Chapter I: Part 1

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

ROBERT WEBSTER JONES

LIGHT INTERVIEWS
WITH SHADES

BY
ROBERT WEBSTER JONES

Publishers DORRANCE Philadelphia

COPYRIGHT 1922
DORRANCE & COMPANY, INC.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES 11

II QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED 20

III JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY 29

IV JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING 37

V KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP 43

VI BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE 50

VII HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS 56

VIII METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS 66

IX JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING 75

X SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES 80

XI ADAM CONDEMNS PRESENT FASHIONS 88

XII CAPTAIN KIDD SPEAKS ON TAG DAYS 96

XIII ALFRED THE GREAT TRIES TO FIND PROSPEROUS KING 102

XIV OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION 111

XV KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES 116

XVI DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE “WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS” 123

XVII PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM 129

XVIII NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ 137

XIX LORD BACON MUSES ON CIPHERS 145

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

I

BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES

I drew this assignment to interview the shade of Bluebeard because our girl reporter backed out at the last minute,—said she had no objection to a nice, ladylike assignment such as getting Pharaoh’s daughter to talk about Annette Kellerman or having a chat with Joan of Ark, or whatever Mrs. Noah’s name was, but she balked at calling on a wife murderer who had never been introduced.

If I had not been warned in advance I should have thought this was surely an impostor—a barefaced one, too, for he wore no beard—to whose room I was ushered by a bellboy of the Olympus Hotel.

“Surprised at my appearance, eh?” he chuckled. “Everybody is. Expect to see a ferocious-looking monster with a long blue beard and a bowie knife sticking out of his belt. It’s about time the folks down below got the real facts, not only of my appearance but of my character. That’s why I’ve consented for the first time to talk for publication. I want to be set right in the eyes of those mistaken mortals. You are a young man and unmarried, I presume, from your happy, carefree countenance. Well, then, here is a thing I hope you’ll learn by heart: where singleness is bliss ’tis folly to have wives. I’ve tried it and I know. I, too, was once a happy, cheerful, careless bachelor, like Adam, you know. And like Adam I didn’t get my eyes opened until after marriage. By the way, speaking of Adam, did you ever pause to think that not until marriage came into the world did man have to dig for a living? Yet I digress. What I started out to say was that marriage is an excellent institution, but like all good things, it can be overdone. My mistake was in being too idealistic. I had resolved to find the ideal, the perfect wife, the kind you read about in poetry (a perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command). Well, my first wife laid too much emphasis on the ‘command.’ She took it literally. I found I had made a mistake and decided to bury it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Clementina was her name. She was not of a trustful nature. Invariably her first greeting on my returning home late at night took the sharply interrogatory form: ‘Where have you been?’ Frequently I would have been glad to tell her, only I could not remember. It has been said that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ but it did not seem to work out that way worth a cent at three o’clock in the morning. We had words, she seeking to obtain what she termed the ‘last’ one. But still there were always more to follow.

“I came in time to feel that I did not possess that treasure of treasures, a wife’s perfect confidence in her husband. One night, I remember, I started to get into bed with my overcoat on. It was merely a bit of harmless absent-mindedness. But Clementina continued to refer to the trifling incident daily, and nightly, for weeks afterwards. She even communicated the circumstance to friends and relatives, including her maternal parent, who naturally had no interest in the subject. When we were invited out to dinner she employed the incident as a conversational topic. I begged her to desist. She refused. I realized that it was high time to ‘try again.’ I need not go into details. But Clementina ceased to trouble and the weary was at rest. The coroner was a personal friend of mine. I had voted for him in three different precincts, and he kindly brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable uxoricide,’ or something of that sort, and everything was nice and comfortable.

“That was Clementina. Now let me see—let me see—who came next? Susannah? No, she was Number Three, I’m pretty sure. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but if I only had my old card index here I could tell you in two seconds. Sapphira? No, she came later. Oh, now I’ve got it: Maria. Yes, I had to get rid of Maria within a year. Nice, amiable girl she was, too, in most respects. Always had the meals on time, never hauled me out at night to call on the new neighbors, would rather darn socks for her husband than crochet a new sweater for herself, and had an impediment in her speech. I’d often heard there were such women, with impediments in their speech, but had never met one before. I thought it was a recommendation, but I was mistaken. It only made her take that much longer to say what she was going to say, anyway. When Maria and the impediment clashed it was always Maria that finally won out. But it took time. Verbally Maria required a long time to pass a given point, but she kept on until she passed it. Maria had one great fault. You’re not married, young man, and you may not grasp this defect in all its hideousness. But this was it: she always talked to me when I was trying to shave.

“At that time I wore a beard, but no side-whiskers, and I shaved every morning before breakfast. It was Maria’s invariable habit to stand at the bathroom door and engage in conversation—or rather monologue interspersed with questions. In consequence I got to spending more money for court-plaster than for shaving soap. A man stopped me on the street one day, gave a second look at my liberally-scarred countenance, and hailed me as a fellow graduate of Heidelberg. Finally, I decided that this business had gone on long enough. I gave Maria fair warning. The very next morning she stuck her head in at the door, just as I was trying to steer around a pimple below my right ear, and told me not to forget to bring home those lamb chops for dinner. I cut a gash an inch long and dropped the razor on the floor. That was Maria’s farewell appearance. There was no demand for an encore. The coroner kindly found that the impediment in her speech had stuck in her throat and she had choked to death. He was a good scout.

“And now we come to Susannah, Number Three, Series N. G. Susannah started out splendidly. She came highly recommended. I thought she was going to be one of the best wives I ever had. But, like all the others, she soon disclosed a fatal failing. I call it ‘fatal’ because it always turned out that way for all my wives. It may seem a trifle to you, young man, but that’s because you’ve never been married. The trouble was this, and it soon got on my sensitive nerves: the only time I could get Susannah’s absorbed, undivided attention was when I talked in my sleep. Then, I have reason to believe, she would sit up and listen by the hour. But at other times she might as well have been totally deaf, so far as paying attention to what I was trying to say was concerned. She always seemed to be thinking of something—I hope it wasn’t somebody—else. I’d start telling her about a business deal I’d just put through with some fellows up at Bagdad, or begin discussing the chances of the Damascus ball team for winning the pennant next year, and before I’d talked ten minutes I’d see as plain as day that she wasn’t hearing a word I said.

“She’d contracted the crocheting habit, too—I don’t know where she picked it up—and she’d work away, whispering to herself and nodding at me every now and then, until I thought I’d go wild. One night while I was right in the midst of telling her a funny story I’d heard at the Khayyam Country Club, she actually interrupted me to remark that she’d just found a new way of purling 14 by casting off 11 and dropping 34, or something of the sort, and I just up and—and— Well, there’s no need to harrow your feelings. Suffice it to say that I added one more to the Association of Former Mothers-in-Law of Bluebeard. Whenever one of my wives departed this life rather suddenly the ex-mothers-in-law always held a sort of indignation meeting. Sometimes they passed resolutions, too. But it didn’t seem to do any good. Just advertised the fact that I was a widower again. Didn’t seem to prejudice the girls against me. In fact, one leap-year I had to get a lot of rejection slips printed, like the magazine editors use, for replying to proposals. I read somewhere once that it always made a fellow popular to get a reputation as a lady-killer, and I seem to have proved it.

“And so it went. All the undertakers in town were trying to stand in with me. But I thought they went a little too far when they adopted a set of appreciative resolutions and invited me to address their annual convention. Some folks have no sense of propriety. The preachers showed more tact. It’s true that one offered to do all my marrying on the basis of a yearly contract, but that was a strictly private, business arrangement, the same as I had with the firm of caterers and liverymen which supplied both cakes and camels. I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off—Sapphira, who objected to my smoking in the front parlor; Anastasia, who believed the adjective ‘annual,’ as applied to house-cleanings, meant every week; Boadicea, who was strong for women’s rights, but refused to go downstairs first to tackle the burglar; Sheba, who took me along when she went shopping and parked me for two hours outside a department store; Delilah the Second, who wanted to cut my hair so as to save enough money to get herself a new winter hat, as if my overhead charges weren’t high enough already. These are just a few samples from my souvenir collection of matrimonial misfits that I happen to recall offhand. The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. If my experience helps other married men I shall be glad to have given this interview. I like to talk, because nowadays I feel I can do so without interrupting some wife or other. Just one word more, and then good night:

“There is no marrying in heaven. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

II

QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED

“Nothing would have induced me to talk for publication,” said Queen Elizabeth, as she negligently lit a cigarette and with a graceful gesture invited me to take a seat, “if you hadn’t printed that interview with that horrid old Bluebeard last week. They used to say that I was a heartless coquette, and that all the men were losing their heads over me. Well, if a young man had come to ask me, around the year 1588, why I had never married—as you have just done—he’d have lost his head in just about the time it would have taken the chief executioner to respond to a hurry call. But times have changed and we change with them. History has done many cruel wrongs to my memory, and I want to be set right. I didn’t stay single for lack of proposals, I can tell you. Why, before I was sixteen the front yard of our palace looked like a college campus, it was so full all the time of young men carrying flowers and boxes of candy and ringing the doorbell, wanting to know if Princess Elizabeth were in. I had every other girl in England jealous of me, if I do say it myself. But I saw too much of marriage at home. My father did enough marrying for the whole family.

“Life got to be just one stepmother after another. I began to lose count. I decided that one member of the family had given enough of a boost to the institution of matrimony, and it didn’t need any further endorsement from me. I soon appreciated the truth of the saying, ‘Man proposes.’ I got so many proposals I had my maids of honor knit a lot of mittens to hand to the fellows as a souvenir. Finally the men saw I was in earnest and let me alone; that is to say, most of them. A few foolish fellows continued to write poetry (that is what they called it) and send presents, but my mind was made up and I refused to change it. It was about this time that our court fool remarked that woman’s favorite occupations were changing her mind, her clothes and her name. And about five minutes afterward he changed his permanent address to the Tower of London. All the world’s a stage, as my friend Shakespeare used to say, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men consider themselves perfectly equipped for the rôle of comedian. But it’s possible to be too fatally funny.

“Now, about that interview with Brother Bluebeard last week. I suppose he thought _he_ was funny when he said about the only time a man gets his wife’s absorbed, undivided attention is when he talks in his sleep. But that’s about the only time a man says anything worth listening to. It just made my blood boil—that man Bluebeard calmly talking about the wives he’d killed. Not that I believe half of it. He was only boasting. And that reminds me: there used to be an organization called the Ananias Club. But who ever heard of a Sapphira Club? There wouldn’t be enough members to hold a meeting in a telephone booth. But ‘all men are liars,’ and married ones have more ready-made opportunities. It has been estimated that in a married lifetime of forty years the average man will be called upon to answer the perfectly reasonable inquiry, ‘Where have you been?’ 14,610 times. This calculation allows for 365 answers in each ordinary year and 366 in leap-years. And when her husband replies to her altogether proper interrogation, too often the wife realizes, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half has not been told her.

“From Ananias to Munchausen and down to the modern press agent, the experts at exaggeration have all been men. Fishermen’s tales and sailors’ yarns are proverbial. A woman trying to tell a lie feels like a fish out of water, and at the first opportunity flops back into the ocean of truth.

“There’s another slander on women I’d like to say a few words about, and that’s the charge of talkativeness. Men have always flocked to the talkative professions like ducks to water. Most lawyers and barbers are men. Are there any women auctioneers? There are few women preachers. There was a time when all the talking in the world was done by one man, but there was no conversation until the arrival of Eve. She did the listening. It is essential to conversation that there be a listener, and man’s happiness was not complete until there was somebody to hear him talk. The average husband loves to deliver home lectures on baseball in summer and politics in winter. Here we have the reason for the popularity of women’s clubs. No man being present, they have a chance to talk. Go into any church Sunday morning and what do you see? An audience composed principally of women listening to a man talking. The recording angel who tries to keep up with a man has to be an expert at taking lightning dictation. One of the newest works in three large volumes is entitled, ‘Last Words of Great Men.’ The edition makes no pretensions to being complete. That, of course, would be impossible when we have had so many great men, all of them talking steadily to the last. But it is worth noting that we have only meagre records of the last words of any great woman. Poor thing! With her husband, and a man doctor and a clergyman at her bedside, what chance would she have?

“I’ll admit that there have been a few of the so-called great men of history who have not been noted for their love of talk, but when such a man is discovered everybody calls attention to him as if he were a genuine curiosity of nature. He is usually given a nickname indicative of his peculiarity, such as William the Silent, and people travel miles to get a look at him. Practically every man is Speaker of the House, and in his case the title is no misnomer. For instance, it’s a question whether all the ancient martyrs put together ever said as much about their sufferings as one modern man with a boil on his neck. Man even goes ahead and invents new languages like Esperanto and baseball, and golf.

“Wives of great men most remind us that they talked all of the time, and departing left behind them words that were not worth a dime. Isn’t that what one of your own American poets said? Sounds something like it, anyway.

“But you wanted to know just why I never married. Well, it was because of these nasty flings at women by the men that I’ve just been speaking of. If they say such things before marriage, what won’t they say after? They’re always talking about women’s curiosity, starting with Eve and the apple. I suppose if there had been a _Saturday Eden Post_, Adam would have written alleged jokes about it or run a funny department called ‘Musings of a Married Man.’ I blame that Eve and her apple story for this eternal joshing about feminine curiosity. You needn’t look surprised, young man. I’m talking twentieth not sixteenth century language these days, and since yours is a family newspaper probably it’s just as well that I am. When I was queen you’d have thought the English language consisted principally of proper nouns and improper adjectives. We called a spade a spade, and then some. If a lady disliked a gentleman she didn’t say he was a mean old thing. She began by calling him a diabolical blackguard and horse thief, and then gradually grew abusive.

“Woman’s curiosity! All the census-takers and private detectives and professional Paul Pry’s who stick their noses into other people’s businesses are men. So are all the explorers, the individuals who are so curious to find out what’s going on at the other end of the earth that they can’t content themselves at home. If, in the history of the world, a woman has ever been seized by an overwhelming desire to see what the North Pole looks like, she has cleverly concealed the fact. While the men were organizing North Pole and South Pole expeditions, and relief expeditions, and expeditions to rescue the relief expeditions, the wives and mothers remained patiently on the job at home. And when the missing discoverers came back covered with hero medals, and suffering from chilblains, and writer’s cramp, and lecturer’s sore throat, and coupon-clipper’s thumb, the women never asked why heroine medals seem so scarce these days. Talk about curiosity! There’s a universal inquiry which is being put by some man to some woman in some part of the world at every second of every minute of the twenty-four hours, and it is this: ‘What did you do with that LAST money I gave you?’ There it is again, that insatiable curiosity of man which will not let him rest. Man is a perambulating question mark, the personification of the rising inflection, a chronic case of interrogationitis. And he has the nerve to talk about woman’s curiosity!”

“How about Sir Walter Raleigh?”

“Ah, young man, there are exceptions to every rule, and a woman is generally willing to take an exception. Walter was an awfully nice fellow, at first, but I was dreadfully disappointed in him. Do you know, that business of the velvet cloak and the mud puddle was only what you would call a grandstand play? I found out later. It was his last winter’s cloak, and he was just on his way to the Charing Cross rummage sale to give it away, when he happened to meet me. I know it’s so, because I got it straight at the meeting of the Westminster Sewing Society from the Countess of Leicester’s sister-in-law, who said she was told by the cousin of a woman who knew an intimate friend of a friend of Walter Raleigh’s aunt. And she said he actually laughed about it afterward!

“Do you wonder I stayed single? Perhaps I’ve said too much already, but one word more and I am finished. Do you know, young man, why women say marriage is a lottery? It is because they draw most of the blanks.”

Subdued, but with a sigh of relief, I withdrew hastily from the royal presence, feeling that “man’s inhumanity to man” wouldn’t be a marker to what would have happened to Queen Elizabeth’s husband.

III

JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY

“Interview your great-uncle and find out what he thinks of our modern navy,” said the city editor.

“My great-uncle?” I asked.

“Admiral J. Paul Jones. Wasn’t he one of your distinguished relatives? You’ve got the same name.”

“Oh, Uncle John? I believe we are related, but he was one of the rough specimens—sort of a piece of bark on the family tree—other side of the family, you know.”

“Well, you may find his bark worse than his bite.”

“Which planet is his shade living on now, do you know?”

“Neptune, I presume.”

And that is where I found him. He gave me genial greeting.

“Shiver my timbers, but I’m glad to see you. Come alongside and cast anchor, my lad, and tell me what wind blew you here.”

I explained that the mighty world below was palpitating for a few timely remarks from its old fighting hero.

“Fire away, then,” he replied. “What’s the first question?”

“Do you believe, Admiral,” I asked, “that a navy can be run on water—that is to say, of course, the ships have to run on water ... but I mean the men. Do you think——” And then I got tangled up and came to a full stop, for the expression on the old sea dog’s face was a mixture of puzzlement and pugnacity.

“What do you mean?” he roared. “Not to give the men water in place of grog?”

His attitude was positively menacing. I began to grow nervous.

“Why—er—that is the idea, Admiral. Do you believe it is possible to conduct a navy efficiently on prohibition principles?”

“Prohibition? Never heard the word before. And now that I have heard it I don’t like the sound of it. What are you jibbing and windjamming in this way for? Come right out and run up your true colors. Do you mean to tell me that anybody is seriously proposing to do away with grog in the American Navy? I’d hang the dastardly rascal from the yard-arm. Walking the plank would be too good for him.”

“Well, Admiral, you might as well know the whole truth. Grog has not only been abolished in the Navy (and that took place some years ago), grog has been abolished throughout the country. Liquor can neither be manufactured nor sold anywhere in the United States.”

Perhaps I should have broken the startling news to the old fellow more gently. But instead of the expected outburst of anger he sat stunned, still as a statue, or a speak-easy in Harlem.

For two minutes or more he kept silent. Then he spoke. “Say it again,” he muttered in a weak tone, “and say it slow.”

I complied.

“No grog for them as fights the battles, no whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum, nothin’ but milk and water. What kind o’ putty-faced swabs—But I needn’t ask. I see it now. You’ve been conquered by them Turks and water-drinking Mohammedans. But who’d have thought it?” And he shook his grizzled head disconsolately. “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum,” he went on muttering to himself as in a daze, over and over again, until I thought it might be advisable to recall him to himself.

“America thinks a great deal of you, Admiral,” I interrupted his melancholy monologue. “The nation cherishes the memory of your thrilling exploits. It will never forget your heroic deeds.”

The old Admiral brightened up a bit at this, but quickly relapsed into his melancholy mood. “No whiskey, no brandy—” he began again, when I tried the effect of another diversion.

“The nation is still safe, Admiral, and it has the largest number of ships and sailors in its history. The recent great war produced its heroes, too. We do not lack for defenders, you will be glad to know, if ever America is assailed again.”

“Yes, I’ve heard something about it,” he grumblingly admitted. “There’s a new-fangled cowardly sort of craft that goes under water and stabs in the back, a regular assassin, I call it. Farragut and Perry and some of the boys went down to perform at a seance in Philadelphia the other night, and they heard a lot of talk about your new naval heroes that have made us back numbers. There was Sims, and Daniels, and Benson, and—and—Admiral What’s-his-name? I can’t just think of it. Gray? No, that’s not it exactly. Admiral—Admiral—”

“Not Grayson?”

“Yes, that’s it, Rear Admiral Grayson. His flagship was the _George Washington_, I believe. And Admiral Denby, what did he do? I just can’t recollect on the moment.”

“Mr. Denby is not an Admiral; he’s the Secretary of the Navy. He’s not supposed to go to sea. He sits at a desk, instead of standing on a deck.”

“Oh, I see. But Rear Admiral Grayson? I wish you would describe some of his exploits to me.”

“Well-er—that’s a little difficult to explain, Admiral Jones, for you have been so long out of touch with our system. Admiral Grayson is really a doctor, and—”

“You mean the admirals say he is a doctor and the doctors say he is an admiral?”

“Oh, no, Admiral, not so bad as that. He is a medical admiral, not a fighting admiral. Rear Doctor—I mean Rear Admiral—Grayson was a naval surgeon, and he has been regularly promoted to the post of rear admiral. His job was looking after the President’s health, and all agree that he tendered good service.”

“Oh, a medical admiral, eh?” grumbled the old sea dog in a disappointed tone. “So that’s what he is. I can see him now, standing on the bridge of the good ship _Calomel_, stethoscope in hand, studying the symptoms of the approaching foe, writing the battle orders on prescription blanks and getting ready to fire a volley of quinine pills, three times a day before meals, at the hated enemy. I can see him taking the temperatures of the crew before going into action, and then, with a lancet in one hand and a scalpel in the other, preparing to repel boarders. I can see him charging the enemy (five dollars a visit, half price for office calls, consultations fifteen, operations, what you’ve got), I can hear the ringing words of command to candidates for vaccination: ‘Present arms.’ I can see him, with his trusty clinical thermometer and his rapid firing hypodermic, bravely—”

“You’ve got the wrong idea, entirely, Admiral Jones,” I hastened to interrupt. “It’s different from your day. None of our admirals do any hand-to-hand encounters. There are no more clashes at close quarters. Sometimes ships fight each other four or five miles apart.”

The grizzled veteran looked as if he scarcely understood what I was saying.

“No coming together with grappling irons, and fighting it out fair and square with pistols and cutlasses on the quarterdeck? A modern naval battle is just a long-distance artillery duel between Sunday School classes composed of total abstainers, as likely as not commanded by a specialist on whooping cough and measles? I guess it’s a good thing I shuffled off when I did. In my time a sea fight was more a matter of men than of machinery. I wouldn’t know how to go about it today. Everything is changed. I’m sure I’d forget to order a double round of hot lemonade for all the crew, instead of a stiff glass of grog, before going into an engagement. I must tell Farragut about it. I suppose they wouldn’t let him say anything stronger than ‘_Darn_ the torpedoes,’ or ‘Oh, fudge,’ if he were down on the job today. And Commodore Perry: ‘We have met the enemy and made ’em all sign the pledge.’ That’s the sort of message he’d be expected to send nowadays. I suppose with all these new-fangled inventions you’ve been telling me about, wireless, and range-finders, and searchlights, and turbines, and seaplanes and torpedoes and all the rest of ’em, a fellow has to stay sober to work ’em. In my day we always considered that a man fought better when he was about three sheets in the wind. I don’t say our ways were perfect, but I’m sure I wouldn’t feel at home on one of your big floating machine shops. I’d forget myself sometimes and want to get close enough to the enemy to see him without a telescope—or a stethoscope.

“Well, you’ll have to excuse me now, my lad. I have a date with Lord Nelson for three o’clock, to join in the historic and comforting ceremony known as splicing the main brace. I’ll break the news to him about what you’ve just been telling me. He’ll need a bracer after he hears it.”

And as the old hero hobbled away I could hear him muttering to himself: “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum; water, water everywhere, but not a drop o’ drink.”

IV

JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING

“How about an interview with one of the shades on daylight saving?” I suggested timidly, as the city editor was racking what he calls his brain in search of a suitable assignment.

“Right! Get hold of one of the old astronomers, Galileo, or Ike Newton, or—or—”

“How would Joshua do?”

“Joshua? You don’t mean Josh Whitcomb? He wasn’t a real character. He was only—”

“No, I mean the Biblical Joshua—fellow who made the sun stand still. That’s what our modern clock-fixers are trying to do. And as the pioneer, the original inventor of the scheme, a few views on his twentieth century imitators ought to be interesting.”

“Go to it. He can’t make the situation any more confusing than it is already.”

I found the ancient prophet reclining under his own vine and fig tree, studying a brightly colored seed catalogue. With alacrity he accepted my invitation to talk for publication.

“Daylight saving, eh?” he mused. “It’s odd how you moderns never seem to get any ideas of your own. Always the same old thing over again. There’s nothing new under the sun. And now you’re trying to beat old Tempus Fidgets with what you imagine is a brand new scheme, but really is older than Solomon’s mother-in-law. What do you expect to get out of it, anyway?”

I started to explain how getting up an hour earlier in the morning through putting the clocks ahead gave us an additional hour of daylight at the other end of the day, when the old prophet cut in: “Just fooling yourselves, eh, a great, big game of make-believe by grown-ups in order to have a little more time for play? You move the clock forward and pretend it’s an hour later, by general agreement? Well, why don’t you extend the idea while you’re about it and apply it to other things besides clocks and time?”

“What, for instance, Mr. Joshua?”

“Well, take the thermometer, an instrument that’s been invented since my time. When I lived on earth we never suffered much from either heat or cold, because we hadn’t any thermometers to tell us that we were uncomfortable. If it were one hundred and ten in the mighty scarce shade out on the desert, we didn’t know it. Eighty-five or a hundred and fifteen—it was all the same to us. We never had any hot waves. There were no daily lists of heat victims. The thermometer liar was unknown. Nobody was initiated into the Ananias Club for boasting that the thermometer on his back porch hadn’t in fifteen years varied a degree from the official weatherman’s. We may have felt a little warmer under the mantle some days than others, but we couldn’t tell in degrees how uncomfortable we were, and so we were spared a lot of suffering. It’s the thermometer that makes you moderns take such a morbid interest in the weather. If you hadn’t any means of measuring the heat and the cold, why, you wouldn’t care anything about them. I was a prophet, but I never went so far as to dare to prophesy the weather. I knew my limitations. But your government guessers, backed up by their thermometers, seem willing to take any chances. Now, I suppose it’s too much to expect you to abolish your worrisome thermometers entirely, but why not take a hint from your daylight saving business and tinkering with the clock twice a year, and do a little fixing of your thermometers?

“For example? Well, for a beginning you would have to adopt a new kind of thermometer with changeable or removable figures. On April first of each year let everybody mark his thermometer down ten degrees. That is to say, the present figure ninety would be replaced by eighty, and eighty by seventy, and so on. The first hot spell would prove the practicability of the device. The scheme is purely psychological, of course, but so is daylight saving. Under the old pessimistic thermometer, which has done so much to encourage the Society for the Promotion of Justifiable Profanity, the temperature, we will say, would be eighty-five degrees in the shade, provided you could find any. But according to the marked-down thermometer it would be only seventy-five, just warm enough to sit comfortably on the front porch and smoke your pipe and read the paper while your wife was washing the dishes in the kitchen. Then in mid-July along comes what, under the old arrangement, would have been a regular scorcher, with the mercury registering ninety-two and all the meteorological Munchausens in town down at the corner drugstore boasting that their pet instruments were registering one hundred and two plus, in the shade. But the optimistic thermometer, operating under the universal heat-saving law, would record only eighty-two degrees. And everybody would be comparatively cool and comfortable. In fact, you would practically never have it ninety degrees in your climate.

“Think what that would mean to perspiring humanity! For we all know how the thermometer affects our feelings. And the optimistic thermometer would work just as well in winter as in summer. It would only be necessary to mark it up ten extra degrees in October. Then you would have mighty few zero days. The saving in coal would be tremendous, for we all regulate the heating apparatus by the thermometer instead of the feelings. The optimistic thermometer in winter would register seventy degrees in the living room when the old-fashioned instrument would have made it only sixty. Isn’t that as sensible as daylight saving?”

“It is certainly a novel idea, Mr. Joshua,” I replied in a non-committal tone. “You seem to be carrying out to the logical extreme the Scriptural theory that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Do you know of any other practical application of the principle?”

“It is capable of indefinite extension,” responded the ancient prophet. “Take the matter of people’s ages. Lots of folks are so sensitive on the subject that it makes them unhappy and others are discriminated against in business or the professions because they happen to be a year or two past an arbitrary age limit and have a bit of gray in their hair. Now, why not by common agreement let everybody over the age of forty mark down his or her age ten years? We are all as old, not as we look or feel, but as we think we are. If we can say it is only five o’clock when it’s six, then we can assume we are only fifty years old when, according to the strict, literal calculation, we are really sixty. Let’s give psychology a chance.”

“Fine idea, Mr. Joshua. Make believe that it’s an hour later or earlier than it is, that it is ten degrees hotter or colder than it is, and that we are all ten years younger than the record says. We live largely in a world of self-delusion anyway. That is what makes living endurable. You would only carry the principle a little farther, if I understand you. But there’s one little device for human happiness I wish you would add to the others.”

“And that is?”

“A barometer that will always predict fair weather when I want to play golf Sunday morning and rain if my wife wants me to go to church.”

But from the look the prophet gave me I saw that Joshua couldn’t be joshed with impunity, and leaping into my astral airplane I glided back to good old terra firma.

V

KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP

“My wife has just told me where we are going to spend my summer vacation,” remarked the city editor. “It’s been said that nothing is absolutely certain in this world, but it’s as sure as anything can be that I’m going to spend my three weeks just where the missus tells me. We never have any discussion on the subject at our house—none of that mountains or seashore business George Ade wrote about, ending in a compromise on the wife’s favorite mountains. But it’s always a relief when the suspense is over and the annual announcement by friend wife is made.

“And that reminds me; how about an interview with one of the shades on the modern vacation, summer resorts and all that sort of thing? Got anybody in mind for it? Noah? No, that trip of his was no summer vacation picnic. Suppose you ask Solomon how he managed the annual vacation business with all those wives of his. They tell me he was the wisest man that ever lived, and I’ll say he needed to be?”

I was gratified to find the shade of the former monarch and much-married man not at all averse to talking for publication. “You see,” he observed with an apologetic smile, “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk without being interrupted. It’s quite refreshing to have an appreciative, interested listener. Fortunately you have come on the very day when the Wives and Daughters of Solomon Association is holding its annual convention, and the mothers-in-law also are attending in their capacity of honorary members. They haven’t the privilege of voting—only of speaking from the floor—but that’s quite satisfactory. They don’t care where they speak from so long as they speak.

“And so, as I have said, we can have a cozy little chat. What did you want me to talk about? Summer vacations? My boy, I could tell you things about the trips I have taken in my capacity as a multiple husband that would dissuade you from matrimony ever after. But I do not wish to relate all the harrowing details. I’ll just give you a hint.

“Well, to start at the beginning, during the first few years of my married life the summer vacation germ spared our happy home. But as I gradually added more wives to my collection, an agitation was begun to get me to take them away somewhere for the summer. The wives began to find fault with the Jerusalem climate.

“They started to criticise what they called the stuffy little rooms of the royal palace. They suggested that other families were closing their houses, or renting them furnished for the summer, and going to the shore of the Mediterranean, where resorts had sprung up that advertised paradoxically cool breezes and a hot old time. They made life so miserable for me that finally one day, after a committee of wives had presented the subject and threatened that they would all go away to Mediterranean City on their own hook if I didn’t consent, I yielded.

“And then ensued such a season of preparation as I hope I shall never have to go through again. Four hundred new trunks bought, four hundred new summer outfits ordered. The palace as if by magic became filled with seamstresses and fitters and millinery architects and all sorts of strange women I had never seen before. You couldn’t walk down the front stairs without stumbling over a seamstress or two.

“The parlor, the living room, the library, all seemed full of sewing societies. Perfect strangers thronged the halls, their mouths full of pins, and tape measures hung around their necks.

“And then, the night before we were to depart, a special committee of wives called on me to exhibit the standardized bathing suit they had decided upon and get my official O. K. At first I was inclined to criticise—and then I reflected what a very, an exceedingly small thing it was to quarrel about—and graciously gave my consent.

“The next day we left Jerusalem for Mediterranean City. And we created some sensation. I headed the procession, followed by the Mesdames Solomon mounted on the four hundred camels. Then came a detachment of mothers-in-law on army mules (they were invited to come in relays during the summer) and the first instalment of the baggage train brought up the rear.

“The second instalment was to come next day with the things the wives had forgotten and sent back for. And other baggage trains were to follow from time to time during the summer, as needed.

“We were several days upon the journey. Before leaving I had not felt that I needed a vacation, but before we finally arrived at Mediterranean City I was ready for the rest cure.

“You see, traveling in those days was not like what it is now. A camel with shock absorbers and air-cushion springs might be a comfortable vehicle, I should imagine, but in his primitive state a camel’s motion is quite different from that of a limousine or a parlor car. Rubber heels had not been invented or I would surely have had our camels equipped with them.

“We had to camp out along the roadside several nights, and none of the wives were used to that. And they did not hesitate to express their feelings. We had started out with a goat among our numerous menagerie, but at an early stage of the proceedings he escaped into the desert—doubtless in search of peace and quiet.

“However, he was not missed. I took his place. It was a rôle to which, in spite of my royal rank, I was accustomed. Everything that went wrong—and that meant practically everything that happened from start to finish—was blamed on me. I was even accused of having planned and perpetrated the excursion, when I had never had the slightest notion of leaving Jerusalem until they suggested it. Finally my patience was exhausted, and I up and told them if they didn’t like it they could go to Jericho. Then, as now, Jericho was far from being an ideal place of summer residence, and their complaints gradually ceased.

“Well, we finally arrived at Mediterranean City, and then our sorrows began in earnest. I don’t know whether you have ever had any practical experience with the Mediterranean mosquito. I have never been quite able to forgive Noah for bringing ’em into the ark. A reception committee of these pests met us at the city gate and escorted us to the Hotel Paymore—so we were stung twice—when we arrived and when we paid the bill on our departure.

“The first hitch came when the clerk started assigning the rooms. It seems there were only some two hundred with an ocean view—and four hundred wives demanding a room apiece. The clerk threw up his hands and appealed to me. He had heard of some puzzling problems I had solved in my capacity as the world’s champion wise man—I threw up my hands and appealed to the proprietor. And he joined in the pleasing indoor pastime, known as passing the buck, by sending in a riot call for the police. But they didn’t come. They were men of long experience, and they knew better than to come between man and wives.

“The upshot was that we drew lots for the first night, the arrangement after that being to take turns occupying rooms with the ocean view. As for myself, with my usual benign disposition, I took a six-by-nine chamber—a room commanding a splendid prospect of the great desert. But I had learned not to be too particular.

“I cannot say that I enjoyed my first and only family summer vacation. Think of four hundred wives wanting to be taken out rowing every day! Think of being required to affix wriggling angle-worms to four hundred separate and distinct fish-hooks! I need not enter into details. These samples are sufficient.

“It is enough to say that after the regular vacation period was over I was compelled, on the advice of my chief physician, to enter the Jerusalem Sanitarium and Rest Cure in order to recuperate. It was ‘never again’ for me.

“I hear there is some complaining today among married men over having to take their wives to the seashore or the mountains. But they should pause to consider that their experience, at worst, can be only one four-hundredth as strenuous and wearing as was mine. I remember the day we got back home to the palace in Jerusalem. Every last one of those wives was so glad to be back that she went up to her room and had what she called ‘a good cry.’”

“And what did you do, Your Majesty?”

“Oh, I went down cellar and took a smile.”

And, notwithstanding my citizenship in the dryest nation on earth, I felt that Solomon had richly earned that spirituous solace.

VI

BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE

“I’ve got a job for you that’s some assignment. You say _you_ always have to suggest the subjects for these interviews with the shades. Well, here’s one for you that I thought of last night all by myself. Interview Collector Brigham Young on woman suffrage.”

“Collector Young? I can’t quite recall on the moment. Let’s see: what did he collect?”

“Wives. Had one of the largest modern collections on record. When they were young used to call ’em his souvenir spoons. You may have a tough time getting him to talk, but if you succeed it ought to be hot stuff. I can imagine what Brigham Young would think of woman suffrage.”

But my usually infallible city editor was wrong on both points. Collector Young was not averse to talking for publication, and his views on woman suffrage were quite different from those he might have been presumed to hold.

“Take a seat. Glad to see you,” he exclaimed with all the affability I had been accustomed to receive during my adventures in interviewing illustrious spirits. “Thought I mightn’t wish to talk for publication? Why, I’ll talk for anything. Mighty glad of the opportunity. I talk now on the slightest provocation. Sometimes when there’s nobody else to talk to I talk to myself. Do you realize, young man, what it was to have forty-nine wives, simultaneously, and just about how much chance a husband had to get in an occasional remark edgewise? And as for getting the last word in a more or less animated discussion! Why, it always looked as if there never were going to be any last word.

“But after my extensive and varied matrimonial experience, as I have said, you can imagine the amount of pent-up opinions, the quantity of suppressed conversation I still have in my system. For thirty-two years my principal rôle in life was that of silent listener. Think of having to sit still and listen to forty-nine separate and distinct, and largely contradictory, reports of the meeting of the Mount Zion Missionary and Sewing Society! Think of listening every Sunday afternoon to forty-nine individual criticisms, chiefly destructive, of the feminine fashions observed in the congregation! Imagine the position of a so-called head of the house who could never utter a word without interrupting somebody or other! But the most maddening experience I had to undergo was when they all came down with the crocheting craze at the same time—or else the knitting mania—another form of feminine insanity—it’s all one to me. When the spell was on they wouldn’t talk to anyone else or let anyone else talk to them. It put them out of their count, they said. But they’d sit there in the front parlor—the whole regiment of them—and knit away, muttering some mysterious words to themselves. And never condescending to explain to a mere man what it was all about. They declared that would be ‘casting purls before swine.’ The click-click-click of the needles, forty-nine pairs of them all going at once, would sound like a knitting mill running full blast. And they always knitted in the evening, the time they insisted on my being at home. Said it made them nervous to be left alone in the house at night. Why, the forty-nine of them could have talked an ordinary burglar to death in half an hour and robbed him of his tools. But they thought they ought to have a man’s protection.”

“That reminds me, Mr. Young, of something I wanted to ask you before I knew you were going to be so courteously communicative. You will pardon me, I know, but I have often wondered how certain things were managed in such a-er-er—such a numerous establishment. For instance, the average husband with only one wife expects to be asked where he has been when he returns home late at night, but if he had forty-nine matrimonial partners, why, er-er—”

“You want to know whether they would all ask him at once? No, sir. That wasn’t the arrangement. We had committees for all such matters. Otherwise there would have been intolerable confusion. It would never have done in the world. A husband might inadvertently give twenty or thirty different—er-er—explanations of his unavoidable tardiness, and then when they got to comparing notes there would have been trouble. As I have said, we had committees. There was a committee on late returns and excuses, a committee for seeing that husband wore his rubbers to the office, a committee for reminding him to get his hair cut, a committee on new hats and gowns for summer and other seasons, a committee to get him to put on the screen doors in May, a committee to remind him about birthdays one week in advance, a committee for—oh, everything you can imagine. It was like a Legislature or Congress—except that instead of one there were forty-nine Speakers in the House.”

“Very interesting, Mr. Young, I am sure. But I was instructed to get your views on woman suffrage. Do you approve of women voting?”