbidden us to fight, except under the direction of the king and his councillors, in which case it is one of the highest virtues.

Civilization has left us also the institution of prize fighting by which a lot of dangerous, pent-up steam may be blown off harmlessly, via the imagination.


And all being sons of Adam, and therefore in direct line from Cain and other bloody-minded men, we can still feel the poetry, the music, the charm of this weird dance, swish, swish, thud, thud, this measure beaded with blood, tinctured with pain, which ends so gracelessly –

SMACK!


Editor’s Note: Boxing was one of the most popular sports in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Autumn on the Avenue

November 18, 1922

Wheeling in that Load of Garden Loam

April 29, 1922

Loam is the ideal type of gardening soil.

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