Rusty saw a cat. Then the tragedy happened. He chased the silly cat… it took a flying jump on to the car
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 10, 1934.
“Your car,” said Jimmie Frise, “needs a paint job.”
“It has reached the stage,” I admitted, “where it either has to have a paint job or it has to be turned in.”
“With an engine like that,” said Jim, “you would be crazy to turn it in.”
“The funny part of it is,” I said, “a paint job at the moment seems more expensive than the first instalment on a new car.”
“Heavens!” said Jim.
“A paint job,” I pointed out, “will cost $50. Right now. Whereas the first instalment on a new car will only come to about $38. And then I won’t have to pay it till a month from now!”
Jimmie looked at me curiously.
“I suppose,” he said, “the bulk of the public is like you.”
“I pride myself,” I agreed, “that I am an average man.”
“I tell you what,” said Jim. “I’m an artist. Color is my line. I am free and easy with a paint brush. If you like I will help you do a paint job on your car.”
“A home-made paint job,” I demurred, “always looks amateurish.”
“Sir,” said Jim, indignantly, “not even the most expert car painting establishments have artists in their employ!”
“I beg your pardon, Jimmie,” I cried hastily. “Of course I would be delighted to have you help paint the car. The only fear I have is that I might undo all the good you are capable of doing. I am a terrible painter. I get paint in my hair. Inside my shoes. It is incredible.”
“With me to guide you,” said Jim, “I think you would do a very good job of painting.”
“After all,” I agreed, “if we make a mess of it, I can turn the car in.”
“Now how about the color?” asked Jimmie.
“It is a kind of beige now,” I said. “A lightish brownish color.”
“Isn’t it funny,” said Jim, “how many bright-colored cars are shown at the motor shows and how many drab black, blue and other dull-colored cars the public buys?”
“I was thinking,” I said, “of a nice dark blue. It would be a nice change from its present color. And if we do a good job, the neighbors might even think it was a new car I had.”
“Funny,” remarked Jim, “how many new cars the neighbors sell!”
“Say dark blue with black fenders,” I suggested.
“I see,” said Jim, “that at heart you are a chartered accountant! You have a cold, mathematical mind! For you there is no joy in life. You have no soul for color.”
“I love color!” I cried. “I know no man who goes as crazy as I do in the spring, at the sight of tulips, daffodils…”
“Yet you want a black car,” said Jimmie. “You want to add to the gloom of this sad city. Toronto, with its sober streets, its drab windows, its cautiously dressed people. Never a splash of color, never a joyous burst of bright hue.”
“Express Yourself in Color”
“It is in the air of this country to be sober,” I pointed out.
“What!” shouted Jim. “With Ontario and her blue skies, her intense greens, her world-famous riot of autumn reds, purples, golds and yellows! With half her surface water, Ontario is one of the most colorful lands in all the world!”
“M’mm,” said I.
“As a true Canadian, a true denizen of Ontario, “went on Jimmie, excitedly, “you ought to express yourself in color. You should rebel against drabness. You, a son of the fifth and sixth generation in this glorious, color spangled Ontario!”
“Quite so,” I admitted proudly.
“And here you have the chance of a lifetime,” said Jimmie. “You are going to paint your own car, with the help of an artist. Let your car bespeak your true Canadian character!”
“What color do you suggest?” I inquired.
“Colors!” cried Jim. “Not color. I suggest a red body for the red leaves of October. Blue mudguards for the blue sky of Ontario, and the blue water of our myriad lakes. And the top…”
“Black,” I said.
“Everybody has a black top,” cried Jim scornfully. “Why not use a little imagination? I say, paint the top like an awning, which, after all, a top really is. Paint it red and yellow!”
“Oh, Jim!”
“Yes, sir, red and yellow, for the autumn leaves, for the fruitful grain fields of Ontario, for the yellow sands of Wasaga Beach and the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie!”
“Jimmie,” I breathed, “you are inspired!”
“How about Saturday afternoon?” demanded Jimmie, hotly.
“Done!” I said. “Let’s see, I’ll buy the paint. Red, blue, yellow.”
“And better get a little green for trimming,” said Jim.
Saturday noon, I had the garage laid out with all the paint and the brushes, step-ladders and so forth. My family was away for the day. Jim arrived the minute he was through his lunch and we donned our overalls.
Jim took a bed slat and ruled off the roof of the car into stripes, as we did the top first so as to have any paint drip down on the lower works before they were done.
“Now,” said Jim, “you do the yellow stripes and I’ll do the red.”
From the top of step-ladders it was no trick at all to do stripes.
In the winter sunlight that top looked lovely.
“I am sorry,” I said, as we surveyed it, “so few people will be able to see it.”
Unfinished Symphony
Then we started on the tonneau. Rapidly the scarred beige of the old car vanished under the proud, bold strokes of two patriots laying on the red of autumn leaves, the red of wintergreen berries, the red of wild strawberries, of Indian flame, of the scarlet tanager and the red-headed woodpecker, and all those other beautiful things we have in Ontario.
“We’re spilling a lot,” I said to Jim.
“The blue will cover it,” cried Jim, who was quite carried away by his emotions. He was swinging his paint brush the way the conductor of a symphony orchestra swings his baton during those rich, juicy bits.
Rusty, Jim’s so-called Irish water spaniel, was sitting watching us with delight. Next to water, which he has hardly ever seen, Rusty loves paint. He is an artist’s water spaniel and has chewed up many a tube of water colors in his day.
We finished the red, and started on the blue. The chassis, they call it. The blue was the blue of Ontario’s sky, of her lakes, of the eyes of her fairest daughters. I tried some out on one side of the hood.
“We should do this to music,” cried Jimmie, “we should have the radio playing ‘O Canada.'”
“Jim,” I said doubtfully, “take a look at it now we’ve done this side.”
“A symphony!” exclaimed Jim.
“It looks like an advertisement for something,” I said. “Gum or maybe barbers supplies.”
“It is an advertisement,” cried Jim. “An advertisement of Ontario, of her boundless color, of the spirit that animates at least one citizen of this joyous, flaming country!”
“But will my mother-in-law go to church in it?” I said. “If any of my folks get married, can we go to the wedding in it? Or won’t I run up the price of an ordinary paint job in taxi bills?”
Jim gave me a cold, long stare.
“Have you no imagination?” he asked.
Jim was up on one mudguard and I was over on the stepladder at the far side, sopping up some pools of yellow and red that had gathered in the corners of the roof, when the tragedy happened.
Rusty saw a cat. He chased the silly cat. The cat ran around the car a couple of times, and then took a flying jump on to the hood.
“Arrrgh!” screamed Jim.
But I was glad.
The cat slithered over the hood, Rusty followed, with swimming motions. The cat leaped to the roof. I helped it.
Rusty skated all over the roof. On to the hood again and along the mudguards.
Then up the alley they chased. So I went around to Jimmie’s side where he was shading his artist’s eyes with his cleanest hand.
“Let us call this the first coat,” I suggested gently, “and as soon as this dries, give it a good coat of black all over.”
Jim peeked at it through his fingers.
“Marbled,” he muttered. “Or shot, like silk. A sort of modernistic effect.”
“Or what do you say I turn it in?” I asked.
“I believe in signs and omens,” said Jim. “I guess this means to turn it in.”
So any day now a car dealer is going to get a shock.
Rusty saw a cat. Then the tragedy happened. He chased the silly cat… it took a flying jump on to the car
Editor’s Notes: $50 in 1934 would be $1,065 in 2022.
A tonneau is an area of a car or truck open at the top. It can be for passengers or cargo.
This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978), and was the cover image. The colour image really makes the difference in this story. It is also an early story, so for whatever reason it is considerably shorter than the standard later.
He crowded up close to us with waving arms. “My blessings for you gentlemans!” he kept crying
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 10, 1934.
“The spirit of St. Valentine,” said Jimmie Frise, “is expressed these days in exactly the right measure. He is the patron saint of love. Therefore, hardly any attention at all is paid to him.”
“You mean love is dying out?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Jim. “Not only love, but all other emotion. A few years ago, if you didn’t send a pretty valentine to your sweetheart, you at least mailed a few ugly ones, anonymously, to people you did not like.”
“I’m glad those days are over,” I said. “I think human nature is much improved since the day of those ugly one-cent valentines.”
“You would say, then,” said Jimmie, “that a man is improved when he grows old and brittle? When he can no longer work up enough steam to either love or hate, he is improved, eh?”
“You misunderstand me,” I put in.
“I tell you, we as a people are showing all the symptoms of old age,” went on Jim. “Even the young people show no dash and go. They are limp and cynical. They are worldly wise and world weary. Whenever a couple of young men to-day decide to hire a schooner and go adventuring to the ends of the earth, it is big news for the front pages of all the newspapers. Whereas the only startling news item ought to be about a couple of young fellows that are staying at home!”
“You’re witty,” I accused him.
“Not me,” cried Jim. “I’m worried. I tell you, the fire of life is dying awfully low in us all! A coldness is stealing over us. Something ought to be done to rouse the fire, to put more fuel on it, to blow it into a blaze. Every day, I see that lethargy more sharply. A whole world, even the young, submitting like sheep to a cold, passionless, meaningless life!”
“Never have the young been livelier, freer,” I exclaimed loudly. “Look at them racing around in new eighty-mile-an-hour slip-stream motor cars!”
“Racing around where to?” asked Jim, coldly. “Where are they racing to? Is their new car the Golden Hind, and is it racing off to discover the Pacific? Are they racing off to Canada, Australia, Africa, to yank some more empire out of the wilderness and the desert? Are they racing off to the west, to push outward the boundaries of man’s life?”
“All that has been done,” I said. “There isn’t much new world to be discovered by the young people now.”
“So they sit in fast motor cars,” said Jim, “and race round and round.”
“Who is cynical now?” I demanded.
This World Needs Warmth
“Well,” said Jim slowly, “there are a lot of new worlds to be discovered besides America and Africa and New Zealand. There are realms of the heart and the mind that have not even yet been glimpsed by human eye. There are worlds of thought and deed, more perilous than the seas Columbus sailed, more deadly than the steaming swamps Cortez marched through, but if you go to the churches, or the political meetings, or the city hall or the parliament buildings, it is all old men you see. You don’t see any youth aboard the ships that are setting forth to unknown destinations to-day!”
“M’m,” said I. “And all this started with St. Valentine and the fact that we don’t hate anybody enough nowadays to send them a dirty valentine!”
“And we don’t love them enough to send them a pretty one,” countered Jimmie. “What this world needs is warmth. Simplicity. Old-fashioned kindliness. We have conquered everything. Discovered everything, mastered all things. Yet we go around on stiff legs, with our hair bristling, the way we did back in the ages when to live you had to hate.”
“What should we do?” I asked. “Go around loving everybody and be taken for a couple of saps?”
“I bet you,” said Jim, “that if we spent one day going about doing good, helping all who needed help, offering a kindly face to all our fellows, the result would astonish us. It would astonish us so that we would be converted to a new way of life. Life would smile upon us. We would feel the sun shining upon us. Offer kindness to the world, and see how kindly the world would respond!”
“That is an old teaching,” I reminded Jim.
“Yes, but it has never been practised,” said he. “I’m willing to try it. Just let us walk right out of this house and start the new life. Watch for every chance to do a kind or a noble act. Never pass an opportunity to do a good deed. We would find a hundred before we had gone a mile.”
“I go all day,” I said, “and never see anybody that wants any help.”
“Your eyes are blind,” said Jim. “Blinded by the coldness, the heartlessness of this age and generation.”
“I’d be glad to try it some time with you,” I said.
So Jim went on with his cartoon and I read a book Jimmie has about “Famous Race Horses of All Time,” and then we had lunch at Jim’s and after spending a few minutes out in the back yard looking eagerly for Jimmie’s crocuses which are not up yet, but which might be up almost any day, we started off for downtown.
We walked down to Bloor and decided to go a few blocks past all the shops with their new spring look about them, especially the flower shops and fruit stores with green onions and new rhubarb all crying out like song birds to the sensitive soul, and after two blocks, we had not seen a single case requiring our assistance. Even by any stretch of the imagination.
Testing the New Spirit
“The world,” I remarked, as we hopped along, “looks pretty good to me, Jimmie, pretty happy and easy, even if they aren’t going any place in a big way.”
“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Jim.
And at that moment something happened.
It was a foreigner in long whiskers and a fur cap, shoving a home-made cart with small iron wheels. It was filled with piles of old paper, bottles and junk.
And just as we came even with him as he strode along shoving the contraption on the slushy road, one of the wheels broke, and the wagon, with all its contents belching out, fell sideways on the road.
Jim rushed over to help.
“This isn’t the sort of thing,” I hissed to Jim.
“Lend a hand here,” said Jim, grasping an armful of the shabby contents of the cart and shoving ruggedly to keep the cart upright. I helped mildly. I don’t care to touch untidy things from heavens knows what source.
The old foreigner with the whiskers was very grateful, uttering words of thanks in between long jabbering and wailing outbursts as he got down and surveyed the broken wheel.
Jim put his shoulder to the cart and steadied it.
“How long do you suppose you will have to stand like that?” I asked him.
“A fine example of the new spirit you are,” said Jim. “Get your shoulder under here and help hold it up. Or pick up some of those things that slid out. They are getting all slushy.”
I picked up a couple of newspapers but lost my appetite at a bundle of old rags.
“They might have measles in them,” I protested to Jim, “or smallpox.”
“Listen,” said Jim gravely, still heaving with his weight while the old foreigner made excited investigations down under the cart, “this may be the test. If you fall down on this case, you may be counted unfit to meet with bigger opportunities.”
I picked up the rags and tossed them into the cart. I gathered up the remaining papers and piled them on the top, even though several people had paused to watch us.
“Ah,” said Jim. “You passed.”
The old foreigner was banging and thumping below. He rose to his feet and explained with elaborate gestures how, if we would both hold the cart upright, he could now fit the broken wheel back on the axle and all would be well.
“Get your shoulder against it,” said Jim.
Winning a Blessing
We both heaved the cart, and in a moment, the peddler shouted cheerily, and we stood away and the cart balanced on its two wheels perfectly.
“Ah, gentlemans,” cried the whiskered foreigner. “Tank you! Tank you! Gentlemans, I give you my blessings.”
“It’s quite all right,” I said. I noticed a wild sort of look in his eyes. They were a greenish color. He crowded up close to us with waving arms.
“My blessing for you, gentlemans,” he kept crying.
“Thank you,” said Jim.
And we walked along.
“I don’t want his blessing,” I said. “There are some things a person likes to do without any reward, not even thanks. Because it makes him feel bigger to have done them.”
“That is the meanest kind of deed of all,” said Jim. “I was glad to have that old man’s blessing. How do you know he might not have the gift of blessing? Maybe he could give us luck.”
“Superstition,” I began, “has vanished…”
But Jimmie had suddenly darted forward, stooping.
He picked up a wallet off the sidewalk. He opened it. It was crammed full with bills!
“Jimmie!” I gasped. We both wheeled to look, but the old foreigner had vanished.
There in the bright winter afternoon, we looked at each other and along the bright street with its shops and easy afternoon people with baby carriages and walking sticks. I felt funny.
“Well,” said Jim, quietly. “What do you think of that?”
He held the wallet in his hand and in a kind of daze, we continued to walk along Bloor St.
“Did he bless me too?” I asked Jim.
“Yes,” said he.
“But I was reluctant,” I said. “Maybe I don’t come under the blessing as strong as you.”
Yet at that moment, a man walked up to me and held out a large bunch of flowers to me!
He was a strange looking man, with jet black eyes glittering, and his teeth bared in a mysterious meaningful smile.
“Jimmie!” I said weakly.
But the man thrust the flowers into my hand, daffodils and tulips and hyacinths, a great glorious bouquet of them.
I took them in my hand and with a feeling of utter unreality, as if I were dreaming in the midst of waking. I walked beside Jimmie, who still held the wallet in his hand.
In a Golden Haze
The sky seemed suddenly bluer over Bloor St., a sweetness filled the air, a kind of golden light, and all the sounds of traffic, of cars and street cars and people passing made a music we had never heard before.
A man, splendidly dressed, a rich, middle-aged man stepped over in front of us.
“Gentlemen,” he said, in a beautiful voice, “step in!”
He waved his hand toward a small bright, brand new motor car standing on the side of the road.
It was one of those new, streamline cars, polished and gleaming like a jewel, and it was the color of a robin’s egg, velvety, moulded, sleek, gorgeous.
Jim and I gazed at the man in consternation.
“Get in,” he said. “Both of you. Drive it!”
He swept the door open.
I was nearest, and transferring my large bouquet to my other hand, I slid into the soft, luscious seat. And Jimmie, still holding the wallet in both hands, crept in alongside of me.
“You mean…?” I said, looking up at the handsome man standing benignly on the sidewalk.
And with one of the kindliest smiles I ever saw, he just nodded his head, slammed the door, and stood back.
“Jimmie,” I whispered.
Jim shook his head. His mouth was open.
I laid my bouquet on his lap. I took hold of the wheel, stepped on the starter and drove off.
“Is it mine?” I asked, huskily.
“He seemed to give it to you,” said Jim.
“But, but,” I stammered. “I don’t deserve it! It was you who threw your weight into the peddler’s cart. It was you who practically ordered me to pick up the newspapers and those old rags!”
“I got the wallet,” said Jim, holding it up. It bulged.
“Maybe,” I said, as I drove east on Bloor, with this soft sweet, silken car purring to my hand, “maybe there is a million dollars in that wallet!”
With trembling fingers Jimmie unloosed the commonplace black purse and took the bills out and counted them. There were $13 and, in change, 20 cents.
I steered into High Park.
A little way in. I ran the sweet, airy light little car to the side of the road and stopped the engine.
Embraced By the Mysterious
Jimmie,” I said, picking up my bouquet from his lap, there is something awfully strange about this business! From the time. you picked up that purse until now, it has been unreal, like a dream, like something out of the Arabian Nights.”
“I told you,” replied Jimmie, “that life was full of mysterious forces, if we would only give them a chance. Spiritual forces, profound forces that the Hindoos and primitive races know about.”
“But whose car is this?” I demanded taking hold of the wheel with my free hand, “how will we arrange that?”
“The day is young yet,” said Jim. “We are in the embrace of the mysterious, the fateful! In return for one good act, look what has happened already. Let us proceed downtown and maybe somebody will give me a skyscraper!”
“I feel as if something were going to happen,” I admitted.
But before I could lay the bouquet down, and before I could even take hold of the wheel, we heard a great tooting of car horns and hoarse shouts, and in an instant we were surrounded by two shabby old motor cars out of which tumbled five men and a woman. One of the men had a white apron on, a clerk in a store.
Jim and I were very surprised.
The first man to stand outside the car window and glare in at us was the handsome man who had presented me with the car.
“Where,” he shouted, “were you off to?”
“Why,” I said, “we didn’t know. We were so surprised!”
“Surprised at what?” shouted the good- looking man.
“At being given the car,” I explained.
“Huh,” said he, looking away, with an expression of disgust. “Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you seen anything of modern salesmanship? I mistook you two for intelligent citizens of the west end. All I was doing was offering you a ride in our new slip-stream model. It’s the latest kind of salesmanship. And you vanish with the car!”
“M’m,” said I.
“Oh!” said Jim.
“And,” shouted the car salesman, “if this poor fellow hadn’t complained here about his flowers, I might never have caught you!”
There, peering past his shoulder, was the dark-eyed, and formerly smiling man who had handed me the bouquet.
“Me poor man!” he cried. “Me poor flower man! I offer heem my flower. He take them. He walk away. No pay feefty cents!”
And then crowded in the man in the white apron, with his hat so hastily flung on, and he had by the arm a woman of about fifty, in a black coat.
“Is that your purse?” he said sharply, pointing to the wallet still clutched in Jim’s hand.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Oh!”
The storekeeper reached in and snatched the purse from Jim and handed it to the woman with a lift of his hat.
“I seen them pick it up,” said the storekeeper.
“The question is,” said the big car salesman, “what should we do with them? And first of all, get the – out of my car!”
I got out. I handed the flowers to the dark man. He took them rudely.
We stood in the mud in High Park and looked dumbly at our accusers gathered around us. “What have you to say for yourselves?” cried the big salesman standing with one foot on his running board.
Jim swallowed. I swallowed. We looked at each other. Then we looked at the circle around us.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Jim, “if we told you, you wouldn’t understand. It was a glimpse of the mysterious. The mystical. For ten minutes, my friend and I here have been back in the Middle Ages. When all things were possible and many things were probable.”
“They are nuts,” suggested the man in the white apron. It was his car they had come in and another car volunteered by a young chap who had not said a word but had been looking at us curiously.
Now he spoke.
“No,” said this young man, “they are not nuts. They are harmless. I know these two gentlemen and they mean no harm to anybody. Let me take them in my car.”
So the lady got in with the storekeeper and the flower seller got into the lovely little blue coupe with the salesman, and we got in with the young stranger.
“Where to, gentlemen?” he said.
“The Star office,” said Jim.
“It is good of you,” I said, “to come to our rescue like that. And to drive us downtown, too. We give you our blessing.”
So there is a young man wandering around, with our blessing on him.
We wonder what happened to him?
Editor’s Note: This story is a little unusual in that it is longer that usual. Regular stories average around 2500 words, and this one is almost 3000. It was also continued on a different page and not confined to a single one. This is likely because this is still early in the series, and there was not a standard look to them yet. There would become a regular routine of publishing the story on a single page in the back of the section of the newspaper.
The Golden Hind was the name of Sir Francis Drake’s ship in his circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580.
“It’s me,” I screeched, as Jimmie took aim. “And the rug! Don’t shoot!”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 27, 1934.
“These bear rugs,” said Jimmie Frise, “make this open job of yours a very nice little car.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Considering it is four years old. But an open car is the only car for a sportsman.”
We were headed out for the country on a rabbit hunt. Our friend Eddie, who owns hounds, was to meet us at one of those big swamps beyond Fergus.
“A sportsman,” opined Jimmie, “has a pretty comfortable life, take it all around.”
“Yet it has its dangers,” I pointed out. “To the casual spectator, seeing us bowling along comfortably smothered in fur rugs, and in our snappy mackinaw clothes, it might look like a life of ease. But consider the hard work we do, the tramping for miles across fields, the struggling through dangerous swamps, and then the guns. Don’t forget the guns. The dangers of carrying firearms and shooting them off, that’s the peril.”
“Sport is not sport,” said Jim, “if it has no element of danger or risk in it.”
“Is golf sport?” I asked.
“Well, you might get hit by a golf ball.”
“Sport,” I said, “in its truest sense, is doomed. You can’t shoot live pigeons any more. As a little boy, I recall attending live bird shoots and seeing my uncle bang down a hundred pigeons without a miss as they were released from a trap. We can’t enjoy that any more. Little by little, all the sturdier forms of sport are being slowly strangled. When I first went deer hunting, we could kill two deer each, and we had a month open season. Now we have twelve days to kill one, and we aren’t allowed to use hounds to chase them to us.”
“The world is getting more humane,” said Jim.
“But all the time it is becoming more humane toward wild animals,” I protested, “the more cruel the world is becoming toward men. More human beings have been shot, murdered, mangled, tortured and gassed in the past twenty-five years of the reform of sport than in the previous thousand years of stag hunting, bull baiting and cock fighting. It looks to me as if man, being denied the outlet of killing animals and birds, has turned his attention to his own species.”
“You’re a swell theorist,” admitted Jimmie.
“A man is entitled to a little danger, a little violence,” I continued. “You can’t suppress it. You can’t cut it out of him with a surgical instrument. Sooner or later, we are going to have to go back over the past five hundred years of reform and do it all over again by taking into account the true character of human nature.”
“Well,” said Jimmie, “we still have a little rabbit hunting left.”
“Sure, but now you can only get a gun license from September 1 to April 30,” I corrected. “And every year the farmers are putting more restrictions on us. You wait. Inside of a few years, we won’t be even allowed to hunt rabbits.”
Just a Few Sports Left
“We will still be able to play golf, tennis, bowls,” said Jim.
“We will still be able to play these games that meet with the approval of the reformers who rule us. People,” I said, driving more rapidly, “who have no hunger, no urge, no fire, no blood in themselves, and who go about enviously depriving their healthier and more natural fellows of a little action, a little excitement.”
“Rabbit hunting,” said Jim, “sometimes has a lot of excitement in it. I love the music of the hounds, the sight of them, all brightly colored, coming streaming through the woods or across the fields. The shooting of the rabbit is only an incident in the whole adventure. It’s the chase that counts.”
“I feel ashamed, every time I go rabbit hunting,” said l. “When I think of my ancestors hunting stags and wild boars, bears and wolves.”
“Did you get these bears?” asked Jimmie, fondling the glossy furs we were cuddled in.
“No,” I admitted. “One was sent to me by a friend in the bush. The bear got its head stuck in an empty jam pail out on the garbage dump, so my friend had to put it out of its misery. The other one I bought from a gentleman who peddled it around the office.”
“Very romantic, both of them,” agreed Jim.
“They make a snug article to go rabbit hunting in,” said I.
“They give you a sense of adventure anyway,” agreed Jim, settling back and inhaling the chill October air as we skimmed northwestward toward our tryst with Eddie and his pack of rabbit hounds.
We took turns in driving, and Jim had the last lap that bore us through Fergus and out some lonely autumn roads to a region of far-flung black swamps, where the bright swamp hare was numerous in his coat now changing from brown to snow white.
We met Eddie at the prearranged crossroads. He had a small truck, the back of which is for holding the hounds. He led us down some narrow swampy roads, turning right, and then left, as he penetrated deeper and deeper into the gloomy depths of cedar and spruce. The swamp was very wet, the road treacherous, but at the end of twenty minutes we came out on a stoney pasture, lonely and bleak in the gray weather, and all we could see on all sides were vast areas of silent brooding swamp.
The hounds were crazy to be let loose. Six of them, they raced about, excited and whining, watching us set up our guns and donning our hunting coats. Then they began sniffing about the edges of the pasture, and before we had got the cars half parked in the pasture, one of them, Dainty, let loose a deep belling song and all of the six fled into the swamp with a music that has been thrilling the heart of men for thousands and thousands of years.
“Let’s get going,” spluttered Eddie. “You take the right side of the swamp, Jim, and you head straight in there. You’ll come to a ridge, about two hundred yards in. Stay there. That’s where most of the rabbits cross.”
Jim went one way. Eddie the other, vanishing into the dark impenetrable cedars, so I set a true course and followed Eddie’s directions. I found the ridge, a stoney mound, and there I took my stand, while far off the hounds made music.
It is lovely being alone in a swamp. The mystic silence, broken only by the tiny chirp of little autumn birds or the startled scurry of a squirrel. The sweet aromatic smell of the cedars and balsams. I picked a good spot from which I could watch in all directions, and then, gun ready across my arm, I waited for the hounds to bring the hare across my path.
But the hounds went farther and farther, until I could barely hear them, even in the silence. Now and again I would hear them coming nearer and I would get set and half raise my gun and aim it at imaginary rabbits, just to get my eye lined up. But then the music would grow faint again.
Bang! Far away, a shot. For fifteen minutes I listened intently before I heard the hounds again. This time they started less than a farm’s width away, and around in a great circle they went in the other direction. I heard them grow faint and near, near and faint, and then – Bang, bang! – two more shots, followed by silence.
I yelled.
“Jimmmiiieeeee!”
But only silence answered my cry. It was chilly, so I walked up and down the ridge. I sat down and waited. A wind had risen. No hounds, no shots disturbed the great stillness of the wind through the cedar tops.
“Hang it,” I said, “is this hunting?”
So I decided to go for a little walk through the swamp and see if I could kick out a rabbit for myself, without the aid of hounds.
It is easy to go wrong in a swamp. The farther I went, the worse the swamp got. I came to a dense thicket of alders and small willows, and when I tried to go back out of it the worse it got. I came to a little stream flowing through the swamp, and I followed it for ten minutes looking for a suitable log to cross it. By the time I found the log I could see the stoney meadow through the cedars, the meadow where our cars were parked.
Some people can pop across a log as easy as walking along a pavement. I nearly always slip off. This time I slipped off and fell into the small creek. The creek was not deep, but one loses one’s balance and falls. I fell lengthwise in the chill little brook and before I could regain my feet I was thoroughly soaked from head to foot.
It was not three minutes out to the meadow and the car, but I was chattering with cold when I reached it. I removed my clothes in a twinkling and threw the bear robes about me. Then I reached for my car keys.
Jimmie had them. When he got out of the car he had just popped them in his pocket.
You can’t dry yourself on a bearskin lap robe. There was nothing else in either car. And I couldn’t start the car, to drive out to the last farmhouse we had passed to ask them to dry my garments at the stove.
“Boy,” I said, “you’ll catch pneumonia!”
I huddled under the bearskins, but they are stiff things that don’t lend themselves to tucking in. Gaps are always left for wind to blow up.
I tooted the car horn, long and loud.
No answer. No hounds. No shots.
I fired two shots rapid, a signal of distress if ever there was one.
A Grand Target
A blue jay laughed from a hidden tree. Far away in the direction Jimmie had taken I heard the sound of an axe chopping.
“Jimmm-eeeee, hoy!” I yelled.
But the distant axe went on chopping, so I figured there was a farm at the other side of the swamp and likely Jimmie would be there conversing with the farmer or even drinking cider in the farmhouse around the kitchen stove with the folks.
I spread my garments over the hood of the car and wrapped the largest rug around me. I pulled on my soggy hunting boots and started in through the belt of swamp in the direction of the axe. It would at least keep me from dying of goose-flesh.
As I pushed through the swamp I decided to keep up a regular call:
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated at every step.
The swamp was deeper and wetter the way Jimmie had taken. I crossed two creeks and each time I saw a clearer place ahead, I found on arriving at it, it was only a patch of impenetrable alders.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I repeated loudly, as I came from under each cedar tree.
Every fifty yards I paused to halloo for Jim. But the silence was profound, the day was grayer and the air more chill.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I called, with monotonous regularity.
Suddenly behind me I heard a terrible sound.
It was the sharp, startled bellow and bay of a hound.
Before I could turn to look I heard other hounds join in the chorus, and in an instant I knew I was the prey of the whole pack of Eddie’s hounds. There is something panic-striking about a pack of hounds on your trail. I should have simply dropped the bear rug and stood forth, in my human mastery, before the surprised hounds. But I did what rabbits do, and foxes, what Liza did with Little Eva in her clasp as she crossed the ice – I turned and ran like a rabbit.
It was all a matter of a few seconds. I could hear the hounds coming, the full terrible chorus of them, high ones and low ones, belling and baleful, a swift, inescapable choir of wild savage voices, frantic with excitement, and I did some leaps that would have credited an Olympic athlete.
Then came the shot.
Just a terrific bang amidst the cedars, and at its call I fell down. In another instant the hounds were on top of me, tearing at the rug I clutched about my shoulders.
“Help, help!” I yelled in muffled tones.
“Hold still,” came Jimmie’s breathless voice, “until I get him in the head!”
“It’s me,” I screeched. “And the rug! Don’t shoot!”
So Jim ran up and kicked the hounds off and raised me to my feet.
“Thank goodness,” I gasped, “you are a punk shot!”
We wrapped the rug around me and led the way out while the hounds and I slunk in confusion behind him. We drove out to the farmhouse and sat around the kitchen while my clothes were dried.
“You see,” said Jim, “there’s excitement even in rabbit hunting. I should say we have all the thrill in rabbit hunting any man would want.”
“Quite,” said I.
Editor’s Notes:Mackinaw coats were standard for hunting back then.
Bull-baiting was a blood “sport” where a dog would fight with a bull. Dogs were bred specifically for this, and that is where bulldogs come from. Bull-baiting was made illegal in the 19th century. Cock fighting (between roosters) was also illegal, but continued for some time anyway.
Liza was a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who escaped slavery with her son by running across the not quite frozen Ohio River. It was based on a true story. I’m not sure why Greg says Eva is Liza’s daughter, Eva was a different character in the book. Many of the plays and stage productions bastardized the original book, so his memory could be based on anything.
All the din and snorting and beeping that accompanied us as we pedalled up toward Bampton was enough to shatter your nerves.
By Gregory Clark, illustrated by James Frise, June 9, 1934.
“We’re all hopelessly,” said Jimmie Frise, “overcapitalized.”
“I have no capital,” I demurred.
“No, but you’ve got a car and a house and a lot of furniture and everything,” said Jim. “You’re overcapitalized.”
“It sounds interesting,” I admitted. “I’m overcapitalized.”
“We are all putting on too much dog,” continued James. “The whole world has got to pipe down.”
“But how can we be persuaded to start?” I asked.
“Tens of thousands of us are being persuaded already,” said Jim. “I’ve a good notion to get a couple of bicycles. One bicycle for me, one for the family, and a few pair of roller skates. That’s about my real speed.”
“I remember,” I said, “the bicycle days. Good old days, they were. I can dimly remember meetings of bicycle clubs in High Park, hundreds of bicyclists, men and women, gathered for a hike through the pleasant country roads west and north of Toronto.”
“Those were the good old days,” said Jim; “when a twenty-mile journey was all the far a man or a woman wanted to go away from home. The Gay Nineties! The age when all our ancestors had group photographs taken in their funny derbies, the ladies sitting with a graceful droop and the men standing, legs akimbo, with one hand resting on the back of the chair, as if to say, here we are; will there ever be a generation like us again?”
“And carpets were tacked,” I said.
“And paper under the carpets,” said Jim. “You could hear it crackling.”
“And curtain stretchers,” I said.
“And elderly ladies with tall lace collars held up with little pieces of whalebone,” said Jimmie, “seemed to be the boss of everything. They wore watches pinned to the front of their black pleated dresses. Pearl sunbursts at their throats.”
“Old ladies,” I said, “and every Thursday they baked cookies and put them in big blue starch tins.”
“Let’s get a couple of bicycles some day,” said Jim, “and go for a ride out through the country, and go sailing leisurely along.”
“What kind of costume do you suggest we wear?” I asked. “The bicycle costume I remember in my boyhood were rather cramping for these days.”
“Let’s wear sport shirts and khaki shorts,” said Jim, “and golf socks, and those tennis visors. Just nice airy costumes.”
“And we could carry small haversacks,” I said, “with lunch and cooling beverages.”
“When do we go?” cried Jim, happily.
“Let’s not get excited,” I said. “The first real fine afternoon. And you arrange where we can rent a couple of bikes.”
The two that Jimmie delivered at my house at noon were the same size. We lowered the seat of mine several times, until it rested on the cross bar. But it still felt a little stretchy to me. Jimmie and I set forth for the pleasant highways that lead northwest from the outer edges of Toronto.
The breeze was lovely in our faces. Our speed was easy and natural. Except for a slight stretch at the end of each shove of my legs, there was really no effort to riding, and all the balance and skill of my boyhood returned. Jimmie was a little inclined to get ahead of me, and he wanted to “scorch” on all the small hills, but quite merrily we bowled along until we came to the Centre Rd., leading to Brampton.
And as soon as we touched the asphalt, the tooting began.
I trust I shall never again toot my car horn at a bicycle. Of all the din and snorting and beeping that accompanied us as we pedalled up towards Brampton, it was enough to shatter your nerves. Not a motor car felt free to pass us, although we hugged the edge of the pavement, without a long, deafening blast on the horn.
Road’s Too Much Used
You would think we were a public menace the way drivers shouted brief nothings at us out the windows as they went by.
Jim was leading and he kept up a continual chatter which I could not hear. If I pedalled up alongside him, two cars had to pass, immediately beside us, and while I wobbled back into position in rear, the two cars jammed brakes, tooted and shouted at us.
“Let’s get off the highway,” I called to Jim. “Let’s find some pleasant country lane to travel in.”
So Jimmie turned west off the highway and we went merrily along, side by side.
I heard a car coming and I had just time to run my bike into the grassy ditch when a couple of young girls in a roadster flashed between us with a snort of a double horn and a couple of derisive yells.
“Even the country lanes,” I sighed, remounting.
“How are you coming?” asked Jim.
“A little achy,” I admitted.
The road grew sandy, and at the hills we both dismounted to push the bikes up. But there were farmers to talk to whenever we came to them and places you could slow down and look at cows and chickens. I picked some wild flowers at a dell and stuck them in my visor.
“Ah, Jim,” I said. “This is the life.”
One of those modern cars had crept up to within ten feet of me, let go its snort and swished by. Both of us fell in the ditch.
“There ought to be a law,” cried Jimmie, “requiring these modern cars to carry sleigh bells.”
“Let’s get off this road,” I said. “It is too much used.”
We turned north on the next road. Within fifty yards we had to take to the ditch for a truck that slammed past in a cloud of dust. Five times before we came to the cart tracks leading back east, we had to leap for our lives. Then we came to two cart tracks, not a road but just a happy track leading to the east, with grass growing between the ruts and in the distance, woods and wide fields.
So Jim took the right hand rut and I took the left, and at last we had perfect cycling. There were birds to see and farms to stop at for drinks out of pumps. Farmers to talk to across snake fences and homecoming country school children with little red lard pails emptied of lunch. A flock of sheep watched us go by with startled interest and lambs raced away at our approach. We came even to a large pig lying in my rut, and I had to get out and go around her, because she just turned up a very nasty little eye, with long Hollywood eyelashes of a dusty color, and dared me.
We came to a woods and sat down for our sandwiches. My legs ached on the insides and they had turned a rich red color.
“You burn,” said Jim. “I just brown.”
We lay in the grass and finished our sandwiches, even the crusts, and the sun blazed down and my ache grew and my burn was stinging and the hide just above my knees began to feel stiff.
Aches and Splinters
“Jim,” I said, “I think we had better get headed back for home.”
“We can take back roads home towards dusk,” said Jim, half asleep in the deep grass. A herd of cows was coming lazily up the road.
“My ache is growing,” I said, “and I feel as if this sunburn is going to stiffen. I forgot when I put on these shorts that so much of my leg would show, sitting on a bicycle.”
“I brown,” said Jim, drowsily.
So while Jim snored gently, I patted my sunburn and massaged the thick muscles on my legs. But I sensed a growing discomfort.
“Come on, Jimmie,” I shook him.
“This is the life,” drowsed Jim.
We mounted the bike and my skin felt as if it would crack above my knees. They were scarlet.
We pedalled easily eastward and came to a steep hill with an old wooden bridge at the bottom.
“Wheeee,” cried Jim, letting her go down, scorching.
I heard him rattle over the bridge. I dipped the front of my bike down and in a moment I had lost the pedals. My legs felt so stiff I couldn’t get a grab at them. I was so busy steering I had no time to waste feeling for pedals.
I felt the front wheel hit the plank bridge, the bike went north and I went south and I had splinters in me. Jim pedalled back down the far hill.
“Where’s the bike?” he asked with interest.
“It went your way,” I said, moving over to a shady spot on the bridge without having to get up.
Jim rested his against the bridge and hunted high and low.
“Maybe it went into the crook,” said he.
It no doubt did. We got long poles and scratched around in the muddy water, but without any luck.
“What on earth will we do?” asked Jimmie, amused yet not amused.
“I go home on your handle bars,” I said.
And since it was easier to ride on the pavement than on the county back roads, we stuck to the pavement. And if it was any of you who saw us as Jim pedalled me carefully along the edge of the pavement, amidst all the rushing evening traffic, and if I made faces instead of smiling when you tooted your horns warningly at us, it was on account of sunburn and discomfort, rather than any indignation with you.
“How about putting on a happy expression?” asked Jim, as he shoved southward towards Cooksville.
“Relax. Lean back. Look like the Gay Nineties!”
But it is difficult to look happy on handle bars, with your legs stiff from sunburn and your shorts kind of pinching and your tennis visor continually slipping down over your nose.
Editor’s Notes: This story is shorter than most, for unknown reasons, but was not that uncommon in the earlier ones.
The 1890s were a period of huge interest in cycling, since early cars were still very expensive, and the “safety bicycle” was invented in the late 1880s.
Paper was placed under carpets as an early carpet liner to help prevent the ingress of dust from gaps between boards. A curtain stretcher was a large wooden frame designed to hold a lace curtain tightly in position in order for it to dry without creases and retain its shape during the drying process. Curtain stretchers were useful when it came to caring from delicate fabrics that could not be ironed.
Jimmie said “crook” to refer to a “creek”, which was not uncommon.
The trout rose and struck. … “Run up to the sporting department,” I said to Jim, “and get a landing net.”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 12, 1934.
“How,” asked Jimmie Frise, “do you like my new fishing costume?”
“Beautiful, Jimmie!” I cried.
And it was beautiful. It was a rich Donegal tweed with large patch pockets and big pleats behind his arms and down the back.
It had plus fours so baggy and so long that they hung nearly to his boottops. It had that look you see in the advertisements of the very latest English styles in the very smartest American magazines.
“Jimmie,” I exclaimed, “you wouldn’t go fishing in that lovely suit!”
“Why not?” demanded Jim, still turning round and round for me to see him in all his Old Country splendor.
“Why, it’s for sitting on the verandas of exclusive clubhouses!” I declared. “You could go to the races in it and get your picture in the rotogravure. It is for walking about the lawns of those magnificent homes in Toronto’s latest up-the-creek suburb. That isn’t a suit for going fishing. That is a sport suit.”
“Isn’t fishing sport?” asked Jim.
“It certainly isn’t,” I assured him. “Look at sport model cars, sport model clothes, well-known sportsmen and so on and you’ll see what sport means. Sport means where there are a lot of people to see you. The races, baseball, horse shows. That’s sport.”
“What is fishing then?” inquired Jimmie, draping himself carefully on a chair.
“Fishing is a pastime,” I replied.
“Then this is my new pastime suit,” said Jim. “I am sick and tired of seeing people looking like tramps when they go fishing or camping. I see no reason why people should want to look dirty and shabby when they go forth to commune with Mother Nature. If we love Nature we should put on our best raiment when we enter her temples.”
“That’s good, Jimmie, but it isn’t practical,” I said.
“Why not?” demanded Jim. “These tweeds are as easy and loose as any old sweater I ever had. And these plus fours are twice as easy as any canvas pants I ever bought, badly cut and cramping your movements. And can’t I drive my car and walk across meadows and wander along streamsides quite as happily in these garments as in a lot of misshapen cast-offs? Won’t I feel better fishing in these clothes?”
“They’ll get dirty,” I said.
“There is no dirt in the country,” said Jim. “It is in the city there is dirt. In the country all is clean and pure. You dust off any clean earth that might touch you. I say, save your old clothes for the city, where there is dust and soot and filth and grease. And save your good clothes for the lovely clean country.”
Humble Ancestry Calls
“You certainly seem right,” I admitted, “but there must be some reason back of the universal habit of putting on shabby old clothes to go fishing.”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Jim. “It is the Old Adam in us. We are descendants of a long line of dirt farmers, sheep herders, peasants, peat burners, cotters, laborers, shingle splitters, and so forth. In every ship that came to Canada a century ago there were, in the cabins above deck, two or three families of nervous gentry, younger sons of obscure small town politicians who had enough pull with Queen Victoria’s uncles to get their bewildered offsprings jobs as surveyors, curates, town council clerks, and so forth in the colonies.
“Down in the steerage, below decks,” went on Jimmie, “were some hundreds of odds and ends, starved farmers, unemployed carpenters and masons, wild young men, people who could no longer pay their rent or who were sick and tired of Napoleon and his wars and the Duke of Wellington and his peace, and who came heaving and rolling across the Atlantic to a promised land of freedom and opportunity.
“Now,” said Jimmie, redraping himself on the chair, “those half a dozen nobles in the cabin above decks have multiplied enormously in the past three or four generations. And those hundreds down in the steerage have practically died out. No trace of them remains. There is not in the whole of Ontario a single descendant of the steerage. Who were your ancestors?”
“Er-ah –” I said.
“Precisely,” said Jimmie. “Your ancestors were English officers retired on half-pay and given big land grants or something? Or were they government officials sent out to help rule the illiterate colonies?”
“I wear old clothes when I go fishing,” I said humbly.
“Good!” applauded Jimmie. “Good for you. An honest man. You wear old clothes when you go fishing because your humble ancestry calls to you, your humble blood begs within you to dress for a little while the way your race has dressed for ages – in homely and undistinguished garments.”
“I see,” I said.
“You love to put on old clothes,” went on Jim, “because it gives a feeling of spiritual honesty. No more pretense. No more bluffing. There you stand, in ragged garments, and all your ancestors for a thousand years, in the bogs of Ireland and on the sheep-clad hills of Scotland, salute you!”
“When I am fishing,” I admitted, “I do seem to see people on the hillsides.”
“However,” said Jim, “I have bought this suit to go fishing in and to go rabbit shooting next fall. I am through with my ancestors.”
“I would be willing to bet you,” I said, “that in my old brown pants and green sweater I could catch more fish than you can in that fancy sport suit.”
“Clothing,” said Jim, “has nothing to do with it.”
“I bet you,” I repeated.
“Ha, Getting Respectable!”
“I take you,” said Jim. “I wish we could I go fishing right now.”
“We can,” I stated.
“It’s the middle of the week,” said Jim.
“We can go fishing right now,” I insisted.
“For suckers or mud-cats in the Island lagoon?” asked Jim, with all the contempt of Donegal tweed.
“For speckled trout,” said I, “one and two pounders. Fourteen to eighteen inches long!”
Jim undraped himself from his chair.
“Where?” he breathed.
“In the basement of a departmental store,” I said, “right here in town.”
Jim looked at me wildly.
“There is a fountain down in the glassware department in the basement of the store,” I went on. “In that fountain are at least two dozen trout. Big ones.”
“But we can’t fish for them,” cried Jimmie.
“Who is to stop us?” I asked.
“Why, the floorwalkers, the store detectives, the salesgirls,” said Jimmie, disgustedly.
“We could fish for ten minutes before anybody could make up their mind what to do,” I said. “The first salesgirl to see us fishing would have to run and tell an older salesgirl. And she would have to go and find the manager of the glassware. And he might be hiding behind any one of those tall counters of glass or pottery. I judge we would have a full ten minutes.”
“‘It sounds nutty to me,” said Jim.
“See,” I cried. “That’s what fancy clothes do to you in fishing. It takes away your nerve. It makes you respectable.”
“It isn’t that,” muttered Jim, who hates to be accused.
“Let’s run up to my house,” I said. “I’ll get on my old green sweater and canvas pants. We’ll use one fly. We’ll toss to see who gets first cast. If the first one of us doesn’t get a trout in five minutes he hands the rod to the other. I bet you I get either a bigger or more trout than you do. And I lay it all on the clothes. Because we will be using the same rod, leader and fly.”
“It sounds nutty,” said Jim.
“Ha, getting respectable!” I sneered.
“What will we say when they stop us?” asked Jim.
“We will say we are simply testing out a fly we had bought at the sporting goods department.”
“It still sounds nutty,” said Jim.
But he stood up and took his hat.
We slipped into my house and I got into my green sweater and canvas pants. I also got my old fishing hat. I got out my light fly rod, reel and line. And we drove downtown.
Fishing in the Fountain
At this season of the year it is not out of the way to see a gentleman carrying a fishing rod. We got into the basement and I led Jimmie over to the fountain, where he stood and stared with rapt joy at the pool in which some large goldfish and a few mud turtles profaned the crystal water in which lazily great olive colored trout fanned the water anxiously and felt the spring creeping through their veins. Unhappy trout, I thought, as I looked at them. Here in a pool, safe, no doubt, but so far from all the mischief and adventure of the dancing stream, the changing skies, the soft sweet loveliness of May…
“Ah, well,” I said, “we’ll be giving them a little fun in a minute.”
“Sssshhh!” warned Jim.
Three ladies, four men and two children were standing about the fountain, gazing without a word at these fish lazily moving about the limpid pool. Especially the men. They were shabby men. They needed haircuts. They stood with hands behind them, with one knee bent, as if they had been, and were going to be, there forever. It would be nice, I thought, to know the thoughts that wandered in the minds of these four shabby men, standing staring so secretly at the trout, those jewels of the Madonna.
I led Jim back from the fountain and we got behind a pillar which was piled high with glassware. Nobody was around and nobody would pay any attention. I jointed the little rod and quickly threaded the line and knotted on the leader.
“Toss,” I said.
Jim took a coin and tossed. “Heads,” said I.
And it was heads.
I walked casually over to the fountain. Jim came behind me. I smiled two of the four men out of the way, and then I knelt beside the fountain. I whipped out the line. waved it to yet a yard or two of length, and then dropped the little greeny-gray fly fair over the nose of the biggest of the trout.
Crash! The trout rose and struck so instantly, so savagely, I had no idea how homesick he had been.
I stood up. The trout raced frantically about the pool, lashing it into a foam. The other trout raced crazily about and the goldfish fluttered excitedly about. A mud turtle became so perturbed he climbed right out of the fountain and started for the exit.
“Run up to the sporting department,” I shouted to Jim, “and get a landing net!”
Old Clothes are Luckier
By this time, of course, a crowd was gathering. One of the shabby men was shouting encouragement to me in a hoarse Scottish voice. Ladies were screaming. Then I felt a hand grip my arm and the gentleman who turned me around was a stranger.
“Pardon me,” I cried, “don’t you see I’m busy!”
And then my line came free. A sickening sensation. The trout was off. Peace descended on the pool. But the crowd was starting to mill about for a view, as crowds will when the victim is a small man.
“My friend,” I said, “will explain. We were trying out a new lot of trout flies we had got at the sporting goods.”
“What friend?” said the man who had my arm.
Jimmie was standing over by the decanters, in all his tweedy magnificence.
“That gentleman over there,” I said, “In the tweeds.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” asked the man, looking me up and down, hat and all.
“Certainly: he is with me.”
“Ha, ha,” said the man. He wore a blue suit. He had a cold Irish countenance.
“Jimmie!” I called, as the man shoved me through the gathering.
But Jimmie just picked up a decanter and looked at it appraisingly, as if he had not heard me.
The man took me up to the sporting goods. Fortunately, the manager knew me. He explained to the man in blue that I was an ardent angler, a fly fisher, in fact, and that at this season of the year all anglers, but especially fly fishers, were likely to be a little touched.
I bought two dozen flies and the matter was closed. I unjointed the fly rod and went quietly back down to the basement. Jimmie was standing by the fountain, looking with interest at the trout.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I win.”
“I wish I had won the loss,” said Jim gloomily. “Look at that trout there, the one by the corner!”
I turned cautiously and there was the large man in the blue suit, his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels and toes. He was looking straight at us and there was no expression at all in his eyes.
“Old clothes,” I said to Jim, “are luckier than new clothes.”
So Jim is going to save his Donegal tweeds for the races.
Editor’s Notes: Plus fours are a particular type of trousers, popular at the time.
Rotogravure is a photographic process, but by this time, meant the photo insert section of newspapers like the Star Weekly.
Donegal tweed is a woven tweed manufactured in County Donegal, Ireland.
“Good day, gentlemen,” said the little financial man.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 20, 1934
“My family,” said Jimmie Frise, “are after me to clean the furnace pipes.”
“It’s a trifling job,” I said. “My gardener does it in a few minutes each year and doesn’t even mention it at the end of the month.”
“Still,” demurred Jimmie, “I don’t see why I should rob some poor man of a dollar.”
“It would do you good to engage occasionally in a little unpleasant toil,” I said. “One of the things that is wrong with the world is specialization, not only in industry, but in life itself.”
“How do you mean?” demanded Jim.
“We kick about the deadening effect of mass production,” I stated, “and the evil effect upon the human race of having men doing one small thing over and over again all their lives, like screwing up nuts or tightening a bolt or some other automatic action. It drives men mad. But how about us all living our lives as automatically, never straying out of the rut, always doing the same things every day at the same time, getting out of bed the same side, shaving in the exact same way, starting with our top right cheek and ending with our left neck, kissing the same woman goodby each morning at the same place in the same hallway, and so forth.”
“What has this got to do with stove pipes?” demanded Jim.
“The deadly routine of your life.” I went on, “includes a furnace, and you stoke it and shake it, and remove the ashes and stoke it again. But the ghastly routine would be broken if, once in while, you cleaned the pipes. It would be like getting out of bed the other side, and shaving your left neck first and ending with your right top cheek, and kissing somebody else goodby in the front hall. It would give you a fresh and sudden zest.”
“I never heard anybody rave about furnace pipes the way you do,” said Jimmie. “How about helping me with them?”
“I could ask my gardener to,” I agreed.
“How about the ghastly monotony of your own life?” sneered Jim.
“I often shave backwards,” I said. “And sometimes I kiss my little daughter goodby instead.”
“If I clean the furnace pipes,” said Jim, “it won’t be for any philosophic or psychopathic reason. It will be simply to save a buck. For five years now I have been trying to end the depression by spending all I made, by sharing my work with others, by hiring people on the slightest pretext to do my work for me. But I can’t see it has made the slightest difference. So from now on I am going to be thrifty and careful like everybody else, and do all my own chores and sole my own boots and cut my own grass and clean my own furnace pipes.”
“And what will you do with the money you save?” I asked.
“I’ll buy bonds,” said Jim.
“That’s patriotic,” I assured him. “Instead of spending your dollars on small jobs like furnace pipes and your garden, you will lend It to the government to pay relief. Then, after they have paid relief to a few million people, you get your money back in ten years. Meantime, who paid the relief?”
“Don’t confuse me,” begged Jim. “I am trying to do the right thing by my country. My country wants cash. To lend it to them, I am going to cut down my spending. I am going to do my own furnace pipes.”
“And the people you no longer help support,” I argued, “will get your money just the same, only in relief.”
“I suppose so,” admitted Jim.
“Then,” I demanded, “where does the money come from, twenty years from now, when the government pays you back the money they borrowed from you?”
“Look,” said Jim, “I have five children. In twenty years they will all be grown up and making money. The government can reborrow from them to pay me back.”
“I’d rather have my furnace pipes done by a pipe cleaner,” I said. “It makes him happy. And it only costs me two dollars. It wont cost my grandchildren anything.”
“But there will be five Frises to borrow from instead of only one pointed out Jim. “It will be easier. That’s what the government figures on. It will be easier to borrow by the time their note to me falls due.”
“It looks to me,” I said, “as if we were paying for having our pipes cleaned and cleaning them ourselves. It is all very confusing.”
“I only want to do what is right,” said Jim. “If they say spend, I spend. If they say save, I save.”
“And if you spend, it’s gone,” I enlightened, “and if you save, It’s loaned.”
But Jimmie had risen from the steps of his house, where we had been sitting in the sunshine, and was staring at a little man walking down the street.
This little man was small and smudgy. Under his arm, he carried a roll of what appeared to be very dirty carpet, and from the ends of the carpet protruded filthy brushes on long wire handles.
“Speak of the devil,” exclaimed Jimmie.
The little man, passing, halted and in a deep English voice cried.
“‘Ow’s yer pipes?”
“Come up a minute,” called Jimmie.
“A real chimney sweep, like in Dickens,” I breathed to Jim.
The little man drew nigh and rested his roll of carpet.
“Are you a chimney sweep?” I asked excitedly, picturing him as one who has spent his entire childhood and infancy in the chimneys of Old London.
“No, sir,” he said, with dignity. “I am a financial man, by profession, but during the present interregnum, as you might say, I am picking up what I can.”
“You clean chimneys?” asked Jim.
“I clean furnace pipes,” said the little man.
“How much do you charge?”
“Two dollars,” said he.
“Two dollars!” cried Jim. “Two bucks Just to rattle a few furnace pipes into an ash can! Man, you’re crazy.”
“It’s quite a job,” said the chimney man.
“Why, for two dollars I could drive my car from here to Montreal!”
“But your pipes would still be choked,” said the small man, “when you got back ‘ome.”
“Two dollars! Why, that is ridiculous,” said Jim. “Some of you people have no sense of proportion. Just because a job is a little unpleasant, you charge three times what it is worth. My friend and I can do those pipes in a few minutes after supper.”
“I shouldn’t try it of an evening, sir,” said the little man. “Professionally speaking.”
“Thanks very much,” said Jim, dismissing the small man, who hoisted his roll of carpet. “I had no idea.”
And as the little man retired down the walk, Jim said: “Look here, you save Saturday afternoon, we’ll do mine and yours both.”
“Mine were done,” I pointed out.
“Lend me hand, just for the experience,” said Jim. “I want to look into this business of small jobs. Two bucks!”
Saturday Jim drove me home from the office very kindly and then reminded me, as he let me out, to come over at 2 p.m.
It is curious how seldom one looks at a furnace. One visits it in the dark, shovels coal into a glowing hole, rattles a shaker, reaches up to a familiar doohickey and turns the draft on or off, and the furnace remains a dimly seen, faintly disliked, something to be admitted only part way into one’s consciousness.
Jim and I surveyed his furnace in some awe. It was a bulging and somehow bowlegged sort of furnace. It was aged and scaley and corroded. There were bands or bolts of clay around it that fell away like dust when you touched them. Everything was rusty and squeaked.
Dark Cloud of Endeavor
The pipes were fragile and sagged. When we slapped them, they felt soggy and stuffed.
“How long is it since you had your pipes cleaned?” I asked Jim, doubtfully.
“I don’t recall them being cleaned.”
“Why, you have been wasting fuel for years and haven’t been getting a fraction of the British thermal units you should have been getting.”
“You’d better take off your coat,” said Jim, throwing his across the empty coal bin stall.
I stood ready while Jim stretched up and took firm hold of the joint of pipe that vanished into the cellar wall. It was stuck. It was corroded.
He tapped it with a stick. He hammered it with the shaker handle. He punched a hole in it.
“Poof,” said Jim, as a darkish mist filled the air.
“Get a couple of chairs, and we’ll both take hold and twist,” I suggested.
So Jim got on a box and I got on a chair, and we took firm hold of the pipe and twisted.
It was only a matter of a fraction of a second, but as the pipe came free, Jim, who was curved in one of these fantastic postures tall men can get into when doing the most commonplace things, lost his balance off the box and I felt a heavy and clumsy pipe slip from my grasp.
“Are you there, Jim?” I asked, from the depths of the inky darkness which had suddenly enveloped the furnace room.
“Curious-pfft-smell, isn’t it-pfft!” said Jim from below.
“We had better go outside,” I suggested.
“Tale a section of pipe each,” said Jimmie. “There are ash cans in the side drive.”
I felt above and found a sagging section of pipe. It came fairly easily into my arms, but I felt a cool dry flood of something like talcum powder flow over my hands and wrists as I tilted the pipe level.
“Easy, there,” said Jimmie, coughing.
By only half breathing, we got out of the cellar, dark as night, into the semigloom of the stairs, and preceding Jimmie, I carried the pipe to the side door. It was heavy. You can have no idea how neglected those pipes were. I saw a garbage can and I dumped the pipe smartly head first into the can.
A great whoof of midnight whirled into the bright afternoon air.
“Make way,” gasped Jim, behind me, and as I turned, still marvelling at the fog, I beheld a devilish figure, black from head to foot, heave a section of pipe alongside mine into the ash can, and another and a vaster and a more deadly black cloud billowed into the air.
“Jimmie!” I cried. “You’re filthy. What have you been doing?”
But I could tell by the red gape of Jim’s mouth in his face that I too, was soiled.
“You’ll pay for cleaning this suit, young man,” I assured him. The more you try to brush soot off, the worse you get. Especially if you are perspiring a little.
“Keep still,” said Jim. “Wait till I think.”
But from the rear of the house came screeches and screams and moans in a female voice. It was the next door neighbor. We ran around the corner, and there was a lady, her arms held over her head like the statue of victory, and she was staring transfixed at three large curtains or drapes of a silvery blue color, that were hanging on the clothesline, while the dark cloud of our endeavor slowly engulfed them like a fog.
“Dear, dear,” said Jimmie, drawing me back from the corner.
Better Stay in the Rut
To the lady’s screams were suddenly added loud, brief and profane shouts of a man.
It was the man whose house abuts the rear of Jim’s place.
Head low to avoid the cloud, he came hurling over the fence and faced us.
“Look at that!” he roared. “Painted this morning, and now look at it!”
We could make out the back of his house. I was finished in white and light green. The cloud was aiming straight at it, and vanishing into the paint as cigarette smoke vanishes into an electric fan.
The lady was standing waiting.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Jim, “I will make it right with you.”
“They just came back from the cleaners,” wept the lady, “and I was airing that smell off them before putting them up before dinner when my father-in-law is coming and we have roast chicken, and they cover the living room windows and now …”
“That job,” interrupted the man, “cost me forty-eight dollars and to have the back done, by George, will cost you at least twenty. Twenty, l estimate. Yes, sir, twenty would be fair estimate.”
There we stood, with the two pipe sections upended in the ash can, and with us the man and the lady, when we heard footsteps up the drive and the little man with the roll of carpet that we had seen last Wednesday joined us.
“Glory!” yelled Jim.
“Good day, gentlemen,” said the little financial man.
“How did you turn up?” said Jim, trying to wring the little man’s hand, but the little man evaded him.
“I overheard you say Saturday, so I just dropped around. I do quite a little business this way, whenever I hear of gents planning to clean their furnaces.”
He laid his roll of brushes down in a business-like way.
“I’ll give you $5 to clean all this up,” cried Jimmie. “That is, if you can empty these two joints as well.”
“It would have been better,” said the little man, “if you had left the pipes. But I’ll do what I can.”
“Five dollars,” said Jim.
“And a dollar and a half to clean this suit,” I said.
“And a dollar and a half for this one,” added Jim, looking down at himself.
“And twenty for the paint job,” I calculated.
“And say three for the curtains?” contributed Jim.
The little man, who had trotted down the collar, reappeared.
“You’ll need new pipes,” said he. “These are all rotted and pitted.”
“How much?” asked Jim. “I should estimate about two,” said he.
“Total,” said Jim, “thirty-three dollars.”
He was very cheerful.
“Now you see,” said Jim, “that it is best not to try to get out of the rut. Accept the ghastly monotony of your life. And don’t try to be thrifty. It always costs you more in the end. Each man to his trade. I’m an artist. You’re a writer. And this gentleman cleans furnaces.”
“The furnace itself,” said the little man, picking up his carpet roll, “isn’t in bad shape.”
Editor’s Notes: $2 in 1934 would be almost $40 in 2021. $33 would be $650.
Old coal furnaces ran by having coal delivered through a chute in the basement window, and would require the owner to stoke the furnace with coal to keep it hot. The shaker handle was accessible from the outside and you would crank it to activate shaker plates in the bottom that would help the ashes from the burnt coal to get to the bottom ash pan. You would have to then collect the ash to put in an ash can that would be picked up from your curb.
