Tag: 1935 Page 1 of 6
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 7, 1935.
“Lookit,” said Jimmie Frise, “that fruit!”
We were doing forty along the highway, and every farm had its roadside display of fruits and vegetables.
“Beautiful, Jimmie, beautiful,” I agreed. “At this season of the year, is anything in the world lovelier than a great big fat double-chinned, ripe, red, home-grown tomato?”
“And peaches, look,” said Jim. “Forty cents.”
“Keep your eye on the road,” I warned him. “I’ll give you a play-by-play account of the fruit stands as we go by.”
“You know,” said Jimmie, “I wonder at the farmers of Ontario going to market at all. Here they have a million-dollar pavement running right past their doors. Then they have a quarter-mile of shop front in their fields all along the highway. Why don’t they just set everything they grow out on the side of the highway and make the buyers come to them?”
“A good idea,” I agreed.
“Instead of their stuff miles and miles to a town,” pursued Jim, “at some expense of gas and wear and tear on their truck; and instead of going into a town where they are at a disadvantage, why don’t they draw the buyers on to their own ground, where the buyers are at a disadvantage? In town, at the market, the buyers know the prices prevailing. They know just how much produce is on hand. They have the upper hand of the poor farmer. But if the farmers just set their stuff out on the highway along their own property, and the buyers had to come out and compete with one another, the farmers would get better prices, the dealers would have to buy quick, for fear some other dealer is cornering the supply – you can see how it would
“Why don’t you suggest that to the farmers?” I asked. “It’s a swell idea. Makes the world come to the farmer instead of the farmer coming to the world.”
“I don’t know,” said Jim. “I sometimes think only the innocent and gentle people are left on the farm. A sort of natural selection has been going on this last fifty years. All the shrewd people, the weasels, the wise guys, the smarties, have left the farms for the towns and cities. Gradually, year by year, the process has thinned out all the sharp-witted ones, and now only the kindly, slow-going, honest people are left on the land. The way they let the city dwellers put it over them seems unexplainable to me, except by the theory that they are too gentle in their spirits to struggle against city weasels.”
“Like us?” I asked.
“Yes, like us,” stated Jim. “Even we try to put it over country people whenever we deal with them. I bet you if we stopped along here to buy a basket of apples, we’d chisel the price and we’d pick the best basket, and fiddle and fume, as if we were buying a house and lot. Yet do you realize what the farmer gives us for forty cents?1“
“A basket of apples?” I hazarded.
To Haggle and Pry
“He gives us,” declaimed Jimmie, “the patient toil of years, the clearing of his land, the plowing, and the planting of little apple trees. He gives us all the patient years of waiting for the trees to become big enough to bear. Years and years of patience that is utterly unknown to-day in any other industry. Then at last, after he has plowed among them, and sprayed them and pruned them, and watched and tended them, at last they bear. And he sprays them again and guards them. Then he performs the last joyous rite of climbing ladders and picking these apples and selecting them and basketing them – and he sells them to us for forty cents!”
“You don’t think of that,” I admitted.
“No,” cried Jim. “Yet when we stop to buy a basket of apples, we sort and pick and shift the baskets around, and mumble forty cents, forty cents, to ourselves, doubtfully, hoping he’ll say thirty-five to you, mister. We’re weasels, that’s what we city folk are, just weasels.”
“And what’s more,” said Jim, “I think more, we ought to stop along here somewhere and pick up basket or two of apples. At this season of the year, every Canadian ought to bring home a basket of something every day. This is the harvest home. As an act of grace, every Canadian ought to bring a basket of God’s bounty home every day, so long as the harvest lasts.”
“Hear, hear,” I applauded, watching eagerly ahead for a good roadside stand. We passed a couple of small ones where there didn’t seem to be much of a display. Then a fine big show loomed up.
“Ah,” said Jim. “Here’s the one. A real enterprising fellow, this.”
He had a wooden stand, like a counter, with the baskets set cleats so they leaned outward for the inspection of the passers by. We slowed down and got out.
A small dark man, who looked more like a city slicker than a farmer, rose to greet us.
“Apples,” he said, “fifty cents, these and those are sixty. Green tomatoes, fifty. Gherkins, sixty.”
“Mmmm,” said Jimmie, examining the baskets. “Apples fifty, eh?”
“Now, now, Jim,” I protested.
“Well, I only mean,” Jim hastened; “they’ve been forty cents all along the road.”
“These are choice,” explained the little dark man. “These are all hand-picked. No fallen goods here. Look, the quality, mister. Look at those silver onions? Did you ever see peas in a basket better sized?”
Jim scooped a handful, revealing larger ones beneath.
“They’re a nice size on top,” said Jim, “but underneath, look!”
“Jimmie,” I protested hotly. “What were you saying only five minutes ago? I thought you weren’t going to haggle and pry and fiddle.”
“I’d let that basket go for fifty cents,” said the little dark man. He was looking at his watch.
Buyers Become Sellers
“Come, Jimmie,” I said, “the gentleman is perhaps getting ready to close up shop. Do you want any apples or don’t you?”
“I was looking for snows,” said Jim.
“They won’t be on the market for a month yet,” said the little man, shortly. He again looked at his watch.
“It seems funny to me,” I explained to the little man. “My friend and I here were only five minutes ago discussing you farmers, thinking how you are chiselled and set upon by us city people.”
“It’s a fact,” admitted he.
“And yet here, the first thing, we are complaining about your goods,” I laughed, “and trying to get a lower price.”
“It’s a fact,” said the little man, gazing up the road as if expecting somebody.
“I suppose you sell quite a bit in a day, though?” I chatted, since Jimmie was still gloomily picking up this basket and that and setting them down and looking below the top layers of apples.
“I haven’t sold one dollar’s worth all day,” said the small man, grimly. “Not one dollar. People stop and look and drive off. They are all buying to a price. Το save five cents, they will drive thirty miles. Huh.”
“It must be pretty trying.” I said, “seeing this stuff that you have planted and nurtured and grown so patiently, being sniffed at by strangers.”
“It’s a fact,” agreed the little man. “Have you gentlemen five minutes to spare?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“I’m expecting a lady coming to my place to supper; I think she must have gone to the wrong place. Would you mind tending my stand here for five minutes while I go and make a call?”
“Why,” said Jim, “all right. We might change your luck. Will we sell, if anybody comes, or just hold them till you return?”
“Sell,” said the little man, walking over to Jim’s car and leaning in to look at the dashboard. “You haven’t got the right time, eh?”
“I haven’t a clock,” said Jim. “All right, we’ll see if we can’t do some salesmanship for you.”
The little man walked back the lane towards the farm house. Jim and I stood, in businesslike attitudes, in front of the stand, looking with expectant air at each car that whizzed by. Some of them slowed. One of them stopped while a large, surly, sow-like lady in expensive. clothes leaned out the window of the car and stared wordlessly at our exhibit.
“Puh,” she said, and drove on.
“I don’t mind if he takes his time,” said Jim. “I rather like this. Isn’t it a funny feeling, having something to sell? You don’t realize how different a feeling it is, buying and selling. I feel all this stuff is wonderful, now. A few minutes ago, I thought it was lousy.”
A truck with two men came along and slowed.
“Buyers,” hissed Jim. “Dealers.”
The man at the wheel called out:
“How many apples you got?”
“Eleven baskets,” I answered smartly.
“How much?”
“Fifty cents.”
The two men got off, and looked our display over. Eleven of apples, six of gherkins, five green tomatoes, four of green onions, three plums, three crab apples, and some sundries.
“We’ll take the lot,” said the dealer. “Figure it up.”
Something Pretty Funny
He drew out a wad of soft one-dollar bills and wet his thumb, while Jim started to count up. The other man began lifting the baskets on to the truck, and I helped him.
So while we rapidly loaded the stuff on to the truck, Jim did his adding first by mental arithmetic and then by pencil and paper. And he was just finishing it on paper when the man I was helping threw up the back of the truck with a bang.
“O.K..” he sang out.
“O.K.,” said the other man, taking two strides and swinging aboard the truck.
“Hey,” Jim and I yelled.
The truck roared and lurched on to the highway.
“Get the number,” screamed Jimmie, darting out on to the road.
But to both our astonishments, there was a potato sack hanging down at the back which totally concealed the license plate.
“Oh, oh, oh,” we said to each other. And out the lane came the little dark man.
He halted in amazement, staring at the poor bare wooden rack where his fruit had been. Fruit of his toil.
“Where the…?” he asked.
So we explained it to him.
“But didn’t you get their truck number?” asked the little sad man, spreading out his hands pitifully.
“There was a sack over it,” we told him.
“Couldn’t you identify it no way?”
“It was too sudden, and anyway, we didn’t want to leave without explaining to you.” said Jim.
“Well,” he said, “where do I get off?”
“It was our fault,” I stated.
“I asked you to mind it, though,” said the small man timidly.
“There you go, Jimmie,” I pointed out. “See, he wants even to take the blame. You were right about country people. They are too gentle, too innocent.”
“I’d take half the blame,” put in the small man.
“That’s fair,” we agreed.
So Jim showed us his figuring, and it came to seventeen dollars and forty cents2, We paid nine dollars to the little man. Four-fifty each, which I borrowed from Jim.
“Gentlemen,” said the small man, “you are both very kind. You have no idea how this would ruin me.”
“We want you to know” I explained, “that we both have the deepest respect for the farmer.”
“Well, you excuse me, please,” said he. “I have to catch the bus.”
A bus was snoring towards us at a little distance.
“Wait,” yelled Jim, as the little man started to run down the highway, “we’ll give you a lift.”
But he paid no attention, ran swiftly two telegraph poles down, signalled the bus and piled aboard it.
“Now that’s a funny one,” said Jim. “That’s a real funny one.”
We stood looking after the bus. Then we looked at the skeleton of the fruit rack. Just a poor little jimcrack thing it was now, bereft of its glowing baskets.
“Somehow, I don’t like that,” said Jim, scratching his head and looking in down the lane at the small farm house crouching amidst the lilac bushes.
We got in the car. Jim reached for the key on the dash. Then he fumbled in his pockets.
“The key, the key,” he suddenly yelled.
“What?” I asked.
“The key,” he yelled again. “Did you see anybody touch the key?”
“The little man leaned in to see the time on the dashboard,” I said.
“Oh, oh, oh,” said Jim, leaping out of the car. “Come into the farm!”
The little farm house was all still. No dog. Nobody in the kitchen, with its open door.
“Hello,” we called.
“Milking,” said Jim, heading for the barn.
We found a lady in a straw hat, milking cows.
“Oh,” she said, rising. “Are you the gentlemen for the keys?”
“Yes,” cried Jim. “Did you…”
She reached into her apron pocket handed Jim his car keys.
“I’ll be…” I said.
“Who gave you the keys?” asked Jimmie politely.
“Don’t you know him?” asked the lady, surprised. “I only know him as Jake.”
“How did he happen to give you the keys?” asked Jim.
“Why, a few moments ago,” she said, “he came to ask if he could use the phone to call his truck, and he handed me these keys and said a gentleman will be along presently to ask for them.
“Do you know this little man out in front of your place?” I put in.
“I only know he came last Wednesday,” said the lady, “and gave me a wonderful talk about how poor we farmers are at selling, and asked if he could set his stand up on our front there.”
“Is he a farmer?” I inquired.
“Pooh!” laughed the lady. “He’s some sort of crack-brained fellow from the city. He brings his stuff out from the city every morning in a truck.”
“Oh, oh,” said Jimmie and I.
“But he’s had his fill of roadside marketing,” the lady laughed, preparing to sit down by the cow again. “He told me to-night he hadn’t sold a dollar’s worth. I guess we’ve seen the last of him.”
“I guess we have,” said Jimmie and I.
So we thanked the lady for our keys and drove home without buying any apples at all.
Editor’s Notes: This story appeared in The Best of Greg Clark & Jimmie Frise (1977).
This ad suggests the Toronto Star is the source for your Federal Election coverage, which would be held on October 14, 1935.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 29, 1935.
“Ah,” cried Jimmie Frise, “come illy bong!”
Come what?” I requested anxiously.
“Come illy bong,” explained Jimmie. “It’s a French saying. It means, ‘Ah, how good it is’.”
“How good what is?” I asked.
“Everything,” cried Jim, expanding his chest and sighing. “This June day. This new flannel suit I’ve got on. This blue tie. This crisp, fresh underwear. I feel like a million dollars.”
“I’m glad you feel good,” I said. “I feel kind of dowdy myself.”
“Ah,” sighed Jim. “To feel good all the time. To feel fresh and crisp and cool and listless, if you get me?”
“I think so,” I said doubtfully.
“I mean, life could be so swell,” said Jim tenderly, “If only we could surround ourselves with the finer things, good clothes, nice furniture, pleasant people. Just to hold this feeling I have right now and hold it all my life!”
“Maybe it would be kind of monotonous,” I suggested.
“I think,” said Jim thoughtfully, “that this feeling I have right now, this sense of well-being, this cleanness and peacefulness, is the goal of all human life. I think this is what millionaires and kings and princes, all those swell people you read about in England and Boston and the Riviera are aiming at. What you call culture. Culture is the business of getting hold of this feeling I have right now and making it permanent.”
“Some days it would be rainy,” I suggested.
“Do you ever read those society magazines?” asked Jim. “They sometimes show two or three pages of somebody’s estate. Beautiful big gardens all filled with flagstone walks and statues and fountains.”
“And nobody in them,” I pointed out.
“And big cool houses,” went on Jim, “and rooms filled with only a little bit of furniture, but all of it old and antique and oval and lovely.”
The chairs look as if nobody had ever sat in them,” I remarked.
“And grand staircases,” continued Jim. “Great curving walnut staircases. And panelled walls with maybe two paintings.”
“I’ve seen them,” I agreed. “The living quarters are in the attic.”
“I’m trying to explain something,” said Jim, “if you’d give me a chance. What I mean is that sense of peace and purity you see in those estates. That’s culture. That’s the way these rich people try to seize hold of this feeling I have got to-day and keep it forever. Now, you take food. Do you know what a gourmet is?”
“A guzzler,” I said.
“Just the reverse,” said Jim. “A gourmet is a person of discrimination in eating. He is a judge of good food. He never eats anything but what is cooked by an artist. He has taste. He wants food prepared for his sense, not to fill him up like pancakes.”
“I like waffles,” I admitted. “They fill you up.”
“Ugh,” said Jim, waving his hand delicately. “A gourmet feels the way I do all the time. Only it is his eating that keeps him cool and dreamy and peaceful. He thinks of eating all the time. As soon as he finishes one meal of, say, goose’s brains and truffles, which is a kind of mushroom, he lies back and starts thinking up something he will have for supper, say, plover’s eggs and filet of sole a la Mornay.”
Culture is a Food
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked.
“It comes to me naturally,” said Jim, “when I feel like this. I think some of my ancestors were French gourmets. The French are the most cultured people on earth.”
“Well,” I said, “between thinking of those pictures of beautiful estates in the society magazines and thinking of fancy eating, sort of dreamy like, taking little nibbles and rolling your eyes between each taste, I don’t think I would care much about being cultured.”
“You will observe,” said Jim, “that the big game hunters, the African lion hunters, are always rich people and Belgian barons and so forth. That is their occasional reaction. When they get too much culture, they go lion hunting in Africa and eat corn pones1 cooked by Congo natives.”
“Culture,” I said, “is all right in its place, but it must be awful as a regular thing. Suppose you wanted to yawn and yell and get up and kick the cuspidor? You couldn’t do that if you were cultured.”
“The more I think of it,” ignored Jim, “the more I realize that we masses…”
“Ah,” said I.
“We masses are missing the greatest things in life,” said Jim, “by not cultivating this inward peace, this feeling of perfection. We toil and slave for some cheap and tawdry goal. We live amidst higgledy-piggledy furniture and eat food that fills us, that’s all. If only we could give all mankind a hint of how lovely life can be, every passing hour of life, every day. And have all mankind gently, culturedly striving, without effort, to achieve this goal.”
“I like that about gently striving, without effort,” I admitted. “Sort of dreamily working, like.”
“If, instead of the terrible drive of modern life,” declared Jim, “we could gear life down to a gentle pursuit of a feeling, a sense, a state of mind, even taxi-drivers and steam shovel men could be cultured.”
“How would we go about getting cultured?” I asked. “Would we have to go back to the university and all that sort of thing?”
“If you didn’t get it at the university the first time,” said Jim, “you won’t get it the second time. I venture to say that I could give you a better feeling of culture by taking you through an antique store for a couple of hours, and then leisurely wandering into a high-class restaurant where there is a good French chef and ordering a dinner for a gourmet, than five years at the university would give you.”
“I’ll do that some day,” I confessed. “Because the two years I was at the university, there was no talk about culture. A man away off at the far end of a big amphitheatre with 700 students in shouted something about the corollary of the some theorem. That wasn’t culture. And going to rugby games and having to yell the way the fellow in the white sweater signalled at us wasn’t culture. One time I tried to spend a night wandering amongst those lovely old stone towers on ‘Varsity campus to look at the stars, but Christie, the campus cop, chased me and told me to go home. It was no good.”
“Culture,” said Jim, “is a feeling, a mood. I’m in it now. Right now, I am cultured. I could go through an antique store right now and appreciate everything, the old glossy wood, the curves of the carving on chairs, the size and proportions of tables and dressers. I could look and fondle old silver. Away back in me something would wake and start to glow, like an ember in a fire that had gone out…”
“Jim,” I said, “I have a little feeling like that, too. Let’s go.”
“When one feels this way, one ought to go,” admitted Jim, rising elegantly.
“They’re My Set-Up”
So we went to a little antique store that Jim knew of because the man who runs it often meets Jim at the races where they choose the same horse. Dim and shadowy was the little store, and filled to the roof with lovely old antique furniture. So dim and shadowy was it, that the furniture seemed more antique than ever.
Old chairs, tables, funny little stands, pictures, old silver, tall cabinets, foot stools, the young lady who was in charge because Jim’s friend was away for the afternoon allowed us to wander among. We sat on old sofas, examined old tables and looked at the pegs that held them together instead of nails; fondled old silver teapots the girl brought us reverently: Jim working tears in his eyes several times, tears of appreciation of something specially fine. Most of all, we liked two chairs and a little table that stood in the window of the store.
They were perfect. The wood seemed to glow from within. The design actually flowed.
“We were still admiring these pieces when the boss came in, very dejectedly. He shook Jim’s hand sadly. Jim said:
“Not getting them these days, Ernie?”
“To-day,” said Ernie, “five of the six ran in the can. And the sixth one paid $1.15.”
So they talked horses for a while, and then Jim gradually wooed Ernie off horses and on to antiques. But Ernie was off antiques for good.
“Just like the horses I bet on,” he growled.
“We like those two chairs and that table in the window,” said Jim.
“You can’t have those,” said Ernie firmly. They’re my set up.”
“Your what?” asked Jim.
“My set up,” said Ernie. “I spent eight years in the antique business to get those. They’re what bring people in here.”
“Naturally,” said Jim, “you put your prize pieces in the window. But wouldn’t you sell them?”
“Sell those!” exclaimed Ernie indignantly. “They’re genuine.”
“Er-” said Jimmie, turning to look back in the shadowy store.
“Er-to you,” said Ernie. “Do you imagine for one minute that a gang of hicks working with hand tools a hundred and fifty years ago could make as good antiques as trained men with modern machinery can make? Be yourself, Jimmie.”
“But those in the window,” I protested.
“Listen,” said Ernie, “there were about ten artists a hundred and fifty years ago, and every stick they made is known to the world, just the way every picture Rembrandt painted is known. If you want any good antiques, I can get them made for you better than all the wood-choppers of Queen Anne’s reign. And within six days.”
“The silver?” said Jim, a little brokenly. “That teapot?”
“Exquisite 1934,” said Ernie contemptuously. “Stick to horse racing. Jim.”
“That sofa?” said Jim. “Horse hair?”
“My man made it in two days,” said Ernie. “Listen, Jim, when that sofa was supposed to be made the mobs of France were burning the chateaux: in England, millions were starving before the Napoleonic wars put up the price of goods, and the world was poverty-stricken in a way you can’t even imagine. How many swell homes do you suppose there were in the eighteenth century in order to equip all the swell mansions of the States, Canada, England, France and Germany to-day?”
A Silence As of Watching
Jim took another long look at the lovely dusky furniture, the gleaming silver, the smudgy oil paintings on the walls.
“Well, I’ll be seeing you at the races,” he said, and we went out.
We drove down the street.
“I’ve lost the feeling,” said Jim. “I feel soggy and damp. But maybe if we could get a little good food, if we could find a chef, a real chef.”
“I saw the dearest little place,” I told him. “Just a plain little restaurant, with small menus in ordinary handwriting on the windows. Let’s take a look at it.”
Jim followed my directions and we came, just as the crowds were going home, to the restaurant with the small, unimposing front, and the menus stuck in the window. We got out of the car and studied the carte du jour,
“Hors d’oeuvres varies
Potage paysanne
Filets de brochet
Poule Rotie
Asperges, petits pois.
Pommes de toutes sortes,
Petits fours
Cafe.”
“Read that” hissed Jimmie. “See that paysanne? That means peasant. I bet we have here the sort of chef you’d find in those little lost French towns, where kings and prime ministers go and hide in order to eat the incomparable cooking.”
“Not much on the menu, Jim,” I cautioned.
“Not much on the outside of the shop, either,” snorted Jim, “because, unlike the local beaneries, the value is inside, not outside. Let’s go in.”
Inside were five tables and one aged waiter in a black coat and white apron, who immediately began flicking around with his serviette when we came in the door. A silence filled the little restaurant. A silence as of watching.
“Good evening,” said Jim to the waiter, “what sort of a chef have you here?”
“Best in the country, sir,” replied the waiter, with an Irish accent. “Best in the country.”
Disillusioned Again
“Where has he been besides here?” asked Jim, still standing up.
“All over, in the foinest places,” the waiter. “He done a long time in Vancouver. He’s been in Montreal, Quebec and many foreign places.”
“Foreign places?”
“Sure, foreign places. I couldn’t remember the names,” said the waiter enthusiastically.
We sat down.
“Start,” said Jimmie, “at the top and go right down the menu.”
“It’s a fifty-cent dinner2,” warned the waiter.
“Tut, tut,” said Jim.
Hors d’oeuvres varies were four olives, two pieces of celery and two radishes. Potage paysanne was vegetable soup, filets de brochet looked like pike to me, the poule was plain chicken, asperges were asparagus the same ever, and petits fours were little fancy biscuits with a local factory name printed on them in the baking.
But Jim persuaded me the meal was incomparable.
“Ex-squeezy,” he said. “Come illy bong!”
“I’ve tasted that vegetable soup on camping trips,” I whispered. “Out of cans.”
“My dear boy, you’ll need to take a course,” he said. “Your palate is dulled. This fish! Taste it!”
“Pike, I swear,” I whispered.
But the old waiter kept coming in and out, so I caught some of Jim’s enthusiasm, and by the time we had finished the coffee and fancy biscuits, the old waiter, whose name was Patrick, was practically sitting at the table with us. He seemed lonesome.
“You don’t get many people in here,” said Jim.
“Just the crame,” said Patrick.
“Now, look here,” said Jim, “amongst my kind of people, as you know, Patrick, it is a custom when we have enjoyed a meal and recognized the hand of a master in the cooking, we see the chef and pay him our compliments direct.”
“Sure, sure,” said Patrick.
“Now would you be kind enough to step in there and ask Monsieur to come into the room while we compliment him?”
“Sure, sure,” said Patrick, uneasily. “He’s a busy man right now. Maybe some other time, when you’re dining?”
“Busy?” cried Jim. “Patrick, be so good as to ask Monsieur to step out here a minute.”
Patrick got up, waving his serviette hopelessly. He vanished through the kitchen door and was gone quite a long time. Presently the door slowly opened, and in backed Patrick.
“Here he is, gintlemen,” said he.
And in a large white hat and an oversize apron, freshly unfolded, appeared a Chinese, smiling uncertainly.
“Ah,” said Jim.
“Ha,” said Monsieur. “Muchee like?”
“Very nice meal,” said Jim, rising. And we both laid a dime down for Patrick. And got our hats. And were rather awkward getting out the door.
In the car, as we went down towards the lake shore for home, Jim said:
“Culture is a bit elusive nowadays.”
And he tooted his horn violently at a fat lady scuffling across Dundas street against the red light.
Editor’s Notes: This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978).
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 27, 1935.
“Listen,” cried Jimmie Frise. “I hear a band.”
We stopped the car. In the distance, the music of drums and horns beat on the night air. We were on Yonge St. near King.
“It’ll be one of the regiments,” said Jim, opening the car window. “What do you say we park here and stand on the curb to see them go by.”
“Maybe it might be the Highlanders,” I exclaimed.
“I haven’t seen a parade for years,” agreed Jim.
So we got out and walked up towards Adelaide St. and picked a nice open space for ourselves, where the bright shop lights glowed out on to the street. Here we would see the soldiers striding by.
The band grew nearer. Along King St. they came and then, with their brass and their buttons agleaming, their white shells, or tunics glowing, the Highlanders wheeled up Yonge St. to the magnificent echoing thunder of their great brass band.
Far out in front marched the giant and handsome master of ceremonies, or whatever you call him. Being only a war-time soldier, I don’t remember, and perhaps never did know, the technical terms of the military art. But this remarkable specimen of manhood who strode at the head of the Highlanders was enough to make skyscrapers and handsome department stores curl up with envy. Even men held their breath when he went by. And as for the ladies…!
Respectfully in rear of him came the band. With those little mincing steps of the High- landers, the white spats tapping like a vast ballet, a corps of a thousand dancers, the band and the regiment followed. Nobody on earth walks as proudly as a Scot. Or at any rate, an Irishman or Englishman or a Canadian by the name of Smith or Kelly in a Scottish kilt.
“Ah,” sighed Jimmie. “Did you ever see anything so inspiring?”
“Let’s walk alongside of them,” I suggested.
So Jimmie and I joined the pavement walkers who kept abreast of the straight-looking soldiers. We got level with the band. And the Kiltie with the big bass drum, with the leopard skin across his shoulders, thumped with all his might.
“In the next war,” I shouted to Jim. “I’m going to play the drum.”
“Majors don’t play drums,” retorted Jim. “You can’t have all the fun.”
“I would rather play the drum,” I said, “than capture Quebec.”
“They’d only give a kettle-drum to a little guy like you,” pointed out Jim.
“A bass drum would look all the basser,” I argued, “on a little man.”
With music crashing and clashing up amidst the tall buildings, with legs moving like the legs of a centipede, the Highland regiment crossed Queen St. while traffic stood still and a great throng stood enviously, the young men on the side lines trying to look superior to all this, the young girls clinging to the young men’s arms clinging a little less closely for the moment.
“One Drum and They’re Done”
“I’m puffed,” I said, “let’s stand now and watch them.”
And so we watched them until the last Scottie stamped truly past and the music was growing dim in the distance.
“But the drum you can hear, long after the horns are gone,” Jim noted.
We walked back to the car, “You can understand,” said Jimmie, “how men go to war when you see a regiment go by. It seems to steal your common sense away. I bet if war was declared, one drum up the streets and away they’d all go.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I mused. “A great many of the young men to-day have serious opinions about war. I’ve talked to the ones in their twenties down at the office. It is about the only serious thought they have.”
“One drum and they’re done,” argued Jim.
“Yet would you willingly send another generation to go through what we went through?” I demanded. “Filthy, futile and without a single gain to be credited to it. War is insane.”
“We had some fun,” pointed out Jim.
“If another war came,” I said, “I would lead a non-co-operation movement, like Gandhi. I would probably go to jail.”
“One drum,” said Jim, “and you’d be sitting on a horse roaring.”
“No,” I corrected. “I would lead a great youth movement, enlisting the young men of Canada in a pacifist league. And once it was well organized, I would hand it over to younger fellows and then I would sneak away and join some regiment overseas. That’s what I would do. I would then satisfy both of my principles.”
“So you have two principles?” asked Jim.
“Certainly,” I assured him. “I am against war. I think war is a crime. But at the same time, like much crime, war is lots of fun. I’d hate to miss it myself, although I would willingly die to spare other men having to go to war.”
“You certainly are confused,” said Jim.
“So is nearly everybody else,” I said. “Most men feel just the way I do.”
“Are you a member of any anti-war society?” inquired Jim. “The League of Nations association or anything?”
“No,” I admitted. “They don’t attract me. They aren’t militant enough to attract men, somehow. A peace organization should be full of war. It should have something to fight for.”
“That’s queer,” agreed Jim.
“If you try to get young men into a society for peace,” I went on, “it has a negative appeal. What you want is a positive appeal. Now, for instance, I might start a society for young men called the League of Youth for Making Munitions Only.”
“Ah,” said Jim.
“This society,” I expounded, “would attract hundreds of thousands of young men who would be sworn to make munitions at $15 a day1, but who are vowed never to go to war.”
War Without Its Evils
“Fifteen dollars a day,” said Jim.
“That would be the wages,” I said. “Same as the last war. The youth of Canada would be willing to do the same for this country as the old men, the politicians, the bankers and big business men. They would gladly sacrifice their time and energy at making money out of munitions. But they would not go to war. They would die first. How’s that?”
“Your idea has a lot of points,” admitted Jimmie.
“The League of Youth for Making Munitions Only,” I repeated, “is now formed. No wealthy old schemer can complain if the youth of the nation are filled with the same patriotism as his. All across Canada, we will have branch societies, organized and trained, so that at a moment’s notice, they can spring to the machines and get the munitions pouring out. The weekly meetings of the branches of the League could be devoted to training on lathes and machine shop technique. There will be lectures on the great munition makers of the past. Biographical lectures, telling how many millions they made and what they did with them. Mind you, Jimmie, munitions doesn’t merely mean shells and guns. It includes wool and blankets and uniforms; food, such as flour and bacon; leather for boots and equipment. There will be room for every kind of young man in our great league. Tradesmen, merchants, clerks, young executives. Room for everybody in the League of Youth for Making Munitions Only.”
“I have an idea,” contributed Jim. “I’ll give it to the world as a gift. It is the Sinkable Battleship. This invention satisfies everybody. We all admit that building battleships is one of the best ways in the world for the big industrialists to make a few million dollars. It also employs thousands of men. And at the same time there are a certain number of valiant young men whose greatest dream is to die violently, to be blown up. Now, this Sinkable Battleship of mine requires no war. In each ship, as it is launched, is hidden a secret bomb, a very powerful bomb, to which is attached mechanism that will set it off at a certain unknown time, within six months or six years.”
“Jimmie,” I cried. “How perfect!”
“Yes,” admitted Jim. “Therefore, as these battleships rush about the seven seas, at a certain time, unknown to any man living, the battleship will blow up with a terrific bang, all lives will be lost. And right away, the government that owned the ship can place a new order with the big industrialists. More millions can be made by these great shots. More thousands of men can be employed. And another ship’s company valiant young men who want to die can be enlisted. Everybody will be satisfied.”
“And all,” I rejoiced, “without war being declared at all!”
“Precisely,” said Jim. “Every government, even Switzerland, can then have the benefits of war without its evils. It is a remarkable invention, this Sinkable Battleship.”
“If we announce my new league in the ordinary way,” I said, as we drove slowly along the lovely lake shore, “it will only attract a few of those pimply-faced young men with untidy hair who join leagues. We ought to use our newspaper instincts, Jim. We ought to start it off some exciting way. It ought to be started with a bang.”
“With a drum,” suggested Jim.
“Exactly.” I cried. “Why not? Why let war have all the drums? That’s what’s the matter with these peace societies. They have no drums.”
“I could get you a drum,” said Jim. “I know an Orangeman.”
“A bass drum?” I asked.
“A big bass drum,” assured Jim.
And that is how the League of Youth for Making Munitions Only got started. Jim’s friend tuned the big drum for him, tightening the steel bands around it. He lent Jim a fife, too, as Jimmie wanted to have some share in this great movement.
We drove down to University Ave.
“You can always get a following down around Queen and University,” I told him. “If you can’t get soldiers, you can get Communists. There is always somebody wanting to follow a drum down there.”
But when we parked the car, it looked a little forbidding. There were men scattered all along the curbs in the early spring evening. There were men wandering in twos and threes, or stopped chatting.
“Let’s start on a side street,” I said, “and by the time we have a good following, we can debouch on to the main streets. When we have about a thousand following us, we can halt, I’ll jump up on the steps of a monument or something and address them.”
We parked in one of those side streets between Elizabeth and University, where Chinese children were playing and foreign ladies were walking along with live fish wriggling violently in loose parcels of newspaper.
I got the drum out. Jim blew through the fife to get the dust out.
“Ready?” said Jim nervously.
We stood side by side.
“Ready, one, two, three,” I replied.
Boom, boom, boom.
Up Elizabeth St. we started. Jim can’t play a fife. No noise came from it. But it looked good. He wiggled his fingers. He held his head back.
“Don’t go too far up or you’ll disturb the sick people in the hospital,” shouted Jim.
“Correct,” I said. “Left wheel!”
We wheeled down Elizabeth St, again. Little Chinese boys lined the curb, and old gentlemen with large beards stuck their heads out of the doors of little frame shops. “Hallelujah,” yelled a colored gentleman, rushing out of a house.
Boom, boom, boom.
“Don’t go too far down,” said Jim, “or the detectives in the city hall will hear you.”
“Left wheel!” I commanded.
The drum was heavy, but what is more important is the fact that a drum vibrates as you hit it. The louder you hit, the livelier it vibrates. And as you are supporting the drum with your abdomen, your abdomen takes the vibration, as it were.
“How many following?” I shouted to Jim, looking out from behind the drum.
“Nobody yet,” said Jim. “Hit it louder.”
Some foreign ladies with live fish wriggling in newspapers gathered on the curb with the children. Several of the bearded men came and sat on the steps to await what was to happen.
“Left wheel!” commanded Jim.
Up and down the block we marched, Jim pretending fiercely to blow the fife and the drum making a magnificent thunder.
Then a bearded man in a striped apron and wearing a derby hat ran out with his hand held high.
“Stop, stop,” he cried. We stopped.
“You wake all the babies,” he said.
“Sir.” I replied, “we are awaking the entire youth of the nation, perhaps of the world.”
“Would you please wake them on another street?” asked the bearded man, lifting his derby politely.
“That’s a reasonable request,” Jimmie said.
“All right,” I agreed. “This drum is heavier than I expected.”
So we went down and got in the car.
We put the drum in. Through the car windows, I looked back up the street. All quiet. Little Chinese children played on the darkening pavement. The bearded men had got up and gone back into their shops. The ladies with the parcels were pursuing their patient way. It was as if no drum had beaten.
Down Elizabeth St., a slow pacing policeman came to a halt at the distant corner and stood looking up street.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” said Jim.
The doors of the armories, south of us, swung hugely open.
There was a sudden thunder of drums. A sudden scream of bugles. Out of the door marched the first ranks of a regiment. A very tall man leading. He was ceremoniously waving an immense gold-knobbed baton.
The policeman leaped to life. He took the centre of the street, stopping traffic with majestic arm.
“Let’s follow them,” said Jim, stepping on the starter.
So we followed the regiment around nine blocks.
Editor’s Notes: This story also appeared in Silver Linings (1978).
- $15 in 1935 would be $440 in 2025. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 2, 1935.
NEW YORK
“Wake up, wake up,” hissed Jimmie Frise through the curtains of my lower berth. “We’re coming into New York.”
“That’s where we started for,” I growled, being one of those few who can sleep in a berth or anywhere else.
“The dawn coming up over New York, come on, let’s see it,” urged Jim.
“I’ve seen it before,” I assured Jim. “Miles of six-storey red tenements. Miles of bleak factories with ten-foot steel fences around them. If I like to wake up in New York at all, it is downtown.”
“You’ve got no soul,” said Jim sadly. “This is one of the wonder cities of the world. Seven million people live here. It is one of the cores, one of the ganglia1, of the human system.”
I slid up the blind.
Just as I expected. Zipping by were vast drab red blocks of high tenement houses and spectral streets in the dawn, like streets excavated in Babylon or Pompeii. A terrible sameness. The same bottle of milk on all the window sills, and the same plate with something wrapped in newspaper. The same quilts flung half way out high windows by early birds already risen.
“Ugh,” I said.
I got up and staggered down to the washroom. There a half a dozen others were ahead of me, snorting, swizzling and gargling.
“New York,” I stated loudly, “gives me the jitters.”
Nobody paid any attention and Jimmie warned me with a shake of the head, his toothbrush twisting his face all out of shape.
“New York gives me an inferiority complex,” I announced, there being no basin empty for me. “I get the same feeling all New Yorkers have. I get intimidated.”
One or two of the gentlemen, drying themselves on scanty towels, gave me a cold look.
“The people of New York are all intimidated,” I repeated, sitting ready with my razor and things. “Their colossal buildings intimidate them. Those monstrous buildings all leaning backward, as if to ignore the millions of slaves crawling about their feet. The speed of New York intimidates them.”
All the gentlemen began coughing, snorting, gargling and snuzzling extra loud to drown me out.
“The people of New York,” I announced, “go about with lowered eyes, hurrying, timid, cold, scared. They are scared by the advertising cards in the subway trains. Cards that frighten them about their cough, warn them about their hair falling out, begging them to be careful of their skins. You can’t raise your eyes in New York, without being scared by something. New York is scared.”
Unseeing Myriads
Just then a gentleman surrendered his basin and I was next. When I was through washing, I sought Jim back in the car.
“Hah,” I said, “I told those New Yorkers a few things, eh? I’m not going to let them get away with the idea that their big town impresses me.”
“Those were all Toronto men in there,” said Jim. “Just before you came in, the porter remarked that everybody in his car this trip is a Toronto man.”
“Well, anyway, I said what I think,” I affirmed.
“You’re just a little excited,” said Jim. “Your approach to New York scares you. So you talk big.”
“I’ve been in New York before,” I asserted.
“And hid in your hotel all day except for little walks nearby the hotel, and a trip by taxicab to a theatre at night, and then, back home to bed.”
“I’ve been around,” I said.
“I bet you never were at Forty-second and Fifth Ave., at five p.m.,” declared Jim, “when the traffic is so thick you could walk across the street on the tops of the cabs! I bet you never yet risked your life in a subway!”
But the porter arrived and we entered a black tunnel where the train roared and thundered, and you felt very uneasy, hoping the engineer wouldn’t miss any switches in the dark.
Thus we came to the fabulous city. The new Ilium2 with its topless towers. Thus we had our suitcases snatched by redcaps who led us at top speed out of the station as if the devil were come to town. Thus we were bundled into taxicabs with their radios blaring, and driven, in a sort of gargantuan, buffalo stampede of cabs, up a broad avenue where the entire traffic was racing, hub to hub and nose to tail, amidst a din of noise rising blasphemously unto the clean, virginal towers, spires, obelisks of serene beauty that aspired to the very sky.
Thus we were, with a lurch of brakes, spewed out at our hotel, where they are never surprised, but always seem to expect you; where all the bell hops seem always to have seen you before; and where, after the first trip in the elevator, they always remember your floor and tell it to you, with a smile.
Thus into the glorious and incredible streets, where a nation of all nations, white, gray, black, brown and all colors, mob past you at top speed, sightless eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left at all the incomparable beauties – the beauty of a window, a vast crystal window set in the foot of a very cathedral of a building, and in that stately vast window, one gown. A fragile, a silver gown.
Windows of incomparable grace, with one hat, one tiny pair of shoes. And windows of delicatessen stores as florid, resplendent, opulent, as if they were the windows of the jewels of Ophir3. And jewelry stores with – one diamond!
Yet to neither right nor left, nor up at the shimmering castellated towers in the sky nor down to the cold and bitter earth, did these passing myriads look.
And in this fabulous city, Jimmie and I walked alone, as if we and we alone were living, breathing, sentient in it.
To tackle stores we went, and saw fishing tackle beyond all dreaming. To book stores and print stores, where we saw prints and paintings and pictures in the care of speechless men and women. Our legs ached with walking, and our eyes smarted with looking.
They Can But They Don’t
We tried to go by subway from 44th St. and Madison Ave. down to Park Pl., and we ended up twenty miles away at the Bronx zoo. We tried to go from the zoo back to our hotel and landed at Park Pl.
We saw a store window with nothing but alligators in it. We saw a man singing only one hymn for a living. It was “Rescue the Perishing,” and he sang it in the morning, and he sang it still, ten miles away at evening, but on the same street, holding before him in the wintry wind an empty cap.
In a magnificent store where they sold flowers, there was in the window one white rose.
Jim led me, on foot, in taxicabs, by underground and by elevated, on bus and on tram car, round and round that incredible mulberry bush which is New York. We lunched at a restaurant where you slip five cents in a slot and your food, beautifully cellophaned, pops out at you on a chromium-plated tongue of steel which secretly slips back again when you take your food from it.
Nobody tried to sell us the Empire State building, so, while we were admiring its unholy height, I selected a few particularly gigolesque4 New Yorkers and tried to sell it to them. But it was no good. They merely looked at me with agate eyes, humorless, remote.
“Everybody in New York,” I said, as I padded painfully and breathlessly alongside of Jimmie, “is small. I have seen only a half a dozen big people all day, amongst the seven million I have seen so far. And they all looked like visitors.”
“Now that you come to mention it,” agreed Jim, “I noticed that, too.”
“Do you suppose,” I asked, “that there might be anything in my theory that the very size and majesty of the city makes the people timid and humble, and that they are actually growing smaller with each generation?”
“All the big people,” said Jim, “have been killed off by traffic. You’ve got to be small and nimble in New York.”
We nimbled our way from the Bowery to Morningside Heights, from the basement of five-cent stores to the needle tip of a fabulous building that points a final, accusing finger at heaven.
And thus we came, at five p.m., to Fifth Ave. at Forty-second St., where the cabs are jammed so thick you can walk across their roofs from one side of the street to the other.
“There you are,” said Jim. “On their roofs, from this side of the street to the other.”
But when I asked a cab driver to let me climb up the side of his cab to make the start, he refused. While we were arguing how much I should pay him for the privilege, whistles screamed, lights flashed, the mighty throb of sound changed its majestic tone, and away went the tide of traffic, rushing and whirling. And Jimmie and I fled across, with five hundred others, under the sheltering wings of ten policemen.
“There you go,” I said, “there you go, Jimmie. You can walk across the roofs of the cabs. But you don’t. That’s New York for you. You can, but you don’t.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” cried Jimmie, “that in all this day, amidst all this splendor, after speeding a mile a minute down in the bowels of the earth and roaring along in the elevated above the roofs of a city, after all those stupendous stores full of fishing tackle and pictures and gowns and guns and alligators, after this glorious day spent rubbing your lonely elbows with ten million others, strange, swift, passing, forever mysterious and unknown, all you can say about New York is that they can, but they don’t!”
Deadliest Complex
“In all this day,” I said, “I haven’t seen a single soul that seems to call to me across the deep.”
“You’re hungry,” said Jimmie. “That’s all’s the matter with you. You need to eat. Now, after showing you the city as it should be seen, I am going to do you a great favor. I am going to take you to the greatest restaurant in America, and one of the five greatest restaurants in the world.”
“Ah, oysters,” said I.
“Oysters, if you like,” said Jim, steering me westward into a district where the buildings were smaller and the lights brighter. “But I advise you to save your capacity for more delectable things. They have a creamed fillet of sole that princesses have wept over. They have a pot roast which is acknowledged to be the greatest stroke of genius in the entire history of cooking.”
“Oysters,” I said. “And little soda biscuits.”
Through the streets all bright with red signs, past huddled little stores wedged in between theatres, every third door a theatre door, with congested cabs patiently, tooting their way all in one direction, packed from curb to curb, we bowed into the winter night wind and came at last to Vincent’s5.
It was a small and cosy restaurant. The lights were tender. The music was faint. The waiters, all pot-bellied and with thin gray hair slicked in two curls on their heads, swayed like adagio dancers among the white linen of the tables.
The menu was as big as a newspaper.
“Oysters,” said I, “and little soda biscuits.”
But Jim, with frequent dreamy gazes about the room, murmured to himself as he read the menu.
The restaurant was filled with people, and Jimmie told me they were the greatest people in New York, actors, owners of banks and radio stations, authors and playwrights, genius of every sort.
“Genius,” I remarked, “sure slurps its food.”
For they were bobbing and bending to the succulent dishes: their talk, their manners, their laughter was eager but not so eager as their forks and teeth.
“They make me hungry to look at them,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have something more than oysters.”
Jimmie raised his head with shining eyes and a flush on his brow. Reverently he nodded to the waiter. The waiter bowed, ear bent down to Jimmie, his pencil poised. “Baked,” said Jim, with a catch in his voice, “baked Boston scrod!6“
“Baked Boston scrod,” said the waiter, flicking a shrewd appraising glance at Jim, as if to say, “ah, a gourmet.”
“Oysters,” I said, “and little soda biscuits. And then some baked Boston scrod.”
Jim watched me engulf the oysters. I chew my oysters. Jim would watch me manipulate the beauties – Cape Cods, they were – into the cocktail sauce and then up to my mouth. Then he closed his eyes and shuddered while I chewed.
“I’ll say this for New York,” I sighed, as the waiter whisked away the empty shells, “their oysters are good.”
Then came the scrod.
From under glowing dull silver covers, the waiter revealed a vast plate with a magnificent light brown square of fish.
And beside the fish, heaped in a pile, like matches in a poker game, was my deadliest enemy!
My deadliest enemy, potatoes Julienne!
They are little measly French fried potatoes, about the size of a match.
They are brittle and hot and dry.
They are deadly, vicious, ruinous.
Liberated At Last
I thrust my chair back and half rose.
“Jimmie,” I said bitterly, “this is to much! This is the end! I’ve had a feeling all day that something like this would happen, that New York would, in the end, heap a final humiliation upon me.”
“What is it?” asked Jimmie astonished.
“Potatoes Julienne,” I rasped. “Potatoes Julienne, my inferiority complex personified. I hate them. I hate them. They and they alone have stood between me and my social rise. If it had not been for those measly, vicious little potatoes, I might have been a great man. I might have attended scores of dinners at Government House. I might be joined the York Club7. I might have been a member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club8.”
“Sit down, sit down,” whispered Jimmie, glancing around.
“It is not, as you might have supposed,” I said, “the fact that I look silly in a dress suit that has kept me from rising in society. It is those, those devilish little potatoes Julienne. And to think it was New York that sought out my deepest humiliation like this!”
I covered my face with my hands.
“Eat,” said Jim.
“My only nightmare,” I quavered, “is a vast platter of potatoes Julienne, and away on the far side of the heap, a great concourse of beautiful girls and handsome young men in dress suits, mocking me!”
“What’s the matter with them?” demand Jim.
“Try to eat them,” I cried.
So Jim tried and I tried. They served in a heap, lying end for end. If you put your fork under them sideways, you lift your fork and not one single little sticklet of potatoes Julienne comes up.
You look at your fork in amazement, and try it end ways. You slide the fork under them and lift. And one or at most two of the insignificant sticks comes out of the heap.
I tried a spoon. It was no better. Jimmie began to get red and perspire and cast anxious glances around the neighboring tables.
“Ah,” I said.
The sugar bowl was at hand, and in it, the sugar tongs. I seized the sugar tongs and took a grab at the potatoes Julienne.
And as I raised the tongful to my mouth I looked up and fair into the eyes of Vincent himself, the lean aristocratic proprietor of this famed house.
I signalled to him.
“Vincent,” I said, in a low voice, “forgive me, but will you tell me, in mercy’s name, how do you eat these potatoes Julienne?”
Vincent bowed.
“Wit,” he said, “your feengers!”
“Fingers!” I gasped.
“Feengers,” said Vincent, “like diss.”
And he took a pinch of potatoes Julienne from my plate, lifted them, and popped them into his mouth.
“Princes,” he said, “keengs, dukes, barons, all the people of the great world, eat potatoes Julienne, only like that.”
I rose.
I shook hands with Vincent.
I stepped around and slapped Jimmie on the back with one hand and shook his hand with the other.
“Jimmie,” I said, “it took New York to liberate me from a complex that has had me down for twenty-five years!”
And for the rest of the trip I embraced New York with my arms as wide as I could stretch them.
Editor’s Notes: This story also appeared in So What? (1937).
- Ganglia is a group of neuron cell bodies in the peripheral nervous system. ↩︎
- Ilium is an ancient Greek town. ↩︎
- “Jewels of Ophir” is a nickname for the Jewels of Opar plant, also known as the fame flower. ↩︎
- I looked this up and don’t know what it means. ↩︎
- Vincent’s has been around since 1904. ↩︎
- If you are not familiar with the term, scrod is just a whitefish fillet, served breaded. ↩︎
- The York Club is a private members’ club in Toronto that began in 1909. ↩︎
- The Royal Canadian Yacht Club is another old club in Toronto. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 26, 1935.
“Be honest,” said Jimmie Frise.
“I flatter myself,” I said, “I am honest.”
“Honesty,” said Jimmie, “is a curious thing. If you were absolutely honest, you would be clubbed to death by an infuriated mob before you had been honest for three hours.”
“Honesty,” I agreed, “must be tempered by common sense. For example, if you were honest, you would tell your friends the truth. You would tell them that never, by any stretch of the Imagination, will they ever be good singers. Yet if you told them that, it would be wicked and cruel.”
“How come?” demanded Jim. “It would save them a lot of grief. And a lot of trouble. It would spare them years of struggle, trying to be good singers. It would put an end to a lot of suffering on the part of people who have to listen to them trying to sing.”
“Yes, but,” I said, “there are really so few things to do in this life. You think at first there are a lot of things to do. But after a while, you discover life has only two or three things to do. And one of them might be singing. Or so you think.”
“That’s what makes life tough,” agreed Jim.
“So, if a man thinks he can sing,” I pursued, and he starts singing, wouldn’t it be wicked, cruel and terrible to deprive him of that belief? He thinks he can sing. It sounds beautiful to him, as he lets his voice blow through his throat. It has a nice, strong feeling. It fills him with a sense of power, of beauty.”
“Yet,” said Jim, “he might be inflicting suffering on five, ten, or even two hundred people, if for example, he were singing in a church choir.”
“Quite so,” I said, “but it is easier to bear the defects of others than to know your own defects.”
“That’s quite a wise saying,” admired Jimmie.
“It’s an honest saying,” I said. “It is more honest than telling a guy he can’t sing.”
“Then we should go about lying,” said Jim. “Lying to our friends by not telling them. Swallowing the truth is the same as lying.”
“Then believe me, we are all liars,” I said. “Or should be.”
“Don’t you think the world would be improved,” asked Jim, “if, instead of kidding one another, we all told the facts and got down to brass tacks? If we all knew our faults, wouldn’t the world be a happier place to live in, a more sensible and practical and business-like place to live in?”
“We would all be dead,” I replied. “There would be no object in living if we had not our dreams and our hopes and our false expectations.
You certainly make a virtue out of dishonesty,” admitted Jim.
“The best thing to do is not think about honesty at all,” I pointed out. “Just take life as It comes and help your brother.”
“It’s a good philosophy,” concluded Jim.
Sportsmen Stick Together
This conversation took place in Jim’s car as we drove to what they call the Annex, which is a district of Toronto north of the parliament buildings, a district where nearly everybody in Toronto was born but from which nearly everybody that was born there has moved away. It is filled with happy grandfathers and grandmothers; thousands of civil servants and university students dwell in it; it has a comfortable air but hardly any side drives. More bachelors and old maids reside in the Annex than in any other concentrated neighborhood of the city, with the result that the lights are out in the Annex earlier at night than in most neighborhoods. Panhandlers do not think very highly of the Annex because bachelors are always saving for their lonely old age.
But Jim knew some people who lived in one of the handsome apartment houses of the Annex. They had an uncle die who had been a great sportsman. He had left behind him great piles of fishing tackle and guns and mackinaw clothes and expensive hunting boots from Scotland. And we were on our way to buy some of the tackle for the benefit of the heirs. At least, that it what you say to your wife. Ah, we sportsmen are so devoted to one another!
“Despite our honesty,” said Jim, as we drove up in front of the beetling apartment house, I wouldn’t put it past us to control our expressions very carefully in case there are a couple of Cellini rods in this collection of junk we are going to see. I could do with a four-ounce Cellini.”
“The only thing to do,” I said, “is to bid one against the other. If there is a rod I want, I’ll say right out how much I’ll give for it. Then you say how much you’ll give. It will be a sort of private auction.”
“You’d never make a business man,” sighed Jim. And we walked up to the apartment house entrance.
Apartment houses always embarrass me. The embarrassment I feel on entering any strange house is multiplied exactly by the number of families living in the apartment. If there are forty apartments in the place, I am forty times as embarrassed. And further more there is, in a few of the better-class apartments, a sort of commissionaire standing in uniform in the front hall. Almost Invariably he is a veteran not of the Canadian but of the imperial army, and he has a high and snooty look.
There was such a one as we entered the foyer of this magnificent apartment house. He had a small red moustache and small bright brown eyes. He eyed us grimly.
“Mr. Grimbleberry’s apartment?” asked Jim sweetly.
“Third floor, number thirty-four,” said the imperial, haughtily.
We went up the self-serve lift. It was an upholstered, creepy lift, like a coffin going heavenward.
On the third floor we got off and started to look for apartment thirty-four. Soft plush carpet, soft lights, soft music and soft odors of food lingered in the long corridors.
Through the Transom
We went down the corridor and turned to the left, where we met a large, extra-stout gentleman in a derby hat coming to meet us.
“Ah,” cried the gentleman in the derby delightedly. “By Jove, you’re just the men I’m looking for! I’ve done a very silly thing.”
We paused politely. He was well dressed, obviously one of the better-class tenants of the high-class apartment.
“I’ve done an absurd thing,” he giggled, shamefacedly. “I’ve just snapped the door shut and left my key on the inside!”
“The sergeant-major downstairs will fix it for you,” I suggested.
“Nonsense! That man!” giggled the gentleman in the derby. “He would merely start in motion an act of parliament to have the caretaker appoint somebody in the course of the coming week to make an adjustment of the matter. Look here, chaps, I want your help. I forgot an important matter, my wife’s wrap. I’m just rushing to meet her at a party. Do help me!”
“Certainly,” we both said. “How?”
“Through the transom1,” he said. “The transom is slightly ajar.”
We walked along the corridor until we came to apartment number thirty-eight. It had, in fact, a transom. The transom was ajar.
“Better still!” cried the derby one. “I’m so big. You are just the size to go through a transom, by jove! Would you mind, I say?”
He was patting me on both lapels.
“I’m still athletic,” I agreed, taking off my overcoat and handing it to him.
Jim and the derby joined hands and I stepped on their palms and was hoisted aloft.
“You’ll see a sort of cotter pin,” said the derby-hatted one softly. “Just give it a smart pull. Then the transom will drop open. Don’t bang it. The people on this floor are very fussy about a little racket. Mostly old women.”
I drew a cotter pin holding the transom rod to the frame. The transom dropped and I caught it and let it softly down. With a few struggles and a wiggle or two, I got through, dropped to the floor and opened the door.
“There’s no key,” I pointed out. “It was just locked. The catch had sprung.”
“Good heavens, where’s my key, then?” cried the gentleman in the derby hat. “However, I won’t detain you. Would you care for a drop of something, raspberry vinegar2 or ginger cordial3?”
“No, thanks,” said Jim. “We’ve an appointment.”
“Well, cheerio and thanks a lot,” said the gentleman in the derby.
So we went and found apartment number thirty-four and the Grimbleberrys were in, and they laid out the piles of their late Uncle Billie’s sporting gear. He had three Cellini rods, all about four ounces. Jim and I paid no attention to them. We just picked them up and laid them aside, as it to see more interesting exhibits. There were fly books crammed with fresh and untouched dozens of flies and boxes loaded with dry flies. There were precious fly lines rolled carefully on storage spools of cork. There were English reels with agate line guides. There were Scotch waders and brogues of leather. Baskets and rod carrying boxes of Spanish walnut with brass fittings and locks. There were English guns in leather cases. There were Harris tweed fishing coats with immense pockets that were just made to order for Jimmie. Nets, gaffs, fly oiling bottles and silver-cased pads of amadou for drying the fly. Pigskin valises and canvas kit bags of the wide-mouth English pattern, trimmed with genuine leather.
In fact, it was a sensation.
“Is That a Fair Price?”
We pawed casually amongst it all. I could feel Jimmie trembling every time he leaned against the table. I coughed loudly, and complained about a raw throat.
“Errumph,” said Jim. “Now one thing you have got to bear in mind, Grimbleberry,” said he, “there are plenty of rogues around who wouldn’t give you a fraction of the value of these things.”
“I’m sure there are,” said Mr. Grimbleberry.
“I’m sorry there isn’t much here that interests us,” I added. “We have so much stuff now our wives think we have gone crazy. In fact, I have to smuggle anything I buy into my own house.”
“Ha, ha,” we all laughed, including Mr. and Mrs. Grimbleberry.
“There are a few little items here,” I admitted, “that I think I could pick up, things I’ve worn out, and so on. But the great majority of the things are second-hand, of course, you see?”
“I wouldn’t mind one of these rods,” said Jim with a faint quaver in his voice.
“Oh?” I said, surprised. “I wonder what condition they are in? How long did your uncle have them?”
“I couldn’t say,” said Grimbleberry. “You see, I don’t fish, none of the family does. It’s just so much junk to us. I was hoping you chaps would take the whole shebang. Give us a lump sum for the whole works. That’s what I was hoping.”
“”Mmmmm,” said Jim and I together, like a duet.
I jointed up one of the Cellinis. It was like a living thing. It was like a jewel, like Aaron’s rod4, pulsing with sensate life, a gorgeous, vital, leaping creation of bamboo yet weighing only four ounces for all its nine feet of length. It was worth every cent of the seventy-five dollars Uncle Billie, now with God, had paid for it new.
“Mmmmmm, not bad, Jim,” I said. “Feel that. Isn’t it a bit loggy to you?”
“Mmmmmm,” said Jim. He had actually to wrestle his gaze loose from that rod. He laid it aside doubtfully.
“How about twenty dollars for the lot?” asked Mr. Grimbleberry. “Is that a fair price? Ten dollars from each of you.”
I didn’t breathe. Jim cleared his throat.
“Or fifteen?” asked Grimbleberry. “I don’t want to impose on the fact that I know you two gentlemen.”
What was worrying me was how Jim and I were going to divide the loot. Who was to get the odd Cellini, for there were three. And who the pigskin bag? And that solid copper dry fly box?
It Pays To Be Honest
At that terrific moment, there came sounds from the corridor outside the apartment. Excited voices and thudding feet. Grimbleberry hastened to his door, saying “There’s been a pants burglar5 working this neighborhood.”
Grimbleberry opened the door and a buzz of excited voices rose from the outer hall. Above all rose the irate and commanding voice of an imperial. He was saying:
“Two of them, a small one in a bright brown coat and a tall one. I spotted them the instant they came in.”
Jim strode to the door. “Are you looking for us, sir?” he demanded sharply.
The commissionaire from downstairs came and stared dubiously at Jim and me.
“These are guests of mine,” said Grimbleberry. “They have been here at least half an hour.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the commissionaire stiffly.
He told how the Bunthorpes in apartment thirty-eight had come in and found their place ransacked, their transom open and valuables stolen.
“It was a small man done it,” stated the commissionaire shrewdly. The only stranger I’ve seen here tonight was a big stout man in a derby hat, and carrying a club bag. But he couldn’t have got in through no transom, no, sir. Not him.”
He went away to pursue his criminal investigations.
We went back to the Grimbleberry’s dining room table were Uncle Billie’s collection of a lifetime – and a connoisseur – was spread out.
“Mr. Grimbleberry,” I said, stoutly, this stuff is worth more than twenty dollars.”
“In fact,” said Jimmie, “just one of these rods alone is worth a great deal more than twenty dollars.”
Mr. and Mrs. Grimbleberry looked at us with open mouths.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” I put in.
“That pair of waders with brogues is practically new,” said Jim, “and they sell, new for about forty dollars.”
“Good grief,” said Mrs. Grimbleberry casting a look around her apartment at the curtains and the rug with an appraising eye.
“One has to be honest,” said Jimmie. “Especially as, in this world, you are so often dishonest without knowing it. So I suggest this. I suggest you have a clerk from a fishing tackle store some night come up and set a fair valuation on all this stuff.”
“A great idea,” said Mrs. Grimbleberry.
“On an off night, have him come up,” I added, “and he can list all this stuff and put a fair second-hand value on everything.”
“And then we’ll come up again and bring some of our friends,” said Jim, and we can have a sale, eh?”
“Beautiful,” cried Mrs. Grimbleberry. “How much do you think it might come to?”
“Oh, I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.
“One hundred? Two hundred?” asked Mrs. Grimbleberry eagerly, and I saw Mr. Grimbleberry suddenly give her a sharp look.
“It wouldn’t be wise to say,” I suggested. “But it would bring you more than you’d get from a casual sale.”
So Jim and I left them and went down and as we passed through the foyer, the commissionaire saluted us respectfully.
“Ah,” said Jim, as we got into the car, “it pays to be honest.”
“Especially,” I agreed, “when it is within your power.”
Editor’s Notes: Normally now, if a story is repeated later, I publish the original and mention the repeat with a copy of the new artwork. But when I first started this project, I was not aware that some stories were repeats. So I published the repeat of this story back in 2020 as “Honesty Pays” which is from January 22, 1944.
- A Transom is a window that exists over a door frame. It was not uncommon for these to open on the horizontal in offices or homes. ↩︎
- Raspberry vinegar is a a drink made from raspberry juice, vinegar, and sugar. ↩︎
- Ginger cordial often combines ginger, lemon and sugar. ↩︎
- Aaron’s rod refers to any of the walking sticks carried by Moses’ brother, Aaron, in the Torah. The Bible tells how, along with Moses’s rod, Aaron’s rod was endowed with miraculous power. ↩︎
- “Pants Burglar” was literally someone who stole pants. I guess the object was to also get money or a wallet that might be left in them, but there are historical newspaper references to people who just stole pants. It was a term used primarily in the early 20th century. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 30, 1935.
“Life,” said Jimmie Frise, “is getting safer every year, anyway.”
“I disagree,” I announced.
“Not,” said Jim, “in the mere matter of accidents on highways and in factories. What I mean, in the larger sense. Every year the chances of persecution, tyranny and oppression grow slimmer.”
“I disagree,” I declared.
“Bullies,” stated Jim, “in government, in business, in the community, in the family used to be on every hand. Tyrants who made miserable the lives of all who were dependent on them. To-day the bully is all but eliminated.”
“Bosh,” said I.
“Take the family first,” said Jim. “Until just recently, within the last twenty-five years, a young man had to run away to sea in order to escape from a tyrannical father. To-day the boy can go and get a job in a brokerage house and make more money than his old man. Not only does this freedom affect young men. It applies to young women also. In former times a young girl could not run away to sea. But to-day she can run down to the department store and get a job and go live with a girl chum in an apartment.”
“Jobs are so easy to get,” I sneered.
“I am speaking in broad principles,” admonished Jim. “The detail may be a little confused. But you must admit the modern parent dare not be a bully.”
“And how does this apply,” I inquired, “to foremen and managers and so forth?”
“A great change has come over the world in the past few years,” explained Jim, “so that public opinion to-day is intolerant of tyranny. Trades unionism in the past 40 years has practically put an end to the bully in the shop. Every business executive knows that his business will be affected if the opinion goes abroad that he is a hard or brutal taskmaster. The minute a man begins to set himself up as a boss, the whole world turns against him.”
“In Germany, for example,” I scoffed, “and Italy.”
“You little know,” said Jim, “what former bullies those two men, Hitler and Mussolini, have supplanted. Until they came along, those countries had a dictator in every village, in every town, hereditary, pompous, vicious bullies. Counts and dukes and all sorts of things, and a girl dared not be pretty in any village and no young man dared walk the earth proudly, the way God intended young men to walk, for fear of those perfumed bullies riding by in barouches1 or on horseback.”
“You’ve been reading novels by lady authors,” I accused.
“Throughout the world,” sang Jim, passionately, “there is now a vast court of public opinion to safeguard us plain citizens from the tyranny of our would-be masters. Since the dawn of time, the mass of mankind have been the victims of every bully that came along. Our entire social system was based on bullies. Bullies national and bullies local. The struggle for freedom has been nothing more or less than the slow and painful elimination of bullies.”
“You are very clever,” I pointed out, “at putting things into a nutshell. But you know what eats nuts.”
“I Could Frame You”
“Less than a hundred years ago,” claimed Jim, “you and I could be framed by anybody. Do you realize the press gang could have come along and snapped us up on the street and carried us off to war?”
“There was no press gang in the last war,” I argued, “yet we were snapped up.”
“A hundred years back,” insisted Jim, “if the local squire or the neighborhood bully took a dislike to us, for any reason, they could have planted a few dead rabbits in our back shed and then deported us to Australia as poachers?”
“I can quote you cases not a year old,” I countered, “where innocent men have been railroaded.”
“You don’t follow me it all,” cried Jim. I “What I am getting is the safety, the security of the average citizen to-day as compared with only a hundred years ago. We generally think of our improved condition in terms of street cars and highways, modern plumbing and radio and that sort of thing. The greatest thing in the history of the past hundred years is the growth of a solid public opinion that safeguards us from the greed, jealousy, malice and hate of those who set themselves up as masters.”
“I could frame you,” I declared, “in five minutes. I could set you on the spot so fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. I could have you in danger of your life, by golly…”
“Heh, heh, heh,” said Jimmie.
And we drove on. We were heading for Kingston, where, in the bays of the St. Lawrence along that still romantic shore, some late fall ducks lingered in the land of their birth before perilously launching themselves across the border toward the Gulf of Mexico, and 8,000,000 American gunners en route.
And Jim and I, as guests of a newspaperman of our autumnal acquaintance, were to urge these wildfowl on their way with a few belated bangs of a shotgun.
I felt my nose running, for it was a chilly day. I drew forth my hankie. And when I removed it, the white hankie was dabbed with gleaming scarlet.
“Hang it,” I muttered. “Another nose bleed.”
“I never knew anybody,” said Jim, “with such a flimsy grip on his blood as you.”
“And shooting, too,” I complained. “Every shot, my nose will start to bleed.”
“Put something cold down the back of your neck,” advised Jim, who was driving.
So I slid a chilly bottle opener down my neck, and continued to dab, until my handkerchief was pretty well incarnadined with my vital fluid.
“Jim,” I said, “this reminds me, we forgot to telephone Tom about the rain slicker for me. That’s important. I won’t go out without a slicker. Let’s stop at the next gas station along the way and see if they have a phone. And if they have, phone Tom to be sure to get a slicker, size forty, for me and put it in his bag. For sure. I nearly died last fall.”
“O.K.,” said Jim.
I gave my nose a tweak. And was promptly rewarded with a fresh flow of blood. I reached for a fresh hankie to catch the spurt.
“Here’s a station,” said Jim.
Ahead off the highway, a lonely but brightly painted gas emporium stood on the bleak road. No signs of life showed, but by the number of pumps and the breadth of the gravel, we surmised the proprietor would be a sufficiently enterprising man to have a telephone.
As we slowed to enter, I climbed over into the back.
“It’s started again,” I explained to Jim. “I’ve got to get a fresh hankie out of my bag.”
Jim drove in and stopped in front of the pump and got out.
“Coming in?” he asked.
“No,” said I, bending low.
I knew he would send somebody out to look at the radiator and oil. That’s the kind of car he has.
The instant I heard his feet crunch away, I hastily tied the blood-stained handkerchief around my face, snatched a handful of dust and grit off the floor of the car and smeared it, with blood, all over my forehead and ears, and rumpled my hair. Quickly shifting a dunnage bag and a valise, I crawled on to the floor, drew the bags on top of me and lay still.
In a moment I heard the gas station door open and a man with a merry whistle approached the car.
I groaned.
I moaned terribly.
I heard the man’s feet halt on the gravel.
“Help, help,” I groaned, muffled. “For mercy’s sake, help.”
I could see the man’s head as he peered white-faced in the car window.
“In heaven’s name,” I groaned, “save me, save me.”
He opened the car door.
“Hello, there,” he said weakly.
“Quick,” I gasped. “They are kidnapping me. Quick, help me up.”
I struggled and got the dunnage bag off me and raised my blood-stained face from the floor. The man instantly slammed the door. I heard Jim’s voice as he came out the gas station:
“There’ll be a telephone there?”
“Oh, sure,” replied a jolly voice. “I cut my phone off at the end of the tourist season, see? But they’ll have a phone at the corners. All winter.”
“Help, help,” I shouted.
Jim ran to the car. I heard him open the door, but I also heard other footsteps crunching rapidly on the gravel, a mutter of quick voices, and then, to my joy, I heard a loud grunt from Jim, a lot of slithering on the gravel, heavy breathing, gasps and thuds.
“Hey,” yelled Jim.
The car door opened, and the pale-faced man, with a big fat man with curly hair stared in. Then they seized me and dragged me from the car.
“Thank heavens,” I cried. “Oh, thank heavens.”
Then they bounded back on Jim who was just slowly staggering to his feet.
“Don’t let him shoot,” I screamed.
The two garage men wound themselves around Jim, heaved savagely and all three went violently to the earth.
“What the…” bellowed Jim, but gravel cut off his words.
And there they struggled and sprawled, while they went all over him for a gun.
“Tie him up,” I warned.
And the pale man whipped off his belt and strapped Jim’s arms above the elbow behind his back.
“Quick,” I cried. “There will be another carload of them along any minute. Run this car around the back.”
The pale man jumped in Jim’s car and in a second, had skidded it out of sight behind the gas station. While I, with a large woollen sock I got from my bag, gagged Jim.
“So he can’t yell at them as they pass?” I explained to the fat man who held Jim in a grizzly bear embrace. “Let’s take him inside.”
We led Jimmie inside the station, where it was cosy. Jim’s eyes glared at me, over the gray sock, with an expression of utter amazement.
“Sit down, you,” I snarled.
“What is this,” gasped the fat man, running his hand through his curly hair.
“It’s a kidnapping, that’s what it is,” I said. “This man is part of a gang of desperate American crooks. I fell foul of them in a little matter that doesn’t interest you, see? So they just took me for a ride.”
“But… but…” spluttered the fat man, “this has nothing to do with me? What if they find out I…?”
His eyes bulged with horror.
“We’ll Bump Him Off”
“Say,” he said, “the less I get mixed up in this the better? Let me go and get the police.”
The pale man had entered.
“Eddie,” said the fat man, “we’re mixed up in some damn thing or other. Gangsters.”
And his shaking hand indicated both Jim and me.
“Listen, buddy.” I said in a tough voice. “There is only one way you can handle this. Any minute, another car is coming by here. They may or may not stop. The toughest gang in America is in that car, see?”
“Oh, oh, ohh,” said the fat man looking angrily at his pale assistant who had been the means of bringing this disaster upon an innocent gas station on a lonely Ontario highway.
“Listen, buddy, just listen,” I snarled “Only one way. If you let this guy go, see, you’re finished. Even if you hand him over to the cops, you’re finished, see? There is only one way out of this mess for you?”
“Wha…wha…wha…?” asked the fat man.
I indicated Jim and drew my finger across my neck.
“We’ll take him out into the bushes back here,” I said slowly, “bump him off and bury him where nobody will ever find him. I beat it, see? Over the border. It’s the last you ever hear of it.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” wailed the fat man.
The pale man just slipped lower and lower down the wall he was leaning against, and after looking with horror at me, slowly closed his eyes.
“You can’t take it, huh?” I sneered. “Well, if you leave this guy loose, you’re as good as dead right now, both of you. You interfered in a snatch, see?”
The fat man began to shake.
“Then, here’s the next best thing,” I snarled. “Help me get this guy back into his car. Tie him up, tight, see? We’ll bury him under the baggage. Then when the other car passes, I’ll drive off and attend to the job myself down the road apiece. But if either of you ever opens your mouth about this, it’ll be just too bad. Just tooooo bad, see?”
I stood up and watched, guardedly out of the window. A car came rushing along whizzed by with three innocent citizens sitting in it.
“There they go,” I hissed, leaping back from the window.
Jim was sitting, exhausted and gagged, but his eyes burned with a baleful light at me.
“Now, boys,” I said, briskly, “let’s get this guy into the car. Stand up, you!”
And then I felt a hard bump in the middle of my back.
“Hands up,” said a sharp voice.
“Hey,” I exclaimed, but raising my arms. It was the pale man. He had a shotgun against my back.
“Let’s,” he cried in a quavering voice “let’s take them both back in the bushes, Bill. We don’t want to get mixed up with gangs, either side.”
“Well,” said the fat man, eyeing us eagerly.
“Just a couple of dirty crooks,” cried the pale one, “it won’t make any difference. And nobody will know but us two. Come on.”
“Just a minute, please,” I stated.
“Shut up,” yelped the pale man, giving me a dig in the back with the shotgun.
“Now, listen, Eddie,” said the fat man, “we’ve got to have an understanding about this. You’re pretty darn gabby. Remember that incident about Norah? How do I know I can trust you if we bump these two guys off? I admit it is the safest thing to do. But how do I know you won’t get drunk and blab?”
“I’ll do the shooting myself,” quavered Eddie. “Then I won’t dare, see? But let’s get out of this jam, and get out of it fast.”
So you see I had to tell them.
I had to explain it was all a little joke, and begged them to unmuffle Jimmie, so he could explain, too.
At first, Jimmie was inclined to borrow Eddie’s shotgun, but when he got quiet, and I was allowed to make a speech explaining about how Jimmie had said the world was safe for democracy, we all had a nice laugh together, and we bought eight gallons of gas and a quart of oil, and everything was hunky dooley.
“But,” said Jim, as we drove away, “I see your point.”
“So do I,” I admitted.
Editor’s Note:
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 31, 1935.
“Hang it,” said Jimmie, Frise, “now I’m in for it.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’ve been inviting my relatives down to the Exhibition for years,” said Jim, “and they can never come because of the threshing. So last winter, I was kidding them and told them if they would come this year, I’d come up and give them a hand.”
“With the threshing?” I asked delighted.
“Yes, and now here’s a letter from Aunt Fanny saying that if I was in earnest, I could come, because they really are short-handed. And if I come for two days, they’ll come to the Exhibition.”
“Well, that’s plain enough,” I said.
“She says if I can bring a friend,” said Jim.
“Why not?” I cried. “I come of a long line of agriculturists.”
“But threshing,” said Jim. “Boy, that’s work.”
“Nonsense, Jim,” I laughed. “It’s all done by machinery. Farm life is all modernized these days.”
“Would you care to come with me if I went up to Aunt Fanny’s?” asked Jim.
“I’d love it, Jim,” I assured him.
“I’ll write her I’m coming and bringing a friend,” said Jim eagerly.
The drive to Jim’s aunt’s was through lovely country, with shorn gleaming fields and tall corn.
“Tell me about the threshing,” I said. “It’s a machine, isn’t it? I’ve passed a huge steam engine hauling something like a circus wagon after it on the road.”
“Well, it’s a machine,” said Jim. “Sometimes it is owned by a man who comes with the outfit and hires out to the different farmers. Sometimes the farmers band together and own a threshing outfit amongst a group.”
“Communism,” I said.
“Yes,” said Jimmie. “Well, anyway, the farmers have put away their grain, in sheaves, up in their barns, out of the rain, to ripen and dry. The threshing machine backs up under the loft of the barn. Some of the hands throw the sheaves down on to a conveyer belt that carries the sheaves into the chopping machine, where knives chop the straw fine and the grain is shaken out.”
“I don’t see where men come into that much,” I said.
“The steam engine,” said Jim, “which drives the belt and the chopping knives, also blows a powerful wind which is strong enough to blow the chopped straw out the blower, a sort of big stove pipe, while the grain, blown clean, slides down a hopper and out a spout. That’s where the work comes in.”
“How?” I asked.
“Somebody has to carry the boxes into which the grain flows; there’s about a bushel to a box, and grab them fast and run them to the wheat bins, while another man has to shovel the wheat in the bins back. It’s all very fast, you see? The wheat is pouring out. The boxes have to be grabbed and carried away. The bins have to be kept shovelled back. And then there is the straw stack.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“The straw,” said Jim, “comes blowing out of the big pipe and rapidly makes a straw pile. Somebody has to steer the big blower pipe, see, and somebody, with a pitchfork, has to be on top of the straw stack, stacking it. It’s quite a job.”
“It doesn’t sound too bad, chucking a few sheaves down out of a mow,” I said, as we sailed along. “Carting a few boxes of wheat. Making a stack. What do you suppose we’ll have to do?”
“We’ll do what we are told,” said Jim. “I imagine they will put us carrying the boxes.”
“It will be near noon before we get there,” I commented.
So Jim stepped on it, and the miles fled by.
As we drove down Aunt Fanny’s lane, we could hear and see the threshing in progress.
And as we pulled in beside the farm house, a thin shrill whistle blew, the engine stopped its roaring, with a whine the whole business slowed down and stopped.
“Lunch,” said Jim.
And we stepped in to meet Aunt Fanny just as a group of six men, red and perspiring, shrugging their shoulders as if to loosen stiff muscles, trooped into the farm house and lined up at the kitchen wash basin.
“I never believed you’d come, Jim,” said his aunt.
But she had places set for us at the big kitchen table, and we joined the company of shy big men, in their overalls and their shining faces, rubbing their hands, and making bashful jokes with one another, to a lunch that would knock a horse over. There were jugs and pails of ice cold water, jugs of lemonade; there were big plates heaped with bread, and platters heaped with sliced head cheese and cold red beef; vegetable dishes staggering under plain boiled potatoes, another with beets, another with squash. There were bowls of pickles and bowls of relish; jugs full of green onions and jugs full of celery.
“Here, here, take a helping,” said the man next to me when I took one boiled potato, and one slice of head cheese.
“No, no, this is far more than I usually eat at lunch,” I assured him.
“You’ll need it before you’re through the day,” said the neighbor.
But the rest of them just dug in, and they ate, and they reached, and they packed a layer of fresh bread on top of each helping of meat and vegetables; and they took four or five helpings of pickles, especially a long-legged man at the end of the table called Sid, who had bright red inflamed eyes and a kind of gray look about him.
“Hay fever? I asked him, indicating his eyes.
“No, straw fever,” he said, and everybody laughed.
And when the bowls and dishes and plates were all empty, Aunt Fanny came in with pies, blueberry pies, apple pies, pumpkin pies, and a cream pie that seemed to go very well, because it never reached me.
The teapot finished the meal, with the men all sitting angular and arms and legs bent, at the table, looking shinier and damper than ever.
“Where would you like us?” asked Jimmie.
“On the boxes,” said the boss of the threshing machine, another big man with a large moustache. “Or can you handle the sheaves?”
“My friend,” said Jimmie, “has to send for a stenographer whenever he needs a new ribbon in his typewriter.”
“Aw, say,” I said.
“Two of you on the boxes, then,” said the boss, whose name was Wesley somebody. Not Wes. Wesley.
“Do you need two of them on the boxes?” asked Sid.
“Well, they can handle the bins, too, and that will free one of you to help haul that barley off the south twenty,” said Wesley.
“Oh, barley?” said Jimmie.
Aunt Fanny had old clothes laid out for us. We dressed. The engine started. We all took our places, like in a square dance. Square dances are just an artistic shaping of the movements of the farm; thrashing, plowing, hoeing, stooking.
And then the big blower, a huge pipe. began coughing out a terrific cloud of straw and dust, the big machine shook and thundered, and out of the hopper underneath flowed a regular flood of barley. The box set below filled so quickly, I hardly had time to straighten my hat and shift my suspenders. Jim shouted above the din, and I picked up the box.
When the Blower Blows
It was heavy. I had to rest it on my leg fronts. I staggered with it into the barn, while Jim set a new box and stood ready. It was deafening and it was exciting. I dumped the box into the bin and hurried back, but even so, Jim was already drawing the other box from under the hopper and signalling me frantically.
I slid my box under and Jim dragged his out. Away he went. Before he got back, my box was overflowing and I signalled him fiercely. Out came my brimming box and under went Jim’s.
“We musn’t let it get ahead of us,” Jim shouted in my ear.
And so, starting right after lunch, it went. Not 10 times, not 25 times, but endlessly, endlessly. It became startling. It became frightening. The sun seemed to stand still in the sky.
And while we toiled around one end of the outfit, out of the blower belched a torrent of gleaming dry straw and dust, a cloud, swirling and whirling, which fortunately a little wind blew away from us, though we got plenty of it in occasional gusts. Up above, a man steered this huge pipe, and another man, stamping and pitchforking for dear life, stood atop the straw stack, shaping it, forking it, stamping it into an ever-growing pile. He was hardly visible. He was the man with the red eyes and the straw fever. He worked in a cloud.
“Don’t we break off for a smoke or anything?” I shouted to Jim.
“No,” he answered, staggering away with his box.
The bin had now grown so full that something had to be done, so Jim waded deep in the grain and shovelled for all he was worth while I tried to do double duty on the boxes.
But the second trip. I yelled at Jim in the bin:
“She’s getting ahead of me, come on!”
“I’ve got to shovel this back,” he yelled back excitedly.
Anyway, he came, and there were now about two boxes of barley on the ground, and the box was hard to shove under on account of the pile.
Wesley looked down from the engine, where he was fixing something, and suddenly he tooted the whistle and everything groaned and whined to a stop.
“I guess,” said Wesley, “we ought to put somebody else on the boxes, eh?”
“How about the blower?” Jim called up.
“The little fellow on the blower and you on the stack?” asked Wesley.
“Or vica versa,” said Jim. “We’ll toss.”
Jim tossed a coin.
“Heads,” he called, opening his hands. It was heads.
“You get on the straw stack, and I’ll steer the blower,” said Jim.
There was a ladder against the rising stack and I climbed up it. Jim got on top of the machine by the blower pipe.
“All ready?” yelled Wesley.
I do not say that Jimmie actually aimed the pipe at me, even when it seemed that he did, but at any rate, there was just a hot belch of air and a cloud of dust and chopped straw, and the more I struggled to stamp the silly stuff down, the deeper I sank into it. If I tried to shift it with the fork, none would stay on the fork. The din prevented me from shouting to him to tell him where to aim the big pipe. If I opened my mouth, it got full of dust. I squinted my eyes, and stamped and tramped and forked, and sank to my middle in the stack.
“Heavens,” I said, “suppose I start sinking and they bury me in this stack!”
And I waved the fork of Jimmie, but he just let it belch and roar at me, and there was nothing to do but keep hopping and jumping up and down to avoid being sunk in what seemed to be quicksand.
Something itching and twitching and sharp and raspy got in my eyes, mouth, nose; down my shirt, front and back. I have since learned that barley has what they call a beard. And this, chopped up, was like granite sand in the air, hotly, storming on to me.
First I got tired, and then I got numb, and then all feeling and lastly all thought left me. The sun went slowly, slowly over the barn, and there I jumped and forked, and tramped a thousand miles. My eyes stung, until I tried closing them; but that was dangerous, because I might fall off the stack. My lungs burned, so that if I did try to shout, I felt they would tear loose.
“Well,” I said to myself, not using any voice, but just thinking, “so this is the best science can do for the farmer, eh?”
And as I leaped and jumped and walked uphill forever on a cloud of straw and dust and thistles and grit, I thought of the way this cruel world, with its marvellous inventions, its motor cars and trains, aeroplanes and trolley cars, its radio and movies, and electric refrigerators and elevators and everything else for the comfort of man, had so terribly neglected the farmer.
Whenever I got far enough up on the straw, I would try to signal Jim, but he says now he saw me so busy he was sure I was enjoying it. And, anyway, he said he didn’t feel we should interrupt the threshing again, after failing with the boxes and letting the hopper get ahead of us.
At any rate, after so long a time that I felt the Great War was only about third of the length, the sun kept falling far below the barn, and evening drew on; supper time came and went, and still that awful engine roared and clattered, and still the sheaves came tumbling out of the mow, and still that terrible rampant pipe, its vast mouth open like a serpent, belched its storm of straw and dust and sand and thistles on top of me, rising higher with every foot the stack gained.
It was actually dark when the little thin whistle blew, and the whole contraption groaned to a stop; and all I did was lie down. I just lay down.
I heard the men talking and joking loudly, no longer bashful. I heard them tinkering with the machine and putting things away. I heard Jimmie’s voice down on the ground, telling somebody how it all came back to him and that he felt he was an old-timer now.
But I just lay there. I lay there when I heard them going towards the house. I lay there when I heard Aunt Fanny’s voice calling them to close the gate.
I lay there and heard cows come into the barnyard. Even when I heard them come up and start breathing and whooshing around the straw stack, I just lay there.
But when I heard the rattle of dishes and the lively sound of a pump handle, and when I smelt, amongst other things, bacon, me thinking I would never smell anything ever again. I sat up.
There had been a ladder up the straw stack. How else did I get up? But there was no ladder I could see now. The stack was bigger above than below. And there were nine cows around the stack, cows with turned-up horns. It was thirty feet to the ground.
“Shoo,” I said, “beat it.”
The cows didn’t even look up. They stayed right there. Around the stack.
“Hoy.” I yelled, my throat flaming. “Hoy, Jimmie!”
I yelled and yelled. But the din of dishes was loud in the farm house, and the hum of voices; and a radio had started.
I gave up shouting. It stung too much. I just sat, feeling the slow sweet ache in my legs, back, neck, head, shoulders, arms…
“Modern agriculture,” I sneered at the dark.
Then Jimmie came suddenly out the back door and looked, in the lighted door way, towards the stack.
“Hoy!” I yelled.
And Jim came running, with a piece of bread and butter in one hand.
“What on earth are you doing up there?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t be interested.” I said.
“Here, here’s the ladder,” said he.
“Shove the cows away.” I said. “Their horns are turned up.”
I cramped down the ladder.
“My dear boy” said Jim, “why didn’t you call?”
“Jim,” I said, “is your Aunt Fanny coming to the Exhibition?”
“Sure,” said Jim.
“I’d like the privilege” I said, “of showing her around for an afternoon.”
So I went in and had what was left at the table, which wasn’t much.
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in So What? (1937).
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 17, 1935.
“After supper,” said Jimmie Frise, “how would you like to run up to North Toronto with me? Eddie phoned me this afternoon from Muskoka. He thinks he left the gas heater on in his cellar.”
“Anything, Jim,” I said. “Anything to break the monotony. If you suggested going to a movie, even, I would agree. This summer bachelor life is the bunk. Bored to death. World weary.”
“Eddie went to Muskoka,” said Jim, “the day before yesterday. And he woke up last night with the awful feeling that he had come away and left the heater on. You know that feeling.”
“This summer bachelor life,” I pursued, “is getting me down. There our wives are in the country, thinking we are up to all kinds of things. Throwing wild parties. Wine and song, anyway, if not women. And look at us. Wilted, dank, damp, limp, frowsy.”
“I bet if Eddie did leave the heater on,” said Jim, “there’ll be a heck of a cloud of steam if we turn on his taps.”
“If he did leave it on,” I said, “let’s both have a bath at Eddie’s expense. It will save the trouble of me going home and putting on that swell patent heater of mine and waiting till midnight for a couple of gallons of lukewarm water.”
“That’s an idea,” said Jim. “Eddie has all his keys with him. But he said I’d have no trouble getting in via the southeast cellar window, over the laundry tubs. There is a broken lock on that window. All we have to do is give a good shove and it opens.”
“I wonder if Eddie has a shower?” I asked.
“It’s his new house. I’ve never been in it,” said Jim. “But I suppose a modern house has at least one shower in its three or four bathrooms.”
“Me for a shower,” I said. “Good and hot. A slather of soap suds. Wash them off with a hot shower. And then, gradually, gradually, turn it cooler and cooler, until you have got it ice-cold, chilling you right to the marrow of your bones. Boy, I’d stay cool for forty-eight hours if I could get a good shower to-night.”
“Poor Eddie,” said Jim. “Sitting up there at his cottage, unable to enjoy the beauties of water and rock and sky, because he has the fidgets over this gas heater. I promised to call him long-distance to-night. He’ll sleep easy anyway.”
“Will we eat together to-night?” I asked.
“We can go to Eddie’s straight from downtown,” agreed Jim.
During the hot spells in summer Jim and I do not often eat supper together because we get on each other’s nerves. We can eat breakfast together fine. Lunch is not so good. But supper is generally fatal. Either I whine about the food or else Jimmie eats watermelon. I can’t bear to be in the same room with Jim when he eats watermelon. He thoops the seeds. He says he can’t get any kick out of watermelon unless he thoops the seeds. Thooping the seeds is sort of shooting them. Sometimes he shoots them at me. Or at a waitress. Or at a cup. It is like tiddly-winks, only worse. Jim just gets a kind of wild look in his eyes and starts thooping watermelon seeds, and all the begging, pleading and swearing in the world won’t stop him. It is only one of the mild insanities that we summer bachelors suffer from. Jim says I moan and sigh all summer. But it isn’t half as bad as thooping watermelon seeds. Don’t you think so?
“You choose the restaurant then,” I said. So we had a nice supper at a restaurant of Jim’s choosing. I paid the waitress 50 cents to say there was no watermelon. I ate tomato aspic jelly1, cucumbers and radishes, which left no cause for whining.
Jim had pickled pigs’ tails and French stick bread, his two pets.
And after supper we drove up to Eddie’s. Eddie lives on one of those streets of north Yonge street where all the houses try so hard to be different that they are all the same. One of those streets which are deserted from July 1 to August 31. No children, no dogs and rarely a poor deserted summer bachelor disturbs the grass grown silence of these streets. Blinds drawn, morning papers for the past three weeks lying rolled on the verandas. Vines heavy. Leaves drowsing.
“One-forty-seven,” said Jim, as I thrust the touring car smoothly along the silent evening street.
No. 147 was a very nice house. Its grass was cut. Its windows had not that neglected look of blinds long drawn.
“You can tell Eddie only went away yesterday,” I agreed. “Where would Eddie get the money for a house like this?”
“He got it on a mortgage,” said Jim. “Instead of putting the money he made in 1929 back into stocks he put it into mortgages.”
“Ah, wise guy,” I said, as we walked up Eddie’s side drive.
“No,” said Jim. “Religious. He doesn’t believe in gambling.”
Eddie’s garden was lovely.
“A man is a fool,” I said, “to raise a garden like this and then go away at the best of it to some dopey cottage up amongst the poison ivy and bracken.”
We found the southeast cellar window. We could see the laundry tubs below it dimly. And we set to work on it. Jimmie shoved. I shoved. We pushed with our feet. We got a clothes prop in the garden and pried.
“H’m,” said Jim, “if that lock is broken it’s a good one.”
So Jim got a piece of iron off the rose pergola and, using it as a jimmie, pried the window open, smashing the lock if it wasn’t smashed already.
We slid down, via the laundry tubs. We lighted matches and found the gas heater. It was off.
“Poor Eddie,” said Jim. “Just like him. Of course he turned it off. I never knew a man more careful. Yet I never knew a man that worried more.”
“Well,” I said, “no bath.”
“Why not?” cried Jimmie. “Eddie wouldn’t begrudge us a couple of baths. Not after he put us to all this trouble. Let’s light it. We can then go up and have a look at his library. He has some wonderful books. And guns! Say, let’s see his guns.”
So Jim scratched a match and lighted the big new-fangled gas heater, and then led me up the cellar stairs.
Through the kitchen and dining room we strolled, and the living room. The living room was walled with beautiful oil paintings, great, big, rich, gold-framed paintings of dim cows and obscure, little, squatty, dull buildings. Real art. Imported art. Art the Old Country got sick of and sold to the new world.
“Eddie sure has rich tastes,” I exclaimed.
“I never knew he went in for paintings,” said Jim. “I guess it must be his wife.”
Upstairs we proceeded, peeping into large spacious bedrooms with colored counterpanes on the beds and luscious walnut furniture.
“Ho, ho,” said Jim. “Eddie has certainly gone up in the world. No wonder he hasn’t had me out to his new house. He must be hobnobbing with the swells now. Last time I was in his house he had iron beds painted brown and no wallpaper on the walls. Just a young fellow making his way in the world.”
“Don’t Try Anything Funny”
We found the library, but it was only a little room. There was no great display of books. Just a set of twenty volumes of one of those correspondence courses which fits you to be anything from a chartered accountant to a railroad engineer. And a few books like “How to Think,” “How to Succeed,” “The Art of Living.”
“H’m,” said I.
“Eddie has a wonderful library,” said Jim. Probably he has it somewhere else, in the attic.”
But in the attic we found nothing much but an old bicycle carefully wrapped in brown paper, some children’s garden playthings like teeters, slides and so forth, also very carefully put away in paper.
“Eddie sure has grown careful,” surmized Jim. “I suppose once you start being a success in life you get canny about everything. Even worn-out toys.”
So we went downstairs again, and sat in the little library waiting for the water to get hot. Jim found a couple of towels in the linen cupboard. I skimmed through a couple of the large, brightly bound books on “How to Think.” They were pretty lousy.
“It is always a surprise,” said Jim, “to discover what your friends read.”
And after a little while Jim said the water was hot and that sure enough there was a shower. So, me first, we had a shower and felt invigorated after the cold sting of the water. We took our time drying and had a couple of smokes while I read Jim some of the elegant bits out of the “How to Think.” Then we dressed and went downstairs and as we started down the cellar steps Jim opened the ice-box door.
“Look at here,” he cried.
And the ice box was loaded with stuff, a ham, two or three heads of lettuce, some tins of anchovies, bottle of olives, cheese, butter.
“Let’s have a snack,” suggested Jimmie. “We’ll be doing them a favor eating this stuff up. People are fools to go away and leave a lot of perishables in the ice-box. I’ll tell Eddie he didn’t forget the gas heater, but his wife forgot the ice-box.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I could eat a few anchovies.”
So we spread out a little feast and were just sitting down to it when we heard a key in the front door.
“What the heck?” said Jim.
“Hello,” came a deep voice from the front hall. “Who’s that?”
“Who are you?” retorted Jim.
Heavy footsteps approached and in the kitchen door stood a large pale man.
“So,” he said, half in and half out, “caught red-handed, eh?”
“What do you want in here?” demanded Jim.
“What do I want?” said the pale man, grimly, “in my own house?”
“Whose house?” mumbled Jimmie, half-rising. “Your huh-why-whuh?”
“Sit down, my man,” warned the big chap and he came a little farther into the kitchen, revealing a golf stick with an iron head in his right hand. “Please sit right down, boys, and don’t try anything funny. I’m an old athlete myself.”
A Student of Psychology
“Isn’t this Mr. Eddie Bilby’s house?” asked Jimmie in a nervous voice.
“My, my,” said the large pale gentleman. “What a clever idea! Isn’t this Mr. Somebody’s house? Well, well!”
He edged a little farther into the kitchen, got a chair in front of him and hefted the golf club a little handier.
“If you wish,” I contributed, “we will go now.”
“Oh, no you won’t,” said the gentleman. “You make a move, either one of you, and you’ll leave here in an ambulance instead of a patrol wagon.
Jim stood up.
“I assure you,” began Jimmie.
“Pardon me-” I said.
“Shut up,” roared the big fellow. “If ever I had the ill fortune to encounter criminals I would not, as most people would, call the police. I would seize the opportunity to help them to try to show them the error of their ways. I am one who has little faith in penal institutions.”
He licked his lips, straightened up and sort of set himself as if to deliver an oration he had been preparing for twenty years.
“I,” he began, “am not one who believes in penal institutions, in the cruelty of imprisonment as a means of deterring crime. I have studied psychology. I realize that criminals are born, not made. You cannot help yourself. Your fault is biological. If God made you a crook, how then can you help being what you are? Will cruelty change God’s handiwork? No. A thousand times no.”
“Pardon the interruption-” I said, with dignity.
“Will you shut up?” cried the pale gentleman angrily. “Listen, I have looked forward to this opportunity for years, nobody will listen to my idea, but now you’re going to. So shut up. Or take the consequences. As I was saying, I can see you both belong to a low grade of intelligence. I have, as I say, studied psychology. I understand all the latest systems of intelligence tests. I have gone farther than most into the relation of physiognomy and the outward manifestations of a low mental grade. At a glance I can tell, with reasonable accuracy, the intelligence rating of the average man. That is why I am successful in my chosen profession of life insurance. Now, as I say, I can tell your rating. I see you are of a low mental grade. But does that fill me with loathing of you? Not at all. Not at all.”
How To Cure Crime
“Then,” I began.
“One more crack out of you,” he snarled, “and I’ll forget my humanity send for the police. Now, shut up. As I say, I am inspired by your obvious handicap not to imprison you, not to clap you into jail, not to subject you to the senseless cruelty of our so-called system of justice, but to try to aid you, to exhort and persuade you. In a word, I hope, having you at this disadvantage, to prove to you that the path you are following cannot help but lead you to disaster. Whereas if you follow the path of truth and honesty, you will avoid all trouble with constituted authority.”
He cleared his throat. He shifted the chair aside, so that he could stand forth before us, with one leg bent and his arm raised in a gesture, one finger pointing upward.
“What,” he said, in a deep thrilling voice, his pale face paler with passion and his eyes looking far off and blazing with an inward light, “what profiteth it a man that he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? In this instance, how could you gain the whole world? At most you might have got a few objects of silver, maybe a valuable painting or two which you could not dispose of without grave risk? Yet for this pittance, this husks that the swine do eat, you two poor chaps have risked your souls.”
A dull boom sounded. A faint thud and shudder shook the room. The orator paused and listened. We heard a hissing sound.
“Eddie’s boiler,” said Jim.
“What did you say your friend’s name is?” asked the reformer, narrowly.
“Mr. Eddie Bilby,” said Jim. “At No. 147.”
“This.” said the reformer, a little dejectedly, “is No. 149. I don’t know the gentleman next door. He only moved in six months ago. Is he a shortish man with a bald head?”
“Yes, and has three children, two girls and a boy,” said Jimmie.
“It sounds like him,” said the pale gentleman, licking his lips regretfully.
We hastened out. We had taken the wrong house. Through Eddie’s cellar window, with a match, we saw billows of steam.
So, reversing the charges, we telephoned Eddie from the gentleman’s house next door.
And then the gentleman took us upstairs to his den, with the twenty volumes of success and “How to Think” and he told us his views about how to cure crime, and from there we got on to the Hepburn2 government and the banking system of Canada and they general condition of the world.
Which is one of the various ways summer bachelors spend their evenings.
Editor’s Notes:
This story was repeated on August 21, 1943 with the same title.
- This is a very old-fashioned recipe that is not often made anymore. It is tomatoes, celery, and parsley in gelatin. ↩︎
- Mitch Hepburn, the Premier of Ontario at the time. ↩︎