Tag: Repairs Page 1 of 2

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 23, 1935.

“There are, say, about fifty guys in the world,” said Jimmie Frise, “who know whether there is going to be war and who’s to be in it. Fifty guys. A few politicians, a few big bankers and generals. The rest of us three or four hundred millions in Europe and America just sit back and wait.”

“I’m sorry, Jim,” I confessed. “But the people chose them.”

“So they just leave things to them,” went on Jim. “They chose them, of course, because of their great interest in their welfare, didn’t they? They elected all those big international financiers and statesmen and generals, didn’t they? They went through the highways and by-ways of the world, seeking the most upright, gentle, kindly and humane of all men. And these they set up at their head, and said, brother, lead us in green pastures, beside the still waters.¹“

“Not exactly that way.” I agreed.

“No,” cried Jim. “Not exactly. But by reason of their brain-power, their hunger for wealth and influence, their incentive, as they call it; by reason of the drive and fury and cleverness, they chose themselves, rose up, fighting, scheming, battling, manoeuvring, gathering, amassing and hoarding, until they became the leaders, whether they were politicians or generals or super business men.”

“Aw, Jimmie,” I complained, “you’re bitter.”

“Bitter?” asked Jim. “Bitter? Oh, no. I’m just so happy that all over the world. there are such unselfish, humanitarian gentlemen at the controls of the human race.”

“How can people get a more tender type of man to be their rulers?” I demanded.

“If I knew,” said Jim, “I would tell you.”

“Well, then,” I shouted, “what do you suppose people can do about it? I don’t want a war any more than anybody else. But how can you stop them?”

“If I knew,” said Jim, “I would tell you.”

“It gives me an awful pessimistic feeling,” I submitted.

“You are a student of Nature,” began Jimmie, sitting back. “You spend all the time you can out on the good earth, looking at the birds, the trees, the flowers. I have seen you, almost like a simpleton, standing watching just the seasons coming and going. You love the good earth. It is a religion to you.”

“Yes,” I breathed.

“Very well,” said Jim. “In your interest and devotion to Nature, are you one of those who thinks we humans are outside Nature. Do you think we are something separate from Nature, and that Nature is only a sort of picture, at which we, from the outside, gaze?”

“Nature is God,” I said.

“Or do you think we humans are part of Nature itself,” questioned Jim; “that we are right inside the frame of that picture, part with the animals, the birds, the trees, the good earth itself?””

“That is the way I try to feel,” I admitted. “That is why I stand, if you like, like a simpleton, just feeling, feeling the seasons come and go. Come and go.”

Fighting Off the Facts

“I’ve got that feeling lately,” said Jim, gently. “This last while, with all the wars and confusions and muddles we humans are in, I have developed the notion within my own heart, that after all, we are only an item in Nature, and that now Nature’s laws are in process of working on us.”

“How?” I asked.

“Except in us humans,” said Jim, “the law of life is the law of the jungle. But we shouldn’t call it the law of the jungle. Because the law of the jungle also applies to the song birds in Muskoka and the mice in York county; we deceive ourselves when we talk, solemnly, about the law of the jungle, because that makes it seem far away. It is right here. In our gardens. The terrible, basic, stark law of Nature, the survival of the fittest.”

“And how do we come into it?” I inquired.

Because we humans,” said Jim, “are in the picture of Nature, too. And Nature’s laws govern us before any other laws. For some two or three thousand years, we have been artificially fighting off the facts by endlessly, struggling to prove that we are better than beasts, that there is something higher and nobler in us, that we are, after all, outside the grim grip of Nature.”

“And we aren’t?” I asked.

“We aren’t,” said Jim. “I show you the whole round world to prove it. In this age of grace, here we are looting and destroying and enslaving. Despite all the ruins of beauty two thousand years old, we are smashing and destroying again just like the Goths and Vandals who made those ruins, two thousand years ago. You can’t beat Nature. Nature has us in her grip.”

“This is terribly pessimistic, Jim,” I groaned.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jimmie. “Maybe we weren’t ever intended to be civilized. Maybe all this war and international confusion is just Nature’s patient way of sending us back to the good earth again, to dwell in caves and rude huts again, and to take our place in the good old natural struggle against bears and sabre-tooth tigers, and to hunt the mammoth.”

“The bees live in communities, Jim,” I pointed out, “and they have no wars.”

“And no politics, either,” explained Jimmie. “And they don’t elect their queen bee, either. She doesn’t rise up to enslave all her fellow bees. She’s born. God creates her. She hatches from the egg a different shape and size, bigger, more beautifully colored. She is queen by Nature’s decree, not the bees’.”

“Then it is not a case of going back to the land,” I suggested.

“Not at all,” said Jim. “It is going back to the jungle. Give us another great big slaughter of a war, another completely smashing and exhausting war, and about ninety-nine per cent. of us will be glad to throw together a valise full of blankets, pails and frying pans and beat it forever from so-called civilization to live alone, in isolated families, in some secret, safe forest. That is where Nature raised us. We left it of our own free will. We worked out a scheme called civilization. It wasn’t Nature’s idea. If Nature had that idea, she would have worked it out with some of her other creatures. So now we are headed back to where we belong.”

To Abandon Civilization

“Will you come and see me sometimes, Jimmie?” I asked. “Maybe we could get a couple of forests not too far apart. Let’s arrange a series of whistles and signals so that we can find one another once in a while. We could pass our signals down to our children so that a Clark would never fling a spear into a Frise, as they lurk through the jungle.”

“Maybe we could both go to the same. forest.” thought Jimmie. “You and your kids take one end of it, and I and my kids. would take the other.”

“It would never do, Jim,” I explained. “Sooner or later, it would come to a blood feud, and your great grandchildren would slay mine, or vice versa. The way it is now, the birds in Muskoka arrive on their ancestral nesting grounds, and they fight, even the tiny little white-throated sparrows that sing ‘Poor old Canada, Canada, Canada’, even these bright, tiny birds fight like demons amongst themselves until, by the time the nests are to be built, no two birds occupy the same feeding range of so many acres of bush. I have seen deadly battles between wrens, tiny brown wrens. All because they could not both nest in the same section of bush. There wasn’t enough feed in that one area of bush to support two families of wrens. Now Nature knows just how much woods a wren needs for its bailiwick. And Nature decrees that these wrens shall fight to the death, if necessary, until only one wren remains to nest. That’s Nature. And it isn’t in any jungle, either. It’s in every beautiful glade in Muskoka and all over the great big world.”

“Well,” said Jim sadly, “when the time comes for us to abandon civilization and head back for the bush, we can at least go part way together. We might go up Yonge St. as far as Orillia together.”

So we sat, brooding on the imminent end of a life-long friendship.

“Speaking of war,” said Jim, at length, “I have to lay a new concrete floor in my cellar. I was out getting the cement and stuff last night. And I was just thinking, hadn’t I better build a sort of concrete pill box in my cellar while I am at it? For air raids, and so forth.”

“And earthquakes, too,” I pointed out. “A good concrete vault in the cellar might prove a very handy item if these earthquakes become a habit around here.”

“War and earthquakes,” mused Jim. “The two things we can’t control. In the face of these two great manifestations of Nature, man can do nothing but fall back wholly on himself. What good are communities, cities, states, when an earthquake or a war strikes? Nothing. It is each poor little man for himself, just the same as in the jungle.”

“My dear boy, in war,” I protested, “men are in mass.”

“Yet every man is all alone,” stated Jim. “When you die, it is a solitary business. There is little or no satisfaction that ten other men are dying with you.”

“I fail to see it,” I declared. “It was just to defeat these disasters of war and earth- quake and what not that man invented the social idea and formed communities, instead of facing life lonely and alone, each in his separate den, like bears, in the jungle.”

“The deadliest feature of society,” propounded Jimmie, “is that masses of innocent men are swept away in the passion of war; and as far as earthquakes go I imagine you could survive it by yourself, but think of the dreadful battle in a great city to secure food and drinking water, just the simple essentials, after a real good earthquake? No, sir, either for war or earthquake, I would rather have a concrete pill box in the back areas of Muskoka than live on the finest avenue in Toronto. I think I’ll build me a pill box.”

“It might almost pay you,” I agreed. “About the safest place I ever was in in the war was a German pill box at Passchendaele. It was sunk in the ground almost to ceiling level. Its walls were five feet solid concrete and its roof was seven feet solid concrete. No shell could ever smash it.”

“Did any shells hit it while you were in it?” asked Jim.

“Several,” I said. “They sounded like somebody dropping a boot upstairs, that’s all.”

“What were you doing in the pill box?” asked Jim idly.

“Well, it sounds silly, but I had a typewriter,” I said, “and I was typing out the recommendation for Tommie Holmes’ V.C.”

“How quaint,” said Jim. “In a war, sitting in a pill box, with a typewriter, typing out a recommendation.”

“In septuplicate, too,” I added. “Six carbon copies and one original. In a pill box. In the mud. With shells landing on the top and sounding like a boot dropped upstairs.”

Nice Concrete Porridge

“War,” said Jimmie, “is silly.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but now that my memory recaptures that scene, twenty years ago, I was just figuring how you would build that heavy concrete pill box. We ought to remember things like that, Jim. We might need them some day again.”

“How would you like to come over tonight,” asked Jim, “and help me mix concrete for my cellar floor?”

“Nothing,” I said, “would please me better.”

So I got out my muskie fishing overalls and old boots and went over to Jim’s after supper where he had suspended the start of operations until I should arrive.

Jim had built a concrete mixing box in the yard. It was like a mortar mixing box, of planks, about six feet square and a foot high. I explained to Jim that the way concrete was really mixed was in a machine. But Jim solved that by showing me he had bought a new quick-drying cement that dried in a very short while, and you mixed fine sand with it to make it the consistency you required.

So Jim arranged that, while I mixed and stirred the concrete, he would hod² it down to the cellar and spread it.

It was a fine starry night. We flung in bags of sand and bags of cement, and stirred in water with the hose. We made a nice porridge of concrete, and colored it with red powder from another bag. Jim had a little cup to test the proper thickness of the mixture.

“If it stands up, it is too thick,” said Jim. “If it smears down, it is too thin, but if it just sags a little, it is just right.”

So while Jim tested, I stirred, and finally we got just the right mixture of cement, sand and water, and Jim proceeded to carry the hod down into his brightly lighted cellar.

Up and down he trotted, while I stirred and stirred. In between hod trips, I tried, under the stars, a few little designs of pill boxes and bombproof shelters of one kind and another. I scooped out small handfuls of the concrete and moulded the little fortifications on Jimmie’s lawn.

About the tenth trip Jim made down the cellar, I was stooping down with a sort of ultra-modern design of a pill box, for dealing with poison gas as well as bombs and shells, when I inadvertently backed up against the board wall of the concrete mixing box.

And in a second, I had toppled backwards into the soggy cement. I sank a foot. I rolled over, keeping my chin above the heavy, boggy mixture, and got my elbows on the bottom and heaved.

But in rolling over. I had gathered my overalls a heavy load of the cement and it weighed me down.

“Jimmie,” I shouted loudly. “Jimmie.”

Jim came up the cellar steps.

“Quick, Jim,” I shouted. “It’s drying.”

And Jim rushed and took a grip my head and dragged me out of the box.

Wonderful Discovery

“What the heck?” he asked.

“I tripped, and fell in,” I explained.

“Well, it seems to be pretty dry, why haven’t you been stirring it?” demanded Jim. “Quick, come down cellar till we get your clothes off.”

Like a knight in heavy armor, I waddled to the cellar stairs and eased myself down. I was carrying about six inches of concrete all over me, except my head. My feet were the heaviest.

“Snappy,” said Jim. “It’s drying. And the heat of your body is helping it. This new-fangled concrete dries fast.”

I felt no panic. I reached the cellar and took my time selecting a good spot to undress, off Jim’s freshly laid floor.

“O.k.,” I said. “Unbutton the top button of my overalls, Jim.”

Jim shoved his hands into the concrete and I felt him fumbling for the button. My own hands were useless, encased in huge boxing gloves of the stuff.

Then I felt Jim starting to grab and fumble faster and faster and I looked at his face. It was white.

“It’s hardened,” he gasped. “Wait till I get a hammer or something.”

But by the time Jimmie had failed to find his hammer and had called at two neighbors until he borrowed one, I was encased in solid concrete from head to foot.

“My dear chap,” Jim groaned, as he beheld me, solidly rooted into the fresh concrete of his new floor.

“Jim,” I said, “get busy. Get a chisel. Get some stone masons. Phone the Labor Temple³. Get a bomb.”

Jim was hammering at me. It was vain. It was idle. His blows did not sound even like a little girl’s slipper falling to the floor in the room above.

“Jim,” I said, “on second thought, I tell you what you do. Go and get a hod of that concrete upstairs and pour it over my head. Encase me. Mummify me. Seal me up forever, and then at last I will be safe against all bombs and shells and poison gas and everything.”

“I wish,” said Jim, “I had never talked the way I did. Can you stand it until I go and get help?”

“I feel a great peace,” I stated.

And as I stood there, waiting for Jim to return with a squad of concrete workers and masons with mallets and roadworkers with those automatic machines for chopping up pavement. I thought how wonderful was my discovery!

“All we need,” I mused, “is a bag of this rapid-drying cement in the cellar of every house, one bag per member of a family. And a gas mask each. And the instant the alarm is sounded, everybody dive for the cellar, mix up a batch of concrete, bathe in it, adjust the nozzle of the gas mask in the mouth, pour the last hodful over the head and, presto – a personal pill box, a private, intimate fortress. And let the enemy do his worst, he cannot reach us in our final and complete individuality.”

But Jim just brought one man with him, a little old man in an old frayed sweater coat: and he, with a little electric buzzer sort of thing, cut a few cuts in the concrete and peeled it off me like peeling an orange.

“Jim,” I said, “our fortunes are made.”

But I didn’t tell him about it yet, because I want to have it patented.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. From the Bible, Psalm 23. ↩︎
2. A hod is a three-sided box mounted on a pole for carrying bricks, mortar, or other construction materials over the shoulder. ↩︎
3. A Labor Temple is in reference to a building like a community centre that houses labour unions. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 3, 1942.

“It’s time,” uttered Jimmie Frise, “that we quit thinking that machines were going to win this war.”

“You must admit,” I pointed out, “that airplanes and tanks and machine tools are playing an important part.”

“Nothing,” declared Jim firmly, “nothing but brains will win this war and it is time we woke up to that fact. Machines are all very well. But look at them. All over the deserts of the world, all over the jungles, the beaches, the mountains, the machines are strewn in tangled and rusty wreckage. And where are we? Just about where we started. Both sides. Machines nearly won the war in 1940 when the Germans overran France and just about blitzed Britain to pieces. But nearly isn’t enough. Something bigger than machines beat them.”

“Was it brains?” I inquired bitterly.

“No, it wasn’t brains,” admitted Jim, “but it was the next thing to them – the human spirit. The blind human spirit, which needs only brains to make it supreme over fate itself.”

“The best brains in all countries,” I asserted, “have been devoted to the production of machines as being the winning factor in this great struggle.”

“It occurs to me,” stated Jimmie, “that it was not the best brains of all countries but merely the most highly paid brains of all countries that filled us full of this machine war stuff. I imagine the biggest paid brains in the world, in Germany, France, Britain and America, were these hired by the machine making industries of the world before the outbreak of war. The minute war loomed, these bimboes immediately saw the opportunity for themselves as well as for their industries. So they put on a powerful campaign to convince us that their machines would win the war for us.”

“I must admit,” I confessed, “that there was a decided similarity in the early stages of the war between propaganda and big business advertising. After all, you would hardly expect the board of directors of a big machinery industry to sit back and let moujiks win the war with clubs and pitchforks.”

“We let the wrong kind of brains,” declared Jim, “lead us into this war and the wrong kind of brains are still selling us machinery. The Japs only use machinery where 1,000 or 10,000 human lives won’t do the job better and cheaper. We go on the theory that a $50,000 machine is cheaper than one human life.”

Hypnotized by Machines

“Isn’t that so?” I demanded indignantly.

“Yes, it is so,” said Jim. “But meanwhile will it win the war? My own idea is that nobody above the rank of foreman should be allowed to have any further share in the war thinking. Let us get rid of all presidents, chairmen of the board, general managers, managers and even superintendents. To date, in all countries, these have loused things up good.”

“It is merely silly,” I declared, “to think that it is not a machine war. What gave the Germans command of France in 40 days in 1940? Simply this: that they had 11 armored divisions and we had only one.”

“If we had had any brains,” countered Jim, “we could have starved and gunned those 11 divisions into eternity in 10 days. All we had to do, about May 15, 1940, once we saw what those 11 armored German divisions were doing, was to bring ashore a British admiral.”

“An admiral?” I protested.

“Yes, a British admiral,” said Jimmie, “and appoint him generalissimo of the Allied forces. Because we knew by May 15 that all that was happening was that 11 flotillas of battleships were loose in the land. A British admiral would have figured the thing out in one night. By noon of May 16, the British army would have been converted into a seagoing institution. The artillery of the British army would have been converted into tank hunters – as they are in Libya today – and the British infantry would have been converted into an organization to serve the guns. There would not have been a German tank in France by May 30.”

“You’re very wise after the fact,” I snooted.

“All we did,” declared Jim, “was spread our infantry out, as in the Boer or Crimean war, and put our artillery back of them to support them. It was pie for tanks. All we had to do was to turn our infantry into a tank-seeking force whose only other job, after locating the tanks, was to act as horses, mules and human tractors, to drag those guns to where they could shoot tanks. It was that simple. But nobody could think simply. They were hypnotized by machines.”

“I’m willing to bet you,” I informed him, “that it will be a machine – a new, astonishing. revolutionary machine, that will win this war.”

“What will win this war,” retorted Jimmie, “is more likely to be something as simple and homely and old-fashioned as Aunt Sally’s cranberry pie.”

“Cranberry pie?” I exclaimed.

“We’ll be at Aunt Sally’s,” said Jim glancing at his wrist watch, “in five minutes. And within five minutes more, I bet you we will be sitting at the kitchen table eating a quarter of a cranberry pie each.”

“She keeps them handy?” I suggested,

“From now on,” said Jim dreamily, “Aunt Sally always has cranberry pies in the pantry. She makes them with the open face you know: with strips of pastry across, instead of the usual lid on a pie. It’s a great wonder to me that cranberry pie is not equally popular in Canada with blueberry pie. The cranberry is an even more widely distributed berry than the blueberry. You find cranberries from coast to coast and right up to the Arctic Circle. And, boy, do they taste good, with their queer, tangy, wild flavor!”

“They’re the perfect autumn flavor,” I agreed. “I bet a cranberry has more vitamins in it than alfalfa.”

“It is my private opinion,” declared Jim, “that wild ducks, robins and geese and all the birds that have to fly to the Gulf of Mexico, eat a few cranberries before setting out. And that’s what gives them the pep to go that awful journey through space and storm.”

And in less than five minutes we were in Aunt Sally’s side drive and rapping at her side-door.

“Mercy, Jim,” she cried when she opened the door. “It’s you, and I haven’t a cranberry pie in the house!”

“Nonsense,” said Jim, heartily, “it wasn’t for cranberry pie we came to see you. We just happened to be passing this way…”

“It’s a queer thing,” said Aunt Sally, taking our hats and coats and pulling out kitchen chairs for us, “but you never happen past my house except in October and November.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Jimmie.

“I’ll go out right away,” said Aunt Sally, “and get some cranberries. I’ve got to go out and do a little shopping anyway…”

But before she went she had to sit down and chat for a while. She had to get all the family news from Jim since last November, almost.

Aunt Sally is one of those ladies who talk best while resting their elbows on the table. And in chatting with her, it is best to rest your elbows on the table too. It is the natural attitude for the kind of intimate. easy gossip of which Aunt Sally is mistress.

“Drat this table,” exclaimed Aunt Sally, as she rested her elbows. “It’s got one short leg and it keeps wobbling around.”

“Put a bit of paper under the short leg,” said Jim.

“I do, but I sweep it up when I’m redding up,” said Aunt Sally, stooping over to examine the defective leg.

“All tables,” stated Jimmie, “should have only three legs. No table needs more than three legs. But they always put four legs on a table, and in the course of time one leg warps and you’ve got to joggle in it.”

To Cure the Wobble

So we all three rested our elbows on it, which held it more or less solid except when one or the other of us lifted our weight for a minute, and then the table interrupted the flow of whoever was talking at the moment by giving a sharp little tip and making a bump with its shortest leg.

“Drat the thing,” repeated Aunt Sally, rising and getting her hat. “I’ve been going to nail a little piece of shingle on that short leg for the past 10 years. Now, boys, I’ll only be 15 minutes. And when I come back you can sort the cranberries while I mix the pastry, and it won’t be half an hour before we have a cranberry pie. And a fine pot of tea.”

And she bustled off, without Jimmie even offering to drive her up to the corner in his car.

“I figure,” said Jim, when she slammed the door, “we can fix her table for her while she’s out.”

So he opened the pantry drawers and found a hammer, saw, a tin of assorted nails. And after exploring around the back kitchen and the yard, we found a small piece of a cigar box lid which had been used to cover a knothole in the back fence.

“We’ll use this,” said Jim. “I remember nailing this piece of cigar box on that very knothole 30 years ago. It was to keep a lot of little girls who lived next door then from spying on our Indian camp we had here in Aunt Sally’s yard.”

We turned the table over, with its legs in the air, and with my sharp penknife whittled the piece of cigar box into a disc just the right size to fit over the defective leg of the table. By testing carefully, we had determined it was the northeast leg that was short. With two small tacks we nailed the disc on the leg and then reversed the table to its normal position.

“Worse than ever,” declared Jim, as we tried the table. It joggled now in three directions instead of one. Now it has three short legs.”

So we turned the table over on its back again and studied the problem.

“Let’s,” I suggested, “cut a thin slice off all three other legs, to bring them to the same length as the warped one.”

“Why didn’t we think of that at first?” cried Jim, seizing the saw.

“Careful to get it flat across,” I warned, holding the leg while Jim worked the saw and got it to start its bite into the old dry wood of the table leg.

After one slice, the others came easy. A saw is like that. It soon understands what you require of it. And we took a neat slice off the three legs and reversed the table in to its feet again.

We touched it and it teetered like a seesaw.

“Good heavens,” I said.

“We must have cut the short one by mistake,” worked out Jim.

It was obvious, on examination, that that is exactly what we had done: for now we had one very long leg, two medium long legs and one very short leg, which had been the short one.

“Okay,” said Jim, upturning the table again, “we’ll measure them this time. We’ll do it scientifically.”

With the broom-handle we measured the shortest leg, marked the length with a pencil, and then checked off an equal length on the three other legs, to get them all the same.

“Make it snappy,” I warned Jim. “Let’s have it done before Aunt Sally gets back.”

Jim sliced off the three discs in record time. And we turned the table back on its legs feeling sure the problem was solved.

“Heck,” said Jim heatedly.

For there was a worse wobble than ever. From whatever side you touched the table it teetered.

We got down on hands and knees and studied the situation.

“I think,” I offered, that you’ve got them on the slant. You can see each leg is sort of standing on tip toe.”

“It still shouldn’t wobble,” said Jim, giving it a nasty push.

“Measure them up again,” I said resolutely. “This time let me do the sawing. I’m shorter. I can see what I am doing better than you.”

Again we upturned the table. And after carefully measuring the leg lengths with the broom-handle, marking the length of the shortest leg on each of the others, I set to work and sawed off, net a thin wafer, as Jim had tried to do, but a good substantial chunk.

“We’ll have enough for croquinole.” muttered Jim, anxiously, as he watched me at work.

When Dee Dee, Aunt Sally’s little dog, scratched at the kitchen door we knew we were in for it. Aunt Sally pushed the door open and promptly dropped all her parcels.

“My grief,” she gasped.

“We were only trying to even off the legs,” said Jimmie eagerly. “You said you…”

“It isn’t the legs,” cried Aunt Sally brokenly. “It’s the top that has warped. You would never get them level by sawing the legs even.”

“Well, who ever would have thought of that?” exclaimed Jimmie indignantly. “Anybody would imagine that a table that wobbled had a short leg…”

“It’s never a short leg,” snorted Aunt Sally angrily. “It’s always a warped top. Anybody that knows anything about tables would know that.”

“Which teaches us,” I chimed in, “never to meddle with things we don’t know anything about.”

“Like tables?” said Jimmie. “Then what do we know about?”

“Oh, wars and things,” I sighed, putting the saw back on its hook in the pantry.

So we sorted the cranberries while Aunt Sally, with many a backward look at the sorely stunted table, mixed the pie crust on the cupboard edge.

And while the two pies were in the oven Jimmie and I went three doors south to Mr. Dimmick, the carpenter and cabinet-maker, and arranged with his wife for him to come up after supper and organize four new legs for Aunt Sally’s kitchen table.

---

Editor’s Notes: Moujiks are a term for Russian peasants.

“Redding up” is an old term meaning to wash up, or tidy.

Croquinole, or Crokinole, is a disc flicking board game from Canada.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, January 25, 1941.

“The funniest thing,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the effect the uniform has on men.”

“I’d be as proud as a rooster,” I informed him, “if they’d let me back into it.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Jimmie. “What I mean is, some of the finest looking men, the minute they put on uniform, look like tramps. And some of the dowdiest looking men of my acquaintance, as soon as they don uniform, turn out to be Adonises.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” I explained. “The uniform is standardized. Thus, the guy who could cover up his physical imperfections as to shoulders or legs by choosing artfully tailored clothes is shown up in his true light when he puts on uniform. And many a man who is physically perfection has never had the taste or the money to buy the clothes that would show him off.”

“Besides, in uniform,” said Jim, “you can’t slouch around. I think good appearance is mostly a matter of tidiness anyway. It isn’t the quality of the clothes. It’s the way you keep them.”

“The reason I wear such loud clothes,” I confided, “is because I am really so shy. I want people to look at my clothes, rather than at me, see?”

“Who ever would have thought of that?” cried Jim. “I bet you were a funny looking soldier.”

“Before I got to France.” I admitted, “my size kind of caused a snicker. I was only five foot two and seven-eighths. And I only weighed 106 pounds and 11 ounces.”

“You have the fractions,” said Jim.

“A man my size always has to use the fractions,” I pointed out. “But once I got to France there were no more snickers. I am told that plenty of big 200-pound comrades of mine used to say their prayers at night in the trenches and ask God to make them little like me.”

“I guess small men are handiest in war,” agreed Jim. “But suppose you had been a private soldier. How would you have got a uniform to fit you?”

“I was a private soldier,” I informed him. “For six weeks. By that time they couldn’t find a uniform small enough, so they made me a lieutenant and told me to go and buy my own uniform.”

“So that’s why so many famous generals are small men,” exclaimed Jimmie.

“Listen,” I said, “do you realize why I have worked so hard all my life? Do you know what boiled me full of ambition to make money? Just the fact that in Toronto street cars my feet do not touch the floor when I am sitting on the seats. So I just had to have a motor car. You have no idea what a spur it is to be a runt.”

“You don’t wear high heels,” remarked Jim, studying my boots.

“No, sir,” I assured him. “When you are a shorty, the trick is to pretend you don’t care. The smartest thing to do is to wear clothes that accentuate your shortness.”

We’re All Self-Conscious

“What the heck,” scoffed Jimmie. “Who cares how big you are? Anyway, who looks at you?”

“Oh, we’re all self-conscious about something,” I declared. “Big men are often more self-conscious than little men. I once had a big man six feet four and 300 pounds of muscle tell me almost in tears about how self-conscious he was. He said every time there was a dog-fight or whenever a drunk made a scene on a street car, everybody looked at him in expectation. He is scared of dogs and hates drunks. He is just a big, shy man. Yet whenever there is any trouble, the whole world looks to him to make a hero of himself.”

“By George, I never thought of that,” said Jim.

“He said he got so he was scared to go out, scared to walk the street, scared to go anywhere,” I described, “for fear of some trouble arising that everybody would expect him to deal with because of his size. That’s being self-conscious.”

“Nobody would ever expect you to jump in and stop a fight,” agreed Jim.

“And that’s why, if I do jump in, I’m a heck of a hero,” I explained. “You don’t know what an awful temptation it is to a little man to jump in and be a hero. That’s what makes us self-conscious. Self-consciousness, after all, is just fear. What we are scared of makes us self-conscious. If I am scared of being poor, I try to look rich. And if I am scared people will find out I am rich, I try to look poor. Life is very complicated.”

“It sure is,” admitted Jimmie. “But the good old uniform makes life a lot simpler for a great many of us. Personally, I wasn’t a bad looking soldier.”

“You’re one of those men, Jim,” I confessed, “who looks the same whether he is in a business suit, a pair of overalls or a nightshirt.”

“I wore overalls,” said Jimmie, “the first 16 years of my life, around the farm. And I’m proud of it.”

“So you should be,” I stated. “In fact, one of my Christmas presents this year was a suit of overalls. $2.95. I bought them myself and sent them up to the house anonymously.”

“What the dickens do you want overalls for?” demanded Jim.

“They are the greatest things in the world,” I informed him, “for fishing, rabbit shooting, gardening and pattering around the car. They are warm. They keep rain off you. They keep you clean. But, most of all, they have a curious psychic effect on people like me. My ancestors all wore overalls. And the minute I put mine on, I suddenly feel capable. All my city-bred helplessness vanishes. This past month I have learned more about the engine in my car than I ever learned before. Why? Because I had overalls on. And my mind seemed to work.”

“Such stuff,” said Jim.

“It’s a fact, Jim,” I assured him. “Clothes make the man. Dress up in a tuxedo with a white stiff shirt and light evening pumps on and you suddenly are infused with a feeling of elegance. You walk with conscious pride. You are witty. Your tongue grows nimble. Your whole being has a swing and a lilt to it.”

“It’s a fact,” admitted Jimmie.

“Put on your oldest clothes,” I continued, “a little ragged, a little skimpy and bulged at the knees, and you feel lazy and dopey and listless. When I put on my overalls I suddenly feel mechanical. I go all artizany. I seem to feel strong muscles in my forearms and my hands get rough.”

“Hold on, hold on,” begged Jimmie.

“I am filled with a sense of capability,” I insisted, “of knowledge of hammers and saws. I can pick up a hammer in my ordinary business clothes and I go all kind of helpless. With overalls on, I can pick up a hammer and feel as if I had been born with a hammer in my hand.”

“You’re a Jekyll and Hyde,” said Jim.

“We can all be Jekyll and Hydes,” I declared, “with a few changes of clothes.”

A Man in Overalls

“How would you like to give me a demonstration of this miracle in your overalls?” demanded Jim.

“Any time,” I assured him.

“Well, it’s like this,” said Jim. “Last November I put the storm windows on without washing them. The family was at me every day and I kept putting it off on account of the deer hunting and one thing and another.”

“One of the things I don’t feel like,” I interrupted, “is putting on storm windows in my overalls. It only applies to the mechanical arts, like engines, carpentering and so on.”

“Wait till I explain,” said Jim. “So one Saturday, when the folks were all out, I got the urge and put the storm windows all on. But it seems I should have had them washed first. The family, which wanted me to put them up so badly, hadn’t washed the windows. They were going to do that whenever I got in the mood to put them up. So there was an awful row.”

“If it’s done, it’s done,” I assured him.

“No,” said Jim; “they were pretty bad when I put them up, but they’re worse now. They’ve got to come down.”

“If you put them up without help,” I inquired, “why do you need a man in overalls to help you take them down?”

“Okay,” said Jim, “okay, if you don’t want to lend a hand to a friend. And this is wartime, too.”

“Storm windows are silly, Jim,” I said. “You should have your house insulated.”

“Okay,” said Jim, “okay. Never mind.”

“It would only be to put my overalls on,” I said, “if I did lend you a hand.”

“Like a fool,” said Jim, “I broadcast all over the house that I would take the windows down and wash them myself. If it was just to take them down I wouldn’t ask any help. But when they came home and found I had put them up right out of the cellar, all dusty and grimey, I announced that I would take them down and wash them.”

“Aw, they won’t hold you to that,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, they will,” replied Jim. “You can’t brag around my house.”

“Well,” I said.

So we quit at 3 in the afternoon and I went home and put my overalls on. I keep them in the attic closet, where I can go and try them on now and then when none of my children are around. I have also worn them quite a bit working on the car, shovelling the snow, putting up some new bird feeding houses in the yard, and anything I can think of. They are my most exciting Christmas present, even if I did send them up anonymously.

They give you a nice, broadlegged feeling when you get them on.

“You look better than I’ve ever seen you look,” declared Jim when I walked down his sidedrive in them. “You look kind of … natural.”

“Thanks, Jim,” I said. “I knew you wouldn’t kid me.”

Jim got a pail of hot water, a chamois, some rags and a scrub brush. We carried out the stepladder and started on the front living-room windows. Jim would climb up and unbutton the window and pry it out of the frame. Then I would draw the bottom out and take hold and lower it down. In overalls, you grab hold of things with your arms and chest, in a most businesslike fashion, because the more dirt you get on your overalls, the better they are.

On that same principle, I took the lead in the washing of them, because a little soapy water splashed on my overalls would only increase their beauty.

“Well,” said Jim, “you’re right. I never saw such a change in anybody in my life.”

“Here y’are,” I said, with a rowdy, window cleaner air. And I handed him up the beautifully polished window and he slipped it into the frame and I banged it home with a good strong, rough hand.

The Magic Garment

We had got pretty well along with the front windows when the elderly lady who lives right opposite Jim came across the road and up the walk.

“I suppose,” she said, “you’ll be all day at this job?”

“We won’t be done before dark, ma’am, “I assured her.

Jimmie came down off the stepladder and joined us. He didn’t have overalls. All he had on was his old fishing clothes.

“Can you do mine starting tomorrow at 8 a.m.?” she inquired crisply.

She was so sharp and businesslike, I thought Jimmie had certainly got on the most amiable relations with his neighbors.

“And how much,” she inquired shrewdly, “do you charge? Is it by the window or by the hour?”

I looked at Jim to let him in on the joke.

But he was just standing staring at the lady with a puzzled frown.

“Well, usually, madam,” I said, “we charge by the window. We measure the window in square inches, and…”

“Nonsense,” said the lady, very choppy; “I have it done each year, the whole house, for $6. I’ll give you $6 and no more.”

“What do you say, Jim?” I hedged, feeling he should be in the neighborly fun.

“Well, aw, ugh,” said Jim, changing position and standing more squarely in front of the lady so she could get a look at him.

She glanced at him briefly, but looked at once back to me as though I were the one to deal with.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said, and you certainly do a good job. My windows don’t really require a second washing at this season of the year. But I have decided that you do so thorough a job I will have you do mine. Come. When will it be? Tomorrow? That will suit me best. And I will pay $7, seeing it is winter.”

“Aw, er, wuh,” said Jimmie, smiling broadly and opening his coat to show his business collar and shirt underneath.

“Well, ma’am,” I said, “we are busy tomorrow, but we’ll give you a ring the first day we’re free. How will that do?”

She looked at me impatiently.

“Very well,” she said. “Make it a good clear day. But I suppose you know your business.”

So I wrote down her name and telephone and she walked back across the road, stamped the snow off and went indoors.

“Well,” said Jim, “I’ve lived across the street from the lady for 10 years. I know her as well as I know you. She knows me as well as you do.”

“She thought you were my helper,” I said. “She practically brushed you off.”

“She certainly didn’t recognize me,” said Jim.

“People never look at faces,” I stated. “They just look at clothes.”

“Then any little embarrassment I have felt,” said Jim, “over washing windows here on my front lawn has been wasted.”

“Precisely, Jim,” I agreed. “If any neighbor happened to notice us working around your house they’ve just said to themselves, the Frises are having something done, and forgotten about it.”

“It was your overalls,” cried Jim.

“The magic garment,” I exulted.

So we have arranged that when the lady across the road calls Jim’s house to get the names of the window cleaners who did such a thorough job the family will give her the telephone number of the first window cleaning outfit we found in the book.

And we hope they wear overalls when they arrive.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 20, 1934

“My family,” said Jimmie Frise, “are after me to clean the furnace pipes.”

“It’s a trifling job,” I said. “My gardener does it in a few minutes each year and doesn’t even mention it at the end of the month.”

“Still,” demurred Jimmie, “I don’t see why I should rob some poor man of a dollar.”

“It would do you good to engage occasionally in a little unpleasant toil,” I said. “One of the things that is wrong with the world is specialization, not only in industry, but in life itself.”

“How do you mean?” demanded Jim.

“We kick about the deadening effect of mass production,” I stated, “and the evil effect upon the human race of having men doing one small thing over and over again all their lives, like screwing up nuts or tightening a bolt or some other automatic action. It drives men mad. But how about us all living our lives as automatically, never straying out of the rut, always doing the same things every day at the same time, getting out of bed the same side, shaving in the exact same way, starting with our top right cheek and ending with our left neck, kissing the same woman goodby each morning at the same place in the same hallway, and so forth.”

“What has this got to do with stove pipes?” demanded Jim.

“The deadly routine of your life.” I went on, “includes a furnace, and you stoke it and shake it, and remove the ashes and stoke it again. But the ghastly routine would be broken if, once in while, you cleaned the pipes. It would be like getting out of bed the other side, and shaving your left neck first and ending with your right top cheek, and kissing somebody else goodby in the front hall. It would give you a fresh and sudden zest.”

“I never heard anybody rave about furnace pipes the way you do,” said Jimmie. “How about helping me with them?”

“I could ask my gardener to,” I agreed.

“How about the ghastly monotony of your own life?” sneered Jim.

“I often shave backwards,” I said. “And sometimes I kiss my little daughter goodby instead.”

“If I clean the furnace pipes,” said Jim, “it won’t be for any philosophic or psychopathic reason. It will be simply to save a buck. For five years now I have been trying to end the depression by spending all I made, by sharing my work with others, by hiring people on the slightest pretext to do my work for me. But I can’t see it has made the slightest difference. So from now on I am going to be thrifty and careful like everybody else, and do all my own chores and sole my own boots and cut my own grass and clean my own furnace pipes.”

“And what will you do with the money you save?” I asked.

“I’ll buy bonds,” said Jim.

“That’s patriotic,” I assured him. “Instead of spending your dollars on small jobs like furnace pipes and your garden, you will lend It to the government to pay relief. Then, after they have paid relief to a few million people, you get your money back in ten years. Meantime, who paid the relief?”

“Don’t confuse me,” begged Jim. “I am trying to do the right thing by my country. My country wants cash. To lend it to them, I am going to cut down my spending. I am going to do my own furnace pipes.”

“And the people you no longer help support,” I argued, “will get your money just the same, only in relief.”

“I suppose so,” admitted Jim.

“Then,” I demanded, “where does the money come from, twenty years from now, when the government pays you back the money they borrowed from you?”

“Look,” said Jim, “I have five children. In twenty years they will all be grown up and making money. The government can reborrow from them to pay me back.”

“I’d rather have my furnace pipes done by a pipe cleaner,” I said. “It makes him happy. And it only costs me two dollars. It wont cost my grandchildren anything.”

“But there will be five Frises to borrow from instead of only one pointed out Jim. “It will be easier. That’s what the government figures on. It will be easier to borrow by the time their note to me falls due.”

“It looks to me,” I said, “as if we were paying for having our pipes cleaned and cleaning them ourselves. It is all very confusing.”

“I only want to do what is right,” said Jim. “If they say spend, I spend. If they say save, I save.”

“And if you spend, it’s gone,” I enlightened, “and if you save, It’s loaned.”

But Jimmie had risen from the steps of his house, where we had been sitting in the sunshine, and was staring at a little man walking down the street.

This little man was small and smudgy. Under his arm, he carried a roll of what appeared to be very dirty carpet, and from the ends of the carpet protruded filthy brushes on long wire handles.

“Speak of the devil,” exclaimed Jimmie.

The little man, passing, halted and in a deep English voice cried.

“‘Ow’s yer pipes?”

“Come up a minute,” called Jimmie.

“A real chimney sweep, like in Dickens,” I breathed to Jim.

The little man drew nigh and rested his roll of carpet.

“Are you a chimney sweep?” I asked excitedly, picturing him as one who has spent his entire childhood and infancy in the chimneys of Old London.

“No, sir,” he said, with dignity. “I am a financial man, by profession, but during the present interregnum, as you might say, I am picking up what I can.”

“You clean chimneys?” asked Jim.

“I clean furnace pipes,” said the little man.

“How much do you charge?”

“Two dollars,” said he.

“Two dollars!” cried Jim. “Two bucks Just to rattle a few furnace pipes into an ash can! Man, you’re crazy.”

“It’s quite a job,” said the chimney man.

“Why, for two dollars I could drive my car from here to Montreal!”

“But your pipes would still be choked,” said the small man, “when you got back ‘ome.”

“Two dollars! Why, that is ridiculous,” said Jim. “Some of you people have no sense of proportion. Just because a job is a little unpleasant, you charge three times what it is worth. My friend and I can do those pipes in a few minutes after supper.”

“I shouldn’t try it of an evening, sir,” said the little man. “Professionally speaking.”

“Thanks very much,” said Jim, dismissing the small man, who hoisted his roll of carpet. “I had no idea.”

And as the little man retired down the walk, Jim said: “Look here, you save Saturday afternoon, we’ll do mine and yours both.”

“Mine were done,” I pointed out.

“Lend me hand, just for the experience,” said Jim. “I want to look into this business of small jobs. Two bucks!”

Saturday Jim drove me home from the office very kindly and then reminded me, as he let me out, to come over at 2 p.m.

It is curious how seldom one looks at a furnace. One visits it in the dark, shovels coal into a glowing hole, rattles a shaker, reaches up to a familiar doohickey and turns the draft on or off, and the furnace remains a dimly seen, faintly disliked, something to be admitted only part way into one’s consciousness.

Jim and I surveyed his furnace in some awe. It was a bulging and somehow bowlegged sort of furnace. It was aged and scaley and corroded. There were bands or bolts of clay around it that fell away like dust when you touched them. Everything was rusty and squeaked.

Dark Cloud of Endeavor

The pipes were fragile and sagged. When we slapped them, they felt soggy and stuffed.

“How long is it since you had your pipes cleaned?” I asked Jim, doubtfully.

“I don’t recall them being cleaned.”

“Why, you have been wasting fuel for years and haven’t been getting a fraction of the British thermal units you should have been getting.”

“You’d better take off your coat,” said Jim, throwing his across the empty coal bin stall.

I stood ready while Jim stretched up and took firm hold of the joint of pipe that vanished into the cellar wall. It was stuck. It was corroded.

He tapped it with a stick. He hammered it with the shaker handle. He punched a hole in it.

“Poof,” said Jim, as a darkish mist filled the air.

“Get a couple of chairs, and we’ll both take hold and twist,” I suggested.

So Jim got on a box and I got on a chair, and we took firm hold of the pipe and twisted.

It was only a matter of a fraction of a second, but as the pipe came free, Jim, who was curved in one of these fantastic postures tall men can get into when doing the most commonplace things, lost his balance off the box and I felt a heavy and clumsy pipe slip from my grasp.

“Are you there, Jim?” I asked, from the depths of the inky darkness which had suddenly enveloped the furnace room.

“Curious-pfft-smell, isn’t it-pfft!” said Jim from below.

“We had better go outside,” I suggested.

“Tale a section of pipe each,” said Jimmie. “There are ash cans in the side drive.”

I felt above and found a sagging section of pipe. It came fairly easily into my arms, but I felt a cool dry flood of something like talcum powder flow over my hands and wrists as I tilted the pipe level.

“Easy, there,” said Jimmie, coughing.

By only half breathing, we got out of the cellar, dark as night, into the semigloom of the stairs, and preceding Jimmie, I carried the pipe to the side door. It was heavy. You can have no idea how neglected those pipes were. I saw a garbage can and I dumped the pipe smartly head first into the can.

A great whoof of midnight whirled into the bright afternoon air.

“Make way,” gasped Jim, behind me, and as I turned, still marvelling at the fog, I beheld a devilish figure, black from head to foot, heave a section of pipe alongside mine into the ash can, and another and a vaster and a more deadly black cloud billowed into the air.

“Jimmie!” I cried. “You’re filthy. What have you been doing?”

But I could tell by the red gape of Jim’s mouth in his face that I too, was soiled.

“You’ll pay for cleaning this suit, young man,” I assured him. The more you try to brush soot off, the worse you get. Especially if you are perspiring a little.

“Keep still,” said Jim. “Wait till I think.”

But from the rear of the house came screeches and screams and moans in a female voice. It was the next door neighbor. We ran around the corner, and there was a lady, her arms held over her head like the statue of victory, and she was staring transfixed at three large curtains or drapes of a silvery blue color, that were hanging on the clothesline, while the dark cloud of our endeavor slowly engulfed them like a fog.

“Dear, dear,” said Jimmie, drawing me back from the corner.

Better Stay in the Rut

To the lady’s screams were suddenly added loud, brief and profane shouts of a man.

It was the man whose house abuts the rear of Jim’s place.

Head low to avoid the cloud, he came hurling over the fence and faced us.

“Look at that!” he roared. “Painted this morning, and now look at it!”

We could make out the back of his house. I was finished in white and light green. The cloud was aiming straight at it, and vanishing into the paint as cigarette smoke vanishes into an electric fan.

The lady was standing waiting.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Jim, “I will make it right with you.”

“They just came back from the cleaners,” wept the lady, “and I was airing that smell off them before putting them up before dinner when my father-in-law is coming and we have roast chicken, and they cover the living room windows and now …”

“That job,” interrupted the man, “cost me forty-eight dollars and to have the back done, by George, will cost you at least twenty. Twenty, l estimate. Yes, sir, twenty would be fair estimate.”

There we stood, with the two pipe sections upended in the ash can, and with us the man and the lady, when we heard footsteps up the drive and the little man with the roll of carpet that we had seen last Wednesday joined us.

“Glory!” yelled Jim.

“Good day, gentlemen,” said the little financial man.

“How did you turn up?” said Jim, trying to wring the little man’s hand, but the little man evaded him.

“I overheard you say Saturday, so I just dropped around. I do quite a little business this way, whenever I hear of gents planning to clean their furnaces.”

He laid his roll of brushes down in a business-like way.

“I’ll give you $5 to clean all this up,” cried Jimmie. “That is, if you can empty these two joints as well.”

“It would have been better,” said the little man, “if you had left the pipes. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Five dollars,” said Jim.

“And a dollar and a half to clean this suit,” I said.

“And a dollar and a half for this one,” added Jim, looking down at himself.

“And twenty for the paint job,” I calculated.

“And say three for the curtains?” contributed Jim.

The little man, who had trotted down the collar, reappeared.

“You’ll need new pipes,” said he. “These are all rotted and pitted.”

“How much?” asked Jim. “I should estimate about two,” said he.

“Total,” said Jim, “thirty-three dollars.”

He was very cheerful.

“Now you see,” said Jim, “that it is best not to try to get out of the rut. Accept the ghastly monotony of your life. And don’t try to be thrifty. It always costs you more in the end. Each man to his trade. I’m an artist. You’re a writer. And this gentleman cleans furnaces.”

“The furnace itself,” said the little man, picking up his carpet roll, “isn’t in bad shape.”

---

Editor’s Notes: $2 in 1934 would be almost $40 in 2021. $33 would be $650.

Old coal furnaces ran by having coal delivered through a chute in the basement window, and would require the owner to stoke the furnace with coal to keep it hot. The shaker handle was accessible from the outside and you would crank it to activate shaker plates in the bottom that would help the ashes from the burnt coal to get to the bottom ash pan. You would have to then collect the ash to put in an ash can that would be picked up from your curb.

This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978).

The first rule is: Leave things alone. Particularly things like lawn mower blades

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, July 18, 1942.

“You’re looking particularly gloomy,” observed Jimmie Frise.

“I’ve been thinking,” I explained, “and it always makes me bilious.”

“You want to be careful,” warned Jim. “You should leave the thinking to those whose job it is. Suppose everybody started thinking. What a fine mess we’d be in then!”

“Don’t be cynical, Jim,” I cautioned. “Isn’t it time everybody started thinking? We have been leaving everything to the guy whose job it is. Or was. If some bird was interested in politics, we left polities to him. If some bloke liked soldiering, we left soldiering to him. If some other baby liked making great big steel tractors, we left making great big steel tractors to him. Then along comes a war. So we leave the conduct of the war to the guys who like politics. And we leave the soldiering to the bloke who likes soldiering. And we leave the making of tanks to the baby who likes making tractors. It never occurred to us that maybe these people who liked doing those things were no more fitted to save us from disaster than any other three busybodies we might pick out at random.”

“Now, now, now,” protested Jimmie. “Doesn’t it stand to reason that people experienced in government should be trusted with government in an emergency? Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that people interested in soldiering should be entrusted with handling our soldiers when we raise them? And doesn’t it make sense that industrialists should know more about producing war material than anybody else?”

“What you say proves,” I informed him, “that you haven’t been thinking. You’ve got faith. But you aren’t thinking.”

“Then,” smiled Jimmie loftily, “what should I think?”

“I suppose,” I weaseled, “that because a kid likes to play hockey, you should let him on the championship team?”

“But the way you find your championship team,” crowed Jim, “is by scouring all the lesser teams. You don’t make a championship hockey team out of wrestlers and tennis players. That is precisely how we get government, soldiers and industrialists. Out of all those playing those games, we select the best.”

The Eternal Battle

“I have trapped you,” I announced. “You still think war is a game. Our government, our army and our industry are not bridge tables. Neither are they private clubs or lodges in which only members may play. War is a convulsion. It is a desperate illness of the body social. It is a natural disaster like smallpox or infantile paralysis. It is like the eternal battle between the birds and the insects. It is one of the awful manifestations of nature. Periodically, one of the tribes of man that is down suddenly struggles to rise up. It happens endlessly, all across history, like the struggle of water to seek its level; like the battle of the jungle; like the fight in a garden between the plants; or the never-ending combat between the trees of the forest.”

“I admit war isn’t a game,” submitted Jim.

“Peace is a game,” I asserted. “A shabby, sordid sort of game, at that; in the hands of a lot of cigar-chewing promoters. But war is life and death; as it was in the beginning. War calls for fighters. And now the fighters must come to the top. By fighters, I don’t mean the noisy boys, the assertive, star performers who drew the big gates in the game of peace. What is there about government that a strong fighting man could not learn in 30 days? All he has to do, after 30 days’ study, is push button and call in a chief clerk to give him the technical data he wants. You and I have both been soldiers. What is there about soldiering that a clever man who has never soldiered could not learn in 30 days? All he has got to do is push a button and call in a department manager in the uniform of a general, to get any technical data he needs at the moment. What is there about one industry that a good man in any other industry cannot take in at a glance? The greatest successes in industrial and financial history have been created by clever, outstanding and fighting men who came in from the outside. War is neither a matter of government, of soldiering nor of industry. War is fighting. And what is fighting? Is it a game? Is it a thing of rules? A lot of dead men thought so, like Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon. They all ended in ruin, because fighting is another thing entirely – a matter of imagination of courage, of intellect and of soul. And as Caesar, Napoleon and all the rest found out, too late, the fighters hardly ever wore uniform, hardly ever had any political connection and hardly ever had the patience to collect, like raspberries, one by one, a billion dollars.”

To Help the Fighters

“You’ve ruled out all the ways we have of selecting our leaders,” complained Jim.

“And our leaders are ruling themselves out,” I assured him, “to make way for the fighters.”

“How will we select the fighters,” demanded Jim.

“You never select the fighters,” I explained. “They are a gift from on high.”

We sat in silence, thinking biliously.

“How useless my life has been,” muttered Jim. “Thirty years drawing cartoons. What good are cartoons now?”

“Thirty years emitting words,” I mumbled, for myself. “Like the drip from a pump.”

“We’re too old to fight,” said Jim, “but isn’t there something we could do to help the fighters?”

“We aren’t even good enough in the legs,” I snorted, “to be water boys, like Gunga Din.”

“We can still shoot,” calculated Jimmie. “We could be guerrillas.”

“I’ve often thought,” I suggested, “that we men from 50 to 60 years of age, if we were trained, could be recruited into special maintenance companies for the tank corps. Did you ever notice, around a garage, that the fellow who really does the problem jobs, on ignition, or on faulty timing, or any of the tricky cases, isn’t the strong, husky bird in his 20’s and 30’s? It is nearly always a middle-aged man, often in his 50’s or better.”

“By jingo, that’s a fact,” said Jim.

“The big husky boys,” I went on, “do the tire changing and the jacking up and the big, noisy jobs. But when your car has to be approached as if it were a murder mystery, it is always some middle-aged gent, in the dirtiest overalls, mostly wearing spectacles, who comes in, quiet and bold, and solves the puzzle. It seems to me that in this modern tank warfare, they are trying to get along without the very men they need most.”

“The men who fight the tanks,” agreed Jim, “can be the young, dashing, tough lads. But the maintenance squads… do they have to be young and dashing?”

“The light aid detachments,” I explained, “and the repair units that follow tanks into action have to be as nippy as the tanks themselves.”

“So they say,” added Jim.

“One thing,” I summed up, “in this day and age, every man ought to know some mechanics. The time has come, in human affairs, when it isn’t enough merely to be a smart buyer or a clever, seller; lawyers, parsons, accountants, salesmen, executives, even doctors, are so much baggage when fighting comes to the bare fists as it is now. Every living man, regardless of his age, should be trained to be able to make something with his hands. Every man should be a mechanic, if only to dig swiftly and cleverly with a shovel; or to splice a telephone wire or do rough carpentry.”

“Look,” said Jim. “At all the technical schools, at the universities, they are conducting classes, night classes, to teach people any one of the many mechanical arts.”

“Then…” I said with finality.

“Of course,” cried Jimmie. “Let’s get going. Let’s make a team specializing on heavy motors. You become the ignition expert and I’ll be the carburetor expert. It will be something,” cried Jim eagerly, “to fill our nights, this autumn. Every night we work, we’ll feel of more use. This awful feeling of sitting. doing nothing…”

“And in the course of a few weeks,” I stated, “we would be fit to grab hold of a job, instead of standing by and watching.”

“Even if we can’t be of practical use,” pursued Jim, “the training will at least make us the better able to understand what our fellow men are doing with their lives. In Norway, there are no private schools. All rich and poor, farmer and banker, are given the same education as far as they go. They all speak the same language, understand the same ideas. It knits them closer together as citizens. In our country, everybody ought to be made to master some mechanical craft and everybody should be taught literature, agriculture and business practice. Then, when we part to go our separate ways in life, we won’t feel like foreigners to one another as we do now.”

“Jim,” I confessed, “in the past 30 years, I haven’t mended a tap or repaired a broken switch. I haven’t even tacked down any weather-stripping. I blush to think of all the hundreds of little jobs I have passed up, around my home, in favor of calling in the plumber, the electrician or the handy man.”

Repairing the Lawn-mower

“It isn’t that you are lazy,” suggested Jim. “It is merely that you have been taught, from your earliest childhood, in school and in life itself, that you must be smart enough to be able to employ other people to do the work that is done by hand. The beau ideal of our educational system is not the white collar man. He is the white-handed man!”

“And now, in all our war camps from the Arctic to the tropics,” I exclaimed, “the commando is our ideal in a desperate effort to convert all our soft white hands into hard brown hands.”

“Okay, carburetors for me,” cried Jim, rising and rolling up his sleeves in expectation.

“I’ll run up tomorrow noon,” I said, “and find out what I can about these night classes at Varsity and at the technical schools.”

“After all,” said Jim eagerly, “just because I have been an artist all my life, surely all the stuff my farmer ancestors had hasn’t petered out of me.”

“One of my grandfathers,” I asserted, “was a stone mason and the other was a farmer who worked 200 acres. I bet I’ve got the stuff in me, if only give it a chance.”

With his sleeves rolled up, Jimmie walked around the room, tested the light switch, tried the window latches, lifted up a chair and felt its rungs.

“There are a hundred things a man can do…” he mused.

“I’ve got it,” he cried suddenly, “My lawn-mower. There’s the very thing. I’ve been intending to repair my lawn mower for two years now.”

“Clocks and lawn-mowers,” I cut in, “are two things my grandmother told me no man should tinker with.”

“Come on,” said Jim, rolling his sleeves still higher. “We’ll begin at the beginning. We’ll tackle the job on hand, just to show our hearts are in the right place.”

First he led me down cellar where, from shelves, drawers, boxes, he assembled the most extraordinary collection of tools. A wrench, hammer, file, oil can, at least half a dozen spanners of assorted sizes.

“Who said you weren’t mechanical?” I demanded in admiration.

“Some of them,” said Jim, “workmen have left behind. Others I borrowed from neighbors so long ago I forget whose they are. Every home has a scattering of tools like this.”

Out in the garden, Jim brought forth the lawn mower from the corner of the garage.

“Why, that’s a swell lawn mower,” I cried. “What’s the matter with that?”

“It needs sharpening,” said Jim, file already in hand. “And the blades need adjusting, Every once in a while, they jam some way.”

“Do you sharpen a lawn mower with a file?” I inquired dubiously

“You sharpen everything with a file,” explained Jimmie.

With a small spanner, Jim explored around among the nuts and bolts until he found the one that held the blade assembly in place. And in a jiffy, he had the blades, all in one piece, out on the ground.

“Feel them,” he said, “dull as a hoe.”

So while Jim scrubbed at the blades with the file. I tinkered around with the frame, oiling here, wiping off there: tightening loose nuts and screws and discovering, for the first time, the simple principle of gears which makes a lawn mower operate.

In 10 minutes. Jim had a nice gleaming edge on all the blades, including the big one in the frame. He wished he had a scythe stone to finish off the job, he said. When he was a boy on the farm, the thing he liked best was to watch a man stoning a scythe with long, strong strokes of the stone and a flexing wrist, making a sweet ring of steel in the summer air.

To Go to Night School

“Now,” said Jim, lifting up the blade assembly.

As his helper, I held the frame steady and helped direct the little ends of the axle into place.

“Gimme the small spanner,” ordered Jim, very mechanic like.

He tightened the nut carefully. But the blade assembly wobbled very loose in its frame.

“Have you touched any of those other nuts?” he demanded.

“I tightened a few of them up,” I explained. So Jimmie went all over the various nuts and screws, loosening and tightening, while feeling the set of the blades in the frame.

“It doesn’t hang level,” I pointed out.

“Not likely to,” muttered Jim, “with people tinkering all over the job. The first rule of mechanics is, don’t tinker. Leave things alone.”

“All I did was oil it,” I protested indignantly, “and tighten up a couple of these nuts that were just about falling off.”

“Here,” said Jim, “take this spanner. I’ll hold the blades in the proper position, and you tighten up the different nuts until it takes hold, just the way I’m setting it.”

I took the spanner and tightened. I tightened here and I tightened there, little by little the way you put on a spare tire.

“Easy now,” warned Jim.

“How’s she coming?” I inquired.

“It’s starting to grasp hold,” admitted Jim.

“One thing about mechanics,” I said, “you always have to have a helper. There is something very companionable about mechanics.”

“Easy,” said Jim. “Pay attention.”

“In most other lines of work,” I said, “you work alone. Writers, artists, lawyers, salesmen, they all work alone. But in the mechanical arts, you have a true demonstration of social effort…”

“OUCH!” screamed Jimmie very unexpectedly.

“Oh,” I replied, turning the wrench firmly in the other direction.

“Oucheeeeeee!” yelled Jimmie in agony.

The tip of his finger was caught between the blades and the edge of the mower.

“Turn it the other way,” he roared.

“That’s tightening it,” I gasped, heaving in the opposite direction.

“Take your foot off it,” bellowed Jim,

And with the littlest move of the mower my way, the blade opened and Jim snatched his finger out.

“It was your darn foot,” he accused bitterly “shoving on the mower that made the blade catch me.”

“I was just getting a good purchase on the spanner,” I explained. “Is it cut?”

“No,” growled Jim, “but it might have been.”

“I’m very sorry,” I assured him. “I was just shoving with my foot…”

“Don’t describe it,” said Jim, standing up and shaking his hand rapidly, to take the pain out of his finger.

“I was doing the best I knew how,” I insisted.

“Listen,” said Jimmie, “there is a mechanics to all things. There is a mechanics to lawnmowers. If you shove one way, the blades go one way; if you shove the other, the blades go the other. It is the same with politics, soldiering and business. There is a mechanics to them all. First, you have to be an apprentice. Then you have to be a journeyman. It takes a long time to be a master mechanic.”

“It’s a funny thing we can’t tinker with a lawn-mower,” I asserted, “a simple thing like a lawn-mower. We’re not saps exactly.”

“Yet,” said Jim, putting the end joint of his bruised finger in his mouth, “you are prepared to let guys at least as clever as us tinker with government, soldiering and industry?”

“There’s a big difference,” I claimed, “between waging war and mending lawn-mowers.”

“You’d be surprised,” retorted Jimmie, “how much alike they are, in the main.”

So when his finger stopped hurting, Jimmie held the blades steady with a stick. And I braced both feet on the frame and took hold of the spanner and tightened all the nuts until the veins stood out on my forehead.

And the lawn mower hums like a Spitfire.

---

Editor’s Note: A scythe stone is a long narrow sharpening stone.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 6, 1936.

“Tell me,” said Jimmie Frise, “something about the war.”

“Jimmie,” I exclaimed, “this is wonderful of you. Nobody ever asks me about the war any more.”

“Oh, I just wanted to freshen up my memory of some of the infantry angles,” said Jim. “Us artillery men missed certain features, you know.”

“Jim,” I said, “this is very kind of you. You can have no idea how congested I get sometimes just from wanting to talk about the war. But nobody will let me. I’ve worn out all my family. I used to look forward to the days when my little sons would be old enough to want to hear about the war. But now that they are getting into long pants they haven’t the slightest interest. If I even try to stick in just one little apologetic anecdote about the war they hear somebody whistling outside and jump up and leave me flat.”

“Don’t forget,” said Jim, “I’m a veteran myself.”

“Yes, but,” I pointed out, “the artillery couldn’t have had all the adventures the infantry had. Don’t forget that.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Jim.

“Just the same old thing every day for you gunners,” I explained. “Firing a modern gun is just like working a lathe or running an engine. You don’t see anything. You just twiddle some wheels, adjust some gadgets, pull a string and bang she goes off into space, aimed at an arithmetical calculation instead of a romantic target.”

“Is that so?” said Jim.

“But don’t let me offend you,” I hurried. “You wanted to hear about the war. My dear boy, I appreciate this more than I can tell you.”

“Just a certain aspect of it,” said Jim.

“It has got so,” I assured him, “that not only does my family walk out on me whenever I introduce even the least teeny weeny bit of war, even just in passing, but now my old gardener has folded up on me. He used to love to have me walking beside him when he was running the lawn mower, for example, and tell him about the war. Many’s the hour we have sat in the garden when he was edging or weeding, and remembered old times together. But now whenever I see him he is so busy he just has to rush.”

“Maybe you have told him all your stories for the second time,” suggested Jim.

“Second time?” I protested. “My dear boy, a war story doesn’t really get rich and fruity until the third or fourth time.”

“What I wanted to know,” said Jim, “was about these wiring parties. What was a wiring party?”

“Ah, now you are asking somebody,” I cried, settling back. “Jim, you are talking now to one of the most expert wirers in the world. I have strung literally miles of wire. I have laid acres and acres of barbed wire.”

“You mean your men did,” said Jim.

“Naturally,” I admitted. “An officer does not go around, as a rule, with canvas mitts on hauling barbed wire. When I speak of having strung miles of barbed wire I speak as an engineer speaks when he says he has built miles of road, see? But as a matter of fact, Jim, I have actually laid quite a lot of wire myself in my time. I remember one night…”

Infantry Experts

“Tell me,” said Jim, “was the wire in big coils?”

“No, no,” said I. “It came in tight spools or bobbins. Remember, we had to carry that wire into the trenches, as well as string it after we got it there. I recollect one night – was it in June, seventeen …?”

“Was it springy, sort of?” asked Jim. “When you started to undo a coil of it did it spring out and get all tangled?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “You cut a couple of small bits of tie wire, and then, with the spool on a stick, you just backed up and unrolled it. Now, this night I speak of in June, I think it was, seventeen, or was it May? Now, let me see? We went from Enquin lez Mines back up to Les Brebis and Mazingarbe…”

“I should think,” said Jim, “that anybody who had handled barbed wire could handle almost any kind of wire.”

“You’re right,” I said. “There were about 300,000 Canadians in the infantry from time to time and every one of those men to-day, wherever he is, is an expert wire man. But as I was telling you, we were on the Bully Grenay front, out by Loos, you remember. It was a fine summer’s night…”

“How did you get the wire tight?” asked Jim. “After you had laid it where you wanted it, how did you pull it snug and tight?”

“A fine summer’s night,” I explained. “One of those luminous June nights, with the stars fairly dripping from the sky. It was quiet, too. Here and there a flicker of guns, like summer lightning. Now and then the lazy bang of a five-nine somewhere in the distance …”

“How many men would you use on one spool of wire?” asked Jim.

”The major says to me, ‘Clark,’ he says, ‘I want you to take the wiring party tonight. It’s a ticklish bit. It’s those old chalk pits. On our side, the wire is about as useful as a lace curtain. I want some wire in there that is wire. I want you to handpick your party, Clark,’ he says, ‘and make a night of it.’ It must have been about nine o’clock …”

“Is this the story,” asked Jim, “about the time the two Germans crawled out and asked you the time, thinking you were a German?”

“Ha, ha,” I laughed. “You’ve heard that, eh? Wasn’t that a scream?”

“I have heard it six or seven times,” admitted Jim admiringly, “and every time it gets better.”

“One keeps remembering details,” I explained. “I wonder if I ever told you one little detail in that story about…”

“What I am trying to get at,” said Jim, still laughing reminiscently. “is this – you see, I had no experience of wiring – and now I am trying to put up a fence at my place. I wanted your advice.”

“A wire fence?” I asked.

“You know that little green wire fence I’ve got?” said Jimmie. “Gyp, my new setter, can hop it in her stride. What I am doing is putting up about twenty tall stakes, with holes bored through them, and then stringing two wires along them, about a foot apart, above the top of the regular fence. Then I am going to plant morning glories and sweet peas and things and grow a sort of screen. I don’t think Gyp will jump through that.”

“It should be very simple.” I said, “just threading wire through holes in stakes.”

“I was trying it last night,” said Jim, “but the wire coil springs out fearfully when you snip the little bits of wire tying the coil together.”

“Hold it with one hand, my dear fellow,” I smiled, “and thread it with the other.”

“I wish I had been in the infantry,” sighed Jim.

“Tut, tut,” I said. “I’ll run over after dinner to-night.”

Which I did, and Jimmie had all the material laid out just like a regular old supply dump back of the lines in Flanders. Four large coils of good stout wire. A heap of long green painted stakes with holes ready bored in them. Smaller posts of two by four for reinforcing them.

“You haven’t the stakes up yet? I pointed out.

“I got three or four up as you see,” said Jim, “but I thought I had better get your advice on that, too, because half the problem of wiring must be the stakes, isn’t it?”

“Quite right,” I agreed. “I recall one time down on the Arras front, out by a place called Roclincourt straight ahead from Madagascar Dump, if you remember?”

“Sure,” said Jim. “Which do you suggest? Should we just drive the stakes down or should we first dig a little hole to soften the earth and then drive them in?”

“On this Roclincourt front,” I explained, “”the problem consisted of an overbody of soft, mucky earth on top of a stratum of hard chalk. And the way we drove our angle iron stakes and screw stakes was this.”

“Here’s a shovel,” said Jim.

He removed his coat and vest eagerly and picked up a fence stake and carried it over to the side of the garden. I followed suit, bringing the shovel. I dug a small hole. About a foot deep.

“Now,” said Jim, “which will I do? Hold the stake or drive it with the axe?”

“You hold it,” I agreed. “I’ll show you a trick or two.”

So in a matter of twenty minutes we had three stakes well and firmly buried in their proper places, except that the first one had the holes for the wire pointing the wrong way.

“That won’t matter,” I showed. We will just jog the wire there and it will make it all the tighter.”

In less than an hour we had ten stakes firmly planted, and that gave us the one full side of the garden and all along the bottom.

“Now, Gunner,” I explained, “we’ll string some wire just before it gets dark, so that you will know how to carry on.”

“This is the part I am interested in,” said Jim.

The big coils of wire were heavy. It would be impossible to hold one in one hand and steer it with the other. So we agreed that one of us would carry the coil and the other steer it through the little holes in the pickets. Jim handed me the pliers to snip the tying wire around the coils.

“Wire,” I explained, as I squatted down to snip, “has a character all its own.”

“Shouldn’t you kneel on it?” asked Jim, “before you cut that last bit?”

I snipped and the coil of wire sprang into the air with a twanging, hissing sound like a serpent. It seemed to be wrapping itself around me. I threw myself on it, and held it down.

“Jimmie,” I commanded, “lend a hand here and tuck it back under me.”

So I lay on it while Jim slowly tucked it back in rings and circles about the size it was originally.

“Ease up a little,” said Jim. “As I coil these coils under you.”

“We never used to have this happen in Flanders,” I said.

“Upsadaisy,” said Jim, “but not too much. Just relax a trifle, while I slide this end under.”

And thus spreadeagled on the very untidy and always struggling wire, I lay while Jim patiently worked it back under me.

“I wish some of your old troops could see you now,” said Jim, appreciatively. “The ones that you used to wire miles and miles with.”

“They’d help me if they did,” I declared.

“And be just about as handy as you are,” said Jim.

“One time,” I said, “out near the Canal du Nord, it was in August, eighteen, if I recollect…”

“Ease up a little,” said Jim, “just a little.”

“We were stopped,” I continued, “on account of our flanks having failed to keep up with us, so I had to put out some wire, just a temporary belt of wire, while we dug in and waited for a day or so…”

“Lift your left leg,” said Jim.

“That’s very wiry wire,” I admitted, after we had got most of it back somehow and laid the axe and a few stakes on it to hold it down.

“I’ll sit on it,” said Jim, “right here on the ground while you work it out carefully and fasten one end to the first stake.”

So Jim sat on the rather untidy coil while I sought out the end of the wire and slowly edged out yard after yard of it until I had enough to reach the first post, up near the house end of the proposed fence. With staples I secured it firmly and wound it several times around the post.

“Now,” I said.

“Good heavens,” said Jim.

For now, having secured one end, we had the whole coil on the ground before us to thread through the holes of the dozen remaining pickets.

“Mmm,” said I. “I guess we should have threaded it first, eh?”

“In the artillery,” said Jim, “we always put the shell in the breech before we fired the gun.”

“I’ll thread this end,” I explained. “It will all come to the same thing.”

It did. In removing a few more coils, Jim eased up just a trifle too high and a whole burst of coils leaped front tinder him and, like lariats, flung themselves around me before I could grasp the situation and let go my end. Jim seeing me trapped, foolishly leaped up to help me and as he did so, the clever coils had him. In a moment, we were both netted in the wire, which, every time you freed yourself of one coil seized you with another.

“Up around Arras,” asked Jim, “what did you do when this kind of thing happened?”

“It didn’t happen,” I declared. “We had proper wire. Barbed wire. Wire that had some sense to it.”

“I suppose all you had to do was call the troops, and they uncoiled you?” said Jim.

“Jim,” I said, as I shoved the coils down off my chest and legs, only releasing them to have them snare Jim instead. “I think you might remember that I sunk most of those pickets for you. I did the digging. I did the pounding.”

“It was your experience with wire that I wanted,” said Jim. “Even gunners can dig holes.”

We gradually got free of the wire, and it committed a few more twangs and leaps and futile snatches in our direction and then subsided into a large, loose and twisted tangle in the middle of Jim’s garden.

“Now let’s see,” said Jim.

“Jim,” I said. “I promised my boys I’d drive them over for an ice cream soda before bed.”

“Good old infantry,” said Jim.

So when I looked back as I went down the gate steps, Jim was standing, the way the gunners always did, just looking down with his hands in his pockets.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 14, 1945.

“Just look,” complained Jimmie Frise, “at that side drive!”

“Cement’s pretty well shot,” I admitted.

“Why, it hasn’t been down more than 10 to 12 years, cried Jim. “And look at it. It looks as if a V-bomb had hit it.”

“Well, it was pretty well shot last season,” I reminded him. And the year before that, if I remember right, you were complaining about it having gone to pieces.”

“Cement ought to last more than 10 years,” asserted Jim.

“Not if you let the frost get under it,” I assured him. “When you notice the first crack in your cement side drive you should have it patched right away. If not, then the frost heaves it and what you’ve got, after all, is a sort of V-bomb underneath.”

“It’s positively dangerous,” said Jimmie. “Last night I was backing the car out. The back wheel tilted one of those hunks of cement. Its jagged corner caught under the differential. If I hadn’t been quick I’d have torn the gizzard out of my car.”

“Well, you ought to have it relaid right away,” I agreed.

“Relaid?” snorted Jim. “And how would I have it relaid? I called up one of the concrete firms and they said I might have a chance about next August. Unless some priority job turned up. Then it might be never. In fact, they couldn’t give me a date.”

“Then the least you can do,” I submitted, is remove the worst of those big jagged chunks and put a few wheelbarrow loads of cinders down.”

“It burns me up,” grated Jim, “the way things go to pieces like this. What’s the world coming to? A concrete job like that should last a lifetime.”

“You’ve got the usual property complex, Jim,” I pointed out. “Nothing should last a lifetime. When you build a new house you should realize that it is going to be a race between you and the house to see which will be old and worn out first. In your youthful prime you are making money. So you do a little careful figuring and decide you will build a house. It costs you, say, $10,000. In 20 years it is old-fashioned, its plumbing is all corroded and crusted. So is yours. It is in a neighborhood no longer fashionable. A lot of strangers have moved in. It is worth about $5,000 now. And you’ve gone down in value, too.”

“In other countries,” declared Jim, “property doesn’t fall to pieces like this. In England, for instance. The stately homes of England. Why, some of those gracious old country houses of England are two and three centuries old.”

“Aha,” I cried. “The outer walls, maybe. The foundations and outer walls of the main section of the house. But if those stately homes of England haven’t been brought up to date with the past few years they are hardly fit to live in. Musty, smelly, fungussy old dumps. I’ve lived in dozens of them the past five years. And our boys have been billetted in them all over Britain. They’ll tell you what stately old homes they are.”

“That’s not my impression,” protested Jimmie.

Not the Original

“Look,” I said, “why were so many of those stately homes handed over to the troops as billets this past five years? Because either they were untenanted or the owners couldn’t afford, these past 10 or 15 hard-time years, to do the necessary repairs. Those old country houses have to be entirely renovated each new generation. The climate of England is easier on stone and brick than ours. They don’t have frost and fierce summer suns to contend with. So the outside shell survives century or two. Sometimes longer. But the inside has to be remodeled every few years. If it isn’t, then it is smelly and musty and fungussy and decayed. Don’t make the mistake that all those ancient buildings that are said to date back to Queen Elizabeth or Charles the Second are just the way they were in those days. What they mean is, the building, whether a church or a mansion or a famous public edifice, has survived as an institution since the days of Queen Elizabeth or Charles the Second. Generally, you will find the building was entirely reconstructed – in strict accordance with the original! – about 1830 or 1890.”

“Aw,” said Jim.

“I was billetted,” I informed him, “in several really old stately homes the past couple of years. And if they dated back any further than 1860 they stunk.”

“You have no soul,” said Jim. “You have no poetry in your make-up.”

“Property,” I assured him, “has to be kept up, whether it is St. Peter’s in Rome or the Buck of Dukingham’s old family estate or your side drive.”

“Why, I remember travelling through England, in the last war, and seeing those lovely old mansions nestled in their ancient beeches and oaks,” said Jim, tenderly.

“Those houses,” I assured him, “on closer inspection, would turn out to be exactly like the old mansions on Jarvis St. in Toronto, dating back to about 1880. The reason our old mansions in Toronto have fallen on evil times is that the district became unfashionable. The rich families moved out farther into the suburbs.”

“Or lost their money,” suggested Jim.

“Or had to divide it,” I submitted, “between too many children for any one of them to keep up the big family mansion. So the old mansions of Toronto are let go to decay. But in England, for obvious reasons, the rich men did not build their mansions in towns and cities. Before the industrial revolution, which was only 150 or so years ago, towns and cities were merely the congregating places of the poor, the landless and the hand-workers. Land was the only wealth. There were no factories. So the wealthy man lived right amid his wealth – his land.”

“No factories?” inquired Jim.

“No factories at all,” I assured him. “Well, maybe there would be a sail factory down near the docks. Or possibly some successful master mason would employ a lot of men in his stone yard, or a master shoemaker might employ 100 shoemakers under one roof. But since there was no power of any kind, except hand power, why, it was cheaper and more practical for the employer to let the workers work in their homes. Or hovels.”

“But the swells,” said Jim, “the really rich, were the land owners. And they lived on their estates. Distributed all over Britain.”

“That’s the picture,” I agreed. “And that’s how you have all those mansions scattered all over England. But now that land is no longer wealth, but a liability, except to the individual man who works it as a farmer, and since riches nowadays is in owning factories or being a broker or a business man in a city, why, property has changed its character, too. No more mansions.”

“Besides,” contributed Jim. “nobody stays home any more. It is just a place to sleep.”

“And keep your extra clothes,” I added. “And garage your car.”

“In which case,” stated Jimmie indignantly, “the modern side drive ought to be made of better concrete than this.”

Jim’s drive was, in fact, a mess. From away back by the garage right out to the street there was hardly a square yard of concrete that had not collapsed. There were large holes. There were patches of broken concrete with corners sticking up like the dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line. The past winter, while not noted for deep frost, had soaked an awful lot of snow into the ground. And that had finished what a few years’ frosts had started.

“Jim,” I suggested, “to lay a new drive here, with modern methods, should be a cinch. Even you and I could do it.”

“Mmmmm,” said Jim.

“Nowadays,” I explained, “these ready’ mix concrete trucks, with their big drums revolving as they drive through the streets, would simply back into your side drive, dump a load of concrete all ready mixed. With a wheelbarrow and a couple of rakes we could spread it out. And presto!”

“Say,” said Jimmie.

A Matter of Initiative

“The modern citizen,” I asserted, “doesn’t need to be half as dependent as he thinks he is. We are all still muddling along in the age of the stately homes of England, when, as a matter of fact, if we took advantage of the modern inventions already in use all around us, we could be really mid-20th century.”

“I’ve got a wheelbarrow,” declared, Jim.

“And I’ll bring down a couple of rakes,” I offered. “And we could rig up a good big plank, with scantling uprights on it for handles. We could pat the stuff down with that. Make it smooth.”

“Say!” said Jimmie eagerly.

“The only thing I’m afraid of,” I remarked, “is that you might need a work priority to get a load of ready-mix concrete.”

But Jim went straight in and telephoned. And no priority was needed. It was a straight case of waiting until Wednesday, as the company’s mixing trucks were all on order up till then. Jim ordered one full load.

So we had Monday and Tuesday evenings to clear the side drive of all the wreckage. Most of the concrete was in chunks that required no extra breaking. A few larger pieces had to be hit a few whacks with the sledgehammer Jim borrowed from the service station up the street. And Jim did the sledge-hammer work while I, with the aid of a pair of ice-tongs, slid the chunks of concrete into the wheelbarrow laid on its side. It was not easy work. But neither was it any harder than the usual gardening projects the average man undertakes at this season of the year. I’ve built several rockeries, in the past 30 years, that cost me far more pain than this. In fact, Tuesday night, seeing us carting the broken concrete back into Jim’s yard, two of the neighbors got ideas and came and offered to cart off several barrow loads for rockeries in their back gardens. Thus, by dark Tuesday, we had all the concrete moved and the under bed of gravel and sand nicely raked.

The load was promised for 8.30 a.m. So Jimmie and I were on the job bright and early to peg down the narrow planks we were going to use as margins or containers of the concrete as we laid it.

We had barely started laying these plank edges when we heard a truck coming noisily and knew it was our big adventure.

“Where’ll you have it?” inquired the driver heartily.

“I think,” Jim suggested, “we ought to have him dump it right there at the street end of the drive, and we will start laying back in at the garage. It will mean more carting with the wheelbarrow. But we can see what we are doing better.”

“Correct,” I agreed.

So with a grinding and a roaring, the big revolving drum started to pour concrete like a meat mincer squishing out hamburger. It went on and on as an imposing pile grew before our astonished eyes.

And away went the driver.

There, as simple as ordering a ton of coal or a load of manure, was the material for two simple citizens to toy with, saving scores of dollars in man-hours, giving healthful spring exercise and permitting free play to individual initiative, free enterprise and, above all, craftsmanship.

We stood and admired the pile. It was soggy. And it settled slightly. Even as we watched. And it certainly was big.

“There’s enough there,” declared Jim, “to lay a real, lifetime pavement.”

Well, first we had to lay and peg down the wooden planks for the edges of the new pavement, and that took an hour. And to get the planks to stand on their edges, it was necessary to dig slight trenches or troughs in which the planks could stand upright.

“How long,” inquired Jim, “do you suppose that stuff will stay soft?”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “You know how long you have to keep off fresh cement. We’ve got all day.”

So we laid the planks steady and true and pegged them down. And while we were at it we laid all the planks for the whole job. A couple of hours.

“I don’t like that warm wind blowing,” said Jim, anxiously examining the free grayish-yellow heap at the mouth of his side drive.

“Come on, brother,” I said, picking up the shovel. “Now for the first barrow.”

Wet concrete weighs more than dry concrete. And dry concrete weighs plenty.

Jim started to shove the barrow up the drive. But its wheel sank deep in the gravel and sand.

“We’ll have to have a plank walk to run the barrow on,” said Jim hurriedly.

So we got in the car and drove over to the lumber yard, a few blocks east, and got five long, cheap planks. With these, carried home on the car top, we laid a path for the barrow. Another hour or so.

“Hey!” said Jim as he picked up the barrow. “This stuff is getting stiff!”

It was not quite as pulpy as I expected.

“Take it up to the garage,” I ordered, “and we’ll flatten her out.”

Jim shoved the barrow up the planks very wobbly and dumped it in front of the garage.

It fell out heavily, and a lot stuck to the bottom of the barrow. I scraped this out with the shovel, and we set to work hurriedly to spread the big blob out. It did not spread very willingly. It broke into cakes and the cakes spread rather granularly

“I don’t like this,” puffed Jim, slapping with the shovel.

“Get another barrow load, it’ll be wetter,” I commanded, and we’ll sort of blend it.”

Jim went down to the front of the drive and got another barrow load.

“It seems a little looser,” he panted, as he arrived. “But I don’t think we have much time to waste.”

A Horrible Sight

The fresh barrow load, while looser than the first, which had been standing all the time we were over at the lumber yard, did not blend very easily with the first load. In fact, the first square yard of concrete in front of the garage doors was rather a horrible sight.

We patted it with shovels. We got our plank with upright handles nailed on it, and spanked it. We smoothed it. We laid the plank down on the concrete and jumped up and down on it.

But it still looked warty.

“Pour water on the pile,” I suggested, a little excited.

But the first pailful seemed to just run off.

“Well, all right,” snapped Jim. “Don’t just stand there? Let’s get it spread first. Then we can smooth it later.”

“But that would only…” I began.

“Don’t argue!” shouted Jim, charging away with the wheelbarrow.

So we shoveled and wheelbarrowed and spread and shoveled and wheelbarrowed and spread. A side drive is a much larger area, in square yards, than you would think, backing a car out of it.

When we had got about 15 feet done out from the garage doors we knew we were beaten. If we delayed to flatten it, the outside of the main pile, down at the front end of the side drive, grew stiffer and more granular and harder to handle. I tried stirring it while Jim ran in and attempted to borrow a couple of men from the service station; from the grocer; the butcher and the drug store. He even telephoned some of our friends downtown at the office.

But my stirring was as useless as Jim’s telephone calls. It only let the air into the pile and dried it quicker.

“Good heavens,” gasped Jimmie, running out of the house. There will be that mountain of solid concrete blocking my drive…”

“Let’s spread it, any old way,” I replied.

So we worked like mad, trying to reduce the Vesuvius out by the sidewalk. In random humps, lumps, mounds, we laid the stuff another 15 feet down the drive,

But the sight of that awful pathway only caused us to abandon the main pile in desperate efforts to flatten down the work already done. We could reduce it in one spot, but the immediately adjoining square foot would resist, bulging up

So by the time the neighbors were arriving home for supper, half the pile stood a slowly congealing and immovable barricade while the other half was scattered in a ghastly, lumpy, misshapen roadway half-way down from the garage.

And Jim’s car inside.

Today, if you hear what sounds like machine-guns, it will be only the gang of concrete workers Jim got on compassionate grounds, breaking down the barricade and the abortive pavement.

They say they’ll have the driveway done before dark.

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Editor’s Notes: V-bombs were German V-1 flying bombs, an early form of cruise missiles. They had short range so were used against Britain between June and October 1944. They were still used against the Allies until the end of the war, but with different targets like Antwerp.

Dragon’s teeth were a form of fortification to block access by tanks and other vehicles.

Greg was worried that they would need a “work priority” to get the concrete. This was still during World War Two, so all sorts of things were rationed, and if concrete was on the list, they would have to apply to the government in order to obtain some. When writing of his time billeted in English estates, he is referring to his time as a war correspondent.

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, February 19, 1944

“For instance,” said Jimmie Frise, “a man could mend umbrellas.”

“True, Jimmie,” I mused. “When I was a boy, I recollect the umbrella menders. There would be one come along our street at least once a month. They would have a half a dozen tattered old umbrellas under their arms, and a little bag of tools, like a doctor.”

“They would rap at each door,” went on Jim, “and say to the lady, with a lift of the hat, ‘Any umbrellas to mend, lady?'”

“Nowadays, I still see scissors grinders,” I confessed, “with a little treadle strapped on their backs, and ringing a hand bell through the streets.”

“They are foreigners now,” said Jim. “But when I was a boy, they used to be our fellow countrymen. And the children would come and gather round to see the blue sparks fly off the wheel, and to hear him sing. I knew one Irishman, young Irishman, with a bright face, and he loved sharpening scissors and knives. And he used to sing a tune in time with his foot pumping on the treadle. A quick tune.”

“I can’t understand any man nowadays,” I stated, “being out of work even though he can’t do war work. There are so many things a man can do. Things men used to do, that seem to be forgotten. Why, I remember the spectacle sellers. Don’t you remember the spectacle sellers? Nicely dressed young men who, when you opened the door, were standing there, with a bright smile, and a sort of suitcase strapped around their necks and spread open in front of them filled with spectacles of all sorts fastened to the tray. From door to door, these merchants went, fitting spectacles to all the housewives.”

“And,” cried Jimmie, “the packmen! With a big black oilcloth pack on their backs with a tray in their hands, containing everything the home required – needles, threads, buttons, tape, elastic, bobbins, wool of all shades, hooks and eyes, buckles.”

“I remember,” I admitted, “my dear old grandmother searching all over the house one time for a bodkin, and finally saying – ‘I wish the packman would come by.’ And then she stopped still and looked wistfully out of the window, and said, ‘Why, I haven’t seen a packman in thirty years.’ And that day she grew many years older.”

“The packmen,” said Jim. “Merchants, with their stores on their backs. Today, it a man comes to your door with needles, thread, shoe laces, all he has got is a little bit of stuff in his hands and he is so shabby and importunate, you know he is only begging. But packmen never begged. They were proud men. They were merchants. Merchants of a prouder and older order than these modern ones that sit in stores. They belonged to that ancient craft of merchants who travelled by camel train and little ship across all the earth, selling as they went.”

“And the clock menders,” I cried. “Where are the clock menders? Don’t you remember the men, mostly with gray beards, who called at each door, and asked ‘Any clocks to mend, lady?’ They had a little handbag full of tools. I can still remember how they would come in and take the clock apart on the dining-room table, and we were allowed to stand there, with our hands behind our backs, and watch him in silence. And these clock menders were silent men, who breathed heavily through their beards as they bent over the mysterious million wheels and springs on the dining-room table. We always used to give them a cup of tea when they were finished, and the clock’s fine gong was ringing through the house again.”

Old-Fashioned Enterprise

“Now there,” said Jim, emphatically, “is an idea.”

“It sure is,” I agreed.

“This city, this whole country,” declared Jim, “is full of wonky clocks that people want repaired because some lines of new ones are hard to get on account of the war. Why, I’ve got two big clocks right now in my house that don’t go and haven’t gone for years and years.”

“I’ve got three of them,” I remarked.

“Isn’t that funny thing?” mused Jim. “I have, up in this minute, thought of those clocks just as ornaments. It is years since they went. I wonder why I haven’t done anything about them?”

“Because,” I stated, “the clock menders no longer call from door to door. Because you can’t think of anybody to come and take them away. Because they are too big and clumsy to take downtown yourself. I bet there is a million dollars’ worth of clock mending to be done right in this city.”

“I wonder,” thought Jimmie, “if it is because we have all grown lazy and indifferent? I wonder if, as the result of all the inventions of the past fifty years, life hasn’t become so soft, so easy, that the whole human species has grown lazy, careless, indifferent. Why wouldn’t I go to the trouble of taking a clock off the mantel, carry it out to my car in the morning and deliver it to a store downtown?”

“Nobody wants to do the little old-fashioned things any more,” Jim went on. “Even the piano tuners. Do you remember the piano tuners? You didn’t have to send for the piano tuner. He just turned up.”

“I remember, even,” I submitted, “a sort of general mender that used to come around about once a year. He had a wooden box on his back. He used to sit in the vestibule. He could resole shoes, mend leather gloves, sew up carpets that were torn, mend carpet sweepers, regild picture frames …”

“The country is full of work. And the grandest kind of work of all – working for one’s self,” said Jim.

“I guess the only kind of work anybody wants now,” I said, “is what somebody else tells them to do.”

“Well,” stated Jim, “one good thing has come out of this conversation. I’m going to get my clocks repaired.”

“The same here,” I said. “Only, it seems a shame that after all this talk about laziness and loss of enterprise, I have to confess that I am the great-grandson of a clockmaker.”

“Are you?” said Jim.

“Yes, my great-grandfather, born here in York, before it was Toronto, even, was Thomas Bradshaw McMurray, watchmaker, probably the first native born watchmaker in this city.”

“Indeed,” said Jim. “Maybe, some of these countless clocks that aren’t going all over Toronto were actually made by him.”

“Possibly,” I confessed. “But I inherit not the slightest aptitude with machinery of any kind.”

“You would hardly call a clock machinery,” pointed out Jim. “A clock is, after all, a very simple mechanism. It is, in fact, as simple as a child’s wind-up toy. It consists of a spring you wind up, a ratchet that holds the spring, and a series of geared wheels which relax the springs at a rate controlled by levers with tension on them. Really very simple.”

“Even so,” I confessed, “I have a horror of opening a clock. I must inherit some reaction from my great-grandfather. I shudder even when I take the back off my wrist watch. To look in and see all those tiny, delicate wheels and sprockets and springs breathing, as it were. Breathing and slowly ticking, ticking, like the beat of a heart. It gives me the creeps.”

“You surprise me,” said Jim. “All I see to clock mending, is, unscrew the works, take it all apart, laying each separate piece in a precise spot on the dining-room table, so that you will remember just when, rather than where, it goes back. Wipe everything with a rag dipped in gasoline or some such solvent. Reoil with great care, and very sparingly; and then reassemble. I should think it would be very simple.”

“Jim,” I cried. “Don’t do it. Don’t you do it.”

“Besides,” went on Jim, “if we learn how to mend a clock, then anybody can learn. And we could then not only advocate clock mending as a trade to the unemployed, but we could actually, when some poor chap calls at our door with a packet of needles or soap. bring him in, teach him the trick of clock mending in an hour or two, and set him on his way a free man, man with a trade and calling.”

“Mmm, mmm,” I said, doubtfully.

“How about the country?’ demanded Jim. “You pass all these little villages and cross roads in the country. There is no glazier there, but all the windows are mended. There is no clockmaker, no plumber, no tinsmith, no dentist, but all the country’s clocks are ticking in the kitchens, the pumps work, the roofs are tight … there must be men all over this country who do know about making things go.”

“Give it up, Jim,” I begged him.

But Jim went back to work at his drawing board with a hard dry look in his eyes, and that night, when the telephone rang right after dinner, I knew it would be Jim. And it was. And he invited me to come over to his place to see him mend a clock. And of course, a man would be a pretty poor specimen that wouldn’t do that much for a friend.

The clock, which Jim had standing on the bare dining-room table, was a large greenish yellow marble clock with gold pillars at the corners and a gold ornament on top. It was a clock made after the shape of a post-office or the British royal exchange or maybe the Greek temple or something severe. Jim had the dining-room doors closed and locked.

“I have here,” he said, “the small screwdriver from the sewing machine, a large screw-driver, a thing to tap with, in case of rust, a rag moistened with gasoline and an oil can. The whole outfit wouldn’t cost a dollar.”

Jim removed the back of the clock with four deft twiddles of the screw-driver. He peered inside, studied, examined, lit matches and peeked; and finally undid a large screw which let him lift out the bowels of the whole clock. It was heavy, brassy and compact.

“I will start at this corner of the table,” explained Jimmie, “and work across the table diagonally that way. I will lay each thing I take out, in its proper order. Thus, when reassembling the clock, I will start at that far corner. And so, as simple as falling off a log, it will go together again.”

I said nothing. Beads of perspiration began to stud my brow.

Jim removed eleven screws, large and small, and laid them, in a sort of row, across the table. Then removed the whole disjointed carcass forward to the head of the row, and delicately pulling, lifting, twisting, he began to take the machinery apart. Each piece he laid separately in the row.

“See,” he said, breathing heavily, “how simple it will be?”

I just moaned.

He worked straight across the table and then made a wide turn and started back on a second row. Still the machine came apart. Still grew that incredible line of wheels, screws, levers, bolts. The spring came away, a thick, dreadful looking thing, coiled like a serpent. Jim studied it, looked through its coils.

“Just as I thought,” he said. “Gummed with ancient oil. Glued, you might say. I will swish it in a bowl of gasoline.”

But on, on he went, finishing the second row and starting on a third. The face of the clock fell out. Jim picked it up and detached the hands.

“There,” he cried. “Was that difficult? Was that intricate?”

I stifled a groan.

With his gasoliney rag, Jim proceeded to wipe each part. He rubbed and scrubbed.

“Be careful,” I said hoarsely. “Don’t lean against the table. Don’t jiggle the least bit.”

“Imagine a man,” remarked Jim, “having a horror of clock insides!”

“It’s inherited,” I muttered.

And then Jim, shifting the duster in his hands to get a fresh clean bit to use, flicked with the tail of the rag the middle row of parts. It was just the lightest possible flick. But my rivetted and fascinated gaze saw a small brass wheel and a very tiny steel pin about the size of a one-inch nail, scamper across the table, and I let out a yell.

“You’ve ruined it, you’ve ruined it!” I shouted.

But Jim, bending down, picked up the wheel and the bolt and a sort of rocking beam sort of thing like on the top of an old-fashioned steamboat. It had a hole at each end.

“Not that, not that,” I hissed.

“I remember where they go,” said Jim easily, and he bent over, studying the rows of parts, and looking for the space the parts belonged to. “Here, this is where the wheel was. Or was it the rod?”

“I’m going home,” I stated.

“Just a second,” exclaimed Jim. “Let’s see. This flat thing was here. And this wheel was … there. Was it?”

“Oh, oh, oh,” I moaned.

“Mmmmm,” said Jim, “I remember this large sprocket was there. It must have moved, too. I’ll put it back there, and then this … Let’s see. This … Well, well, mmm, mmm, dear me.”

He straightened up. He stared narrowly at the rows of bits.

“Jim,” I said, taking his hand tenderly. “I’m off. Good-night.”

“Hold on, a jiffy,” said Jim, eagerly. “Now wait a minute.”

But he was frightened, and it showed. There was perspiration along the top of his forehead, too. I couldn’t leave the poor chap in such a plight. I hid my face in my hands and sat down.

“Mmm, mmm,” Jimmie kept saying, “Mmm, mmm.”

I heard little clicks. I heard snaps, clinks, snucks and taps. I heard things going together and things being grunted apart. I heard a loud tapping, and looked up to see Jim hammering a wheel on to an axle, using the butt end of a screw-driver.

“It’s all over,” I said brokenly.

“Well, anyway,” sighed Jim, holding small gear about the size of a dime, “I’ve found one thing I’ve been looking for for months. This gear will exactly fit my casting reel. The one with the black handles.”

“Please,” I begged, “don’t start trying tinker with your fishing reel.”

“It’s the very fit,” said Jim. “And now I know where I can get wheels and springs and anything like that.”

And he laid the clock on its back and rescrewed the face on it, and then laid it on its face and on its back door he just dumped, dumped all the works, packing them in and prying them in with the screw-driver and tamping them down with the butt of the screw-driver, and finally getting the back door closed and the little button turned.

“There,” he said. “Nobody will ever notice.”

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Editor’s Note: Gasoline was also used as an all-purpose cleaner back in the old days.

This story is a repeat of “Mmmm, Mmmm!” which was published on February 29, 1936. The image from that story is at the end.