Chapter II: Part 2

“I don’t quite like the form of your question. Put it this way: do I object to women voting? I do not, for two reasons: first, I know better, after my extensive experience, than to object to anything women want to do, since it can do no good; and second, since women run things, anyway, to suit themselves, the act of voting is merely a symbol or ceremony of registration of their power. They were the real rulers before they got the ballot, and the vote isn’t going to change the situation any. The only hitch I see will come if the women can’t make up their minds as to just what and whom they want to vote for. I suppose in states where women have never voted before there may be a little trouble with those who have changed their minds after casting their ballot and want to get it back for a minute to add a postscript. But on the whole I don’t see why any man—any married one at least—should object to woman suffrage. Since the average voter gets his instructions from a political boss, anyway, it might be more convenient to have that boss in the family. Woman is assuming new duties and responsibilities every day. The hand that used to roll the baby carriage now rolls the cigarette.”

“You have spoken, Mr. Young,” I remarked as I rose to depart, “as if the wife were always the ruler, the autocrat of the home. Are you aware that the Census Bureau now officially recognizes the husband as the head of the house?”

Brigham smiled sadly as he replied: “Yes; but they only take a census once in ten years.”

And I tiptoed silently from the pathetic presence of one who had married not wisely, but too much.

VII

HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS

“What did you say about a hip-pocket?” queried the city editor suspiciously. “I want a drink as much as any man, but since prohibition arrived no camel has had anything on me. I believe in respecting the law even if—”

“I didn’t say anything about a hip-pocket,” I cut in. “I said it might be a good scheme to interview old Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, and find out what he thinks about modern doctors and surgeons and professional etiquette and whether times have improved any since he was in active practice a couple of thousand years ago. What do you think of the idea?”

“Go to it,” responded the C. E., “but be careful he doesn’t try to charge you ‘for professional advice.’ Make him understand that we’re doing the favor, not he. He ought to be glad of the free advertising. He’ll say at first he doesn’t want any publicity—it is unethical. See if he doesn’t. These doctors are all alike. I know ’em.”

Much to my surprise the city editor’s cynical prediction was verified by my victim’s opening remarks. “You want me to talk for _publication_, young man?” said the Father of Medicine. “You’re sure you’re not a representative of an eastern publishing house who has been authorized to place a few copies of a new encyclopedia with a selected number of the most prominent citizens, absolutely free of charge, on payment of a dollar down and five dollars a month for twenty years?”

Somewhat mystified, I replied in the negative.

“And you’re not demonstrating from purely philanthropic motives—the only charge being for packing and postage—a new tonic guaranteed to make the baldest pate blossom into a Paderewski?”

“No, sir, I’m not an agent of any kind. I have nothing to sell.”

“You are certain you are not promoting the sale of a new absolutely talk-proof safety razor for married men whose wives insist on conversing while they are trying to shave themselves? Or a new hip-pocket Testament holding one pint? Or a machine for manufacturing cigars at home, in anticipation of the next Great Reform? Or a self-spelling typewriter for business college graduates? You are not selling stock in a gold mine in Iceland at fifty cents par today, but price to be raised positively next Monday at ten o’clock to a dollar and a half, all shares guaranteed non-assessable and non-returnable? You are not the agent for a combination snow-shovel and lawn-mower, especially designed for the North American climate, transposable at a moment’s notice? You are not selling diamond-studded coupon clippers for profiteers or self-finding collar buttons, or—”

“My dear sir, I have nothing to sell at all. I am a reporter and I want—”

“Oh, a reporter? Well, why didn’t you say so at first, instead of causing all this confusion and waste of breath? I’ve been so bothered with agents of every sort lately that I can’t sleep nights. I told one that the other day and he pulled a bottle out of his bag and tried to sell me an infallible cure for insomnia. I resolved not to let another one into my house. But you’re a reporter, eh? That’s a refreshing novelty around here. Come in.

“But you must know that I never talk for publication. I have never done such a thing in my entire professional career. It would be entirely contrary to the ethics of my sacred calling. Somebody might say I was trying to advertise myself. You know doctors can’t be too careful. We never advertise. We may occasionally consent, under pressure, to the publication of an item in the society column saying that ‘Dr. Theophilus Sawbones of 52896 Arnica Avenue has returned after a two weeks’ trip to Atlantic City and resumed his practice.’ But that isn’t advertising. That’s news. You never see a surgeon, for instance, descending to the low commercial plane of your merchants, and announcing in a display advertisement: ‘Cut rates all this week at Dr. Carvem’s. Now is the time to get that appendix cut out. All operations marked down. Special bargains in tonsils.’

“No, sir. We have an exalted code of ethics in our profession, I am happy to say, dating from the time when I founded the practice of medicine. But if you are sure a few timely remarks from me will not be misinterpreted and regarded as an attempt on my part to get into the limelight, I am at your service to the extent of about a column and a half, offered for acceptance at your regular rates, to be run next reading matter.”

“I am certain, doctor,” I responded, “that the world will attribute no self-promoting motives to one enjoying your long and honorable reputation. Do you note many changes in the practice of medicine since the days when you were in the harness?”

“Well,” responded Hippocrates as he thoughtfully stroked his long beard, “there seem to be more different kinds of doctors nowadays than we had in 400 B. C. We didn’t know anything about specialists in our time. We were not merely general practitioners; we were universal practitioners.

“Suppose, for instance, a prosperous citizen of Athens had the gout, indigestion, corns, heart murmur, rheumatism, torpidity of the liver and clergyman’s sore throat—seven ailments in all. He sent for me and I treated all his diseases at the same time. While he had a combination of diseases, we knew any good doctor would understand the combination.

“I felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, and told him he was working too hard—just as one of your modern doctors would do. It always pleases a prosperous citizen to be told that he is working too hard—and we aim to please. If I thought he would like a trip somewhere, I recommended a run over to Rome during the Coliseum season. They used to have some mighty good shows at the Coliseum. If he preferred to take his vacation at home, then I recommended a trip for his wife. I told him not to eat so much and to take more exercise, and to cut out the worry, and then collected my fee of two drachmas, and went on to the next vic—I mean, the next patient.

“But take that same prosperous citizen today. How many specialists would he have to call in before he could consider his case properly attended to? Seven diseases, seven specialists, you say? Oh, more than that. First thing he’d have to send for the primary diagnostician, if he wished to do it in thoroughly up-to-date style. Well, the primary diagnostician would come in to find out, first, what was the matter with him. He looks the patient all over and takes flash-light pictures of his interior, makes a card index of all the things the matter with him and then calls in his stenographer and dictates a circular letter to a collection of specialists, asking them to drop around at their leisure and confirm his diagnoses. And do _they_ proceed then to treat the patient? Not for a minute. They are the secondary diagnosticians. Each has his specialty and wouldn’t dream of encroaching on any other specialist’s territory. The gout man looks only for gout—and he finds what he is looking for. The indigestion expert does the same—and it can’t escape his eagle eye. It’s the same all down the line.

“When the seven secondary diagnosticians have finished their job the patient is presented with seven neatly-inscribed charts, showing the general plan and location of his various troubles—and seven courteously worded communications beginning with precisely the same words: ‘For professional services to date.’

“Now it’s time to call in the specialists who administer the treatment. Seven more of ’em. Why, nowadays the house of a rich man who’s got something the matter with his insides looks like the convention hall of the American Medical Association during a well-attended session. And that’s not all. You not only have to have a different doctor for each disease, but a whole lot of brand-new diseases we never heard of in my time have been invented. Back in the old days in Athens there were only about a dozen ailments a fellow could acquire. If he escaped these he never had to call in a doctor. But today, as any specialist will tell you, there are about fifty-seven varieties of throat trouble alone. You can have eighty-six different things the matter with your liver, while the various kinds of indigestion, plain and fancy, would fill a book. In our time, too, we did mighty little tinkering with the human frame with tools and things. We knew about the appendix, but we failed to perceive its commercial possibilities. We thought it had been put there for some wise purpose—but it didn’t occur to us that it might be a financial one. The price of a modern appendicitis operation would have supported one of our old Greek physicians in luxury for three years.

“It was the same with tonsils. We’d as soon have thought of cutting off a man’s tongue as taking out his tonsils. Every young doctor had to take an oath—the _Hippocratic_ oath, _I_ called it—that he would give everybody the benefit of his services without regard to money. Nowadays if doctors take the oath I presume a good many of them keep their fingers crossed. I agree that when a doctor is called out of his bed in the middle of the night, to treat an old fellow who is suffering from nothing except fatty degeneration of the pocketbook, it’s quite a temptation to relieve him of a substantial share of that trouble. Some folk think they aren’t getting full attention unless they are charged enough to make them feel it in the pocket nerve. Increased wages of workingmen are bound to enlarge the number of millionaire medicos.”

“So, you think, Doctor, the practice of medicine has become somewhat commercialized since your day?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. I did not wish to reflect on my successors. That would not be professional. I’m simply sorry that back in 400 B. C. we were not alive to our opportunities. Think of our allowing Croesus, the richest man that ever lived, to go around with his appendix intact! Why, I sat up with him all one night when he had acute inflammation of the imagination and thought he saw pink Egyptian crocodiles crawling up the window-shades, and only charged him two dollars!

“No, understand me. I’m not finding fault with the twentieth century doctors. I’m only envious of their opportunities. Your modern doctor dashes around town in his automobile and calls on twenty patients a day. I had an old ox team, non-self-starting, that couldn’t take the smallest hill on high and had a maximum speed on the level of two miles an hour. While I was attending a patient at one end of Athens a patient at the other end had time to get well without my assistance. That was discouraging to any young fellow just as his practice and professional beard were beginning to grow. And nowadays they tell me you have allopaths, and homeopaths and osteopaths—but you must remember that all paths lead to the grave.”

“Why is that last joke just like you, Doctor?” I interposed in self-defense.

“I give it up. Why is it?”

“Because it dates from at least 400 B. C.”

And the look Hippocrates gave in return made me thankful he wasn’t my family doctor. I knew he would rejoice to write me a prescription of ten grains of strychnine, three times a day, to be taken before meals.

VIII

METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS

It’s odd how often in interviewing the old-timers and ancient shades one’s preconceived ideas get a jolt. In my mind’s eye I had a vision of Methuselah, for instance, as an antediluvian figure with a Santa Claus beard and a general air of decrepitude. The door was opened in response to my ring by a smartly dressed, smooth-shaven individual, who certainly looked as if the burden of age sat lightly upon his shoulders.

“I should like to see Mr. Methuselah,” I said. “That is, if he is able to see callers today. If he’s having his nap, or not feeling very spry this morning, I can come again.”

“Come again? I guess not. You see me right now. I was going over to the Olympus Club to play a round of golf, but I’ll be glad to give you half an hour. Walk right in. What can I do for you?”

“My city editor wanted an interview on how to attain long life, but I must have got hold of the wrong Mr. Methuselah. I want the one who lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, the world’s champion oldest inhabitant. Surely you’re not—”

“I’ll say I am. I’m the only original, the guaranteed nine-times-centenarian and then some. I know what you expected to see: an old fossil with snowy whiskers and numerous wrinkles, walking with a couple of canes and dressed in a single garment like an old-fashioned nightshirt. You were prepared to have me give my reminiscences, to wheeze out, between painful breaths, that the old days were far better than anything we have now, to roast the younger generation, and wind up by attributing my longevity to abstaining from booze and the use of tobacco in any form. You were all ready to put down that I can read fine print without glasses and can remember events of nine hundred and fifty years ago as if they happened only yesterday. Oh, I know you newspaper fellows and I’ve read so many interviews with centenarians I could write one myself with my eyes shut. My advice to anybody who wants to live to be a hundred, to say nothing of nine hundred and sixty-nine, is, ‘Don’t.’ And as for reminiscences, my motto is, ‘Forget it.’ I haven’t any very happy recollections of my long-drawn-out stay on earth. Existence is pleasant, but it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing.

“Take our married life, for instance. At the start everybody said it was a regular love story. But even a love story that stretches out into a serial of over nine hundred chapters gets a trifle monotonous. You’ve never heard of Mrs. M. She wouldn’t tell her age even to get her name into the Bible. I remember when they first started taking the census. The census taker came to our house and camped out three years. Couldn’t get all the facts of our family any other way. And we had to board him all that time. Well, his wife’s sister belonged to the Daughters of Eve Foreign Missionary Society, the same one my wife did, and Mrs. M. said she just knew that if she gave her age, why, that mean old thing would know it within half an hour, and it would be all around town before the day was over. And she just wouldn’t give it. I gave him all the dope about the other members of the family, my great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren and the close relations on my wife’s side who’d been living with us for three hundred and fifty years (close was no name for it), but I balked when it came to the question of Mrs. M.’s age. The fact was, she was only about four hundred and twenty-five, or thereabouts, at the time, but you know how women are—so blamed sensitive about something that men are proud of—and so I told him to go and get the information from headquarters.

“Well, it happened to be a bad combination that day. It was wash-day, and the cook had just left, after being with us for a hundred and eighty years, and quite a number of the children had the measles and the whooping cough and one thing another, and Mrs. M. happened to have a mop in her hand at the time, and—But here I am reminiscing away and I said I wouldn’t. Let’s get back to business. What did you want me to talk about?”

“I’d like you to explain how you’ve kept so young-looking and feeling after all these years.”

“That’s easy. I’m just following the new policy of you folks down below and carrying it out to its logical extreme. The modern idea is to regard age as merely a state of mind. Simply refuse to grow old and you’ll find it’s easy enough to stay young. Is your hair getting gray? Never say dye. Is your hair falling out? Get it bobbed. Don’t try camouflaging your face, but keep young inside. Joshua has the right dope: let’s have some lifetime saving. Half a century ago a man was old at forty and a woman put on a cap and sat in the chimney corner when she turned thirty. A girl was an old maid at twenty-five. Today you think there’s something wrong with a grandmother who can’t jazz and nobody knows the meaning of ‘declining years.’ And nobody is too old to decline a cigarette or a dance. They used to say a man ought to retire at seventy. Now it’s hard to get him to retire at midnight, if there’s a good show left in town. Folks are just beginning to enjoy life at sixty.

“All I’ve done is to follow you folk’s example and refuse to be old at nine hundred and sixty-nine. If I can do it, everybody can. How does this jibe with my advice not to try to live to be a hundred, you may ask. That’s perfectly consistent. The way to live long is not to bother about it. I wouldn’t have been five hundred if I’d tried to keep up with the advice of all the insurance experts. I speak from experience. Take the ‘no breakfast’ cranks, for instance. I went without breakfast for one hundred and twenty-five years and I didn’t know what was the matter with me. Then I tried taking a couple of pounds of beefsteak and half a dozen baked potatoes before breakfast every morning, and I felt like a new man. Then, once at the beginning of a century—I forget which one—Mrs. M. got me to swear off on tobacco for a hundred years. We used to make our so-called good resolutions at the start of a century, not of a year, the way you do. The first hundred years may be the hardest, she said, but ‘see how much better you’ll feel.’ Well, I stuck it out about sixty years, and then the whole family came around and besought me on bended knee to go back to hitting the pipe. They said life in our once happy home was getting to resemble a bear garden or a peace conference or a free-for-all prize fight. Better to smoke than to fume. And so I got out the old pipe and smoked up for another six hundred years.

“I wish I’d kept a card index of all the health fads I’ve seen come and go. Once the vegetarians had their inning. Somebody said the secret of health was to eat nothing but onions. It would have been pretty hard to keep the secret. Then we were told to eat only fruit. And once all the cranks decided on an exclusive diet of nuts—sort of cannibalistic when you come to think of it. One winter they said we’d all be healthier with the minimum of underwear—the short and simple flannels of the poor. Another rule for living long was to almost freeze yourself every morning taking a cold bath—I remember one winter I qualified for a zero medal. I ate baled hay and fried sawdust and all sorts of breakfast foods for two or three centuries, under the impression that they were the elixirs of eternal youth, and then one day I found I was getting so weak and wobbly on my pins I cut ’em all out and went back to a good dose of real food, three times a day, to be taken at mealtime. I quit the fads and fancies, ate everything that came my way and let ’em fight it out among themselves. And I broke the world’s record for dodging the undertaker.

“But, as I remarked before, I can’t say I’d advise anybody to try to be even a single centenarian, to say nothing of scoring nine. Think of paying for nine hundred birthday presents your wife gave you, not to mention several thousand contributed by the children and grandchildren and other descendants. Why, one birthday I got ninety-three pairs of slippers, most of ’em, of course, a size too small—must have thought I was a centipede. Then there’s a good deal of competition among centenarians, and that leads to jealousy and hard feelings. For instance, I’d always predicted the weather by my rheumatiz (although I could never tell when there was going to be a storm at home). I got quite a reputation by it. And then an upstart centenarian over at Ararat, a young fellow only about three hundred years old, claimed it always rained when his corns hurt him—or the other way round—and took away about half my visitors. He boasted that he had a set of infallible corns, and every morning he’d get out a bulletin such as ‘Fair and warmer,’ or ‘Cold weather with snow.’ A regular fakir, he was. Honest folk just considered him one of those excess prophets. But he seemed to guess right about fifty per cent of the time, and when he was wrong people gave him credit for his good intentions. His whole stock in trade was his corns. Any good chiropodist could have reduced him to bankruptcy in five minutes. But he put up a bluff and got away with it and made folks think he was the real Oldest Inhabitant.”

“One more question, Mr. Methuselah: how do you account for the fact that folks lived so much longer in your time than they do nowadays?”

“Well, there were no automobiles and telephones and germ theories, and revenue officers and apartment houses and phonographs and piano-players and rolled hose and alarm clocks and table d’hôte dinners, for one thing, and for another, we didn’t try to compress five hundred years of living into a fifty years’ existence. We didn’t cover any more distance over the highway of life than you moderns do, but we took more time to do it in. We walked instead of ran, and picked flowers along the wayside and paused now and then to admire the scenery. And rich or poor, young or old, we got out of life exactly what you do—a living. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I promised to play nine holes with Noah before luncheon. How would you like to carry my golf sticks?”

I respectfully declined, pleading a previous engagement. I have played many rôles in my time, as a reporter, but I felt I must draw the line at caddying for Methuselah.

IX

JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING

On receiving the city editor’s assignment to interview the shade of Jesse James on the tipping custom, I carefully removed my watch, purse and scarfpin and left them in my desk, for even my brief experience with dwellers in the astral region had taught me that they haven’t greatly changed their habits and modes of living since their departure from earthly scenes, and I couldn’t afford to run any risk. But I soon found that I needn’t have taken the precaution, for in almost his first words the famous bandit and all-round bad man showed me that he had thoroughly reformed.

“Want me to talk about tipping, eh?” he growled. “Well, I throw up my hands. I’m through with the bandit business. I’m a has-been, a second-rater, and I don’t mind admittin’ it. I suppose you know that we shades go back to earth now and then to see how things are comin’ along, take a hand in ’em, too, if we feel like it. Sometimes we play one-night stands for the mejums. Captain Kidd had a job all last season at a kind of continuous performance seance in Boston. Took all sorts of parts, from Julius Cæsar to Andrew Jackson. One night he was materializin’ as John Bunyun, and he couldn’t find his chewin’ tobacco or something, and he kind o’ forgot himself and he used the particular brand of language that Bunyun didn’t and—well, that ended the Massachusetts engagement. We don’t all go in for performin’. Personally, I prefer just to go around the old places and mix in with the crowds and compare old times to these, but I’m not going back again for a while. My last trip was a little too much for me. I got a shock and I guess I need a good long rest.

“I’d heard considerable about this tipping business, pro and con, but I thought it just meant slippin’ the colored waiter a nickel if he happened to be extra spry and accommodatin’. That’s the way it used to be out in Missouri back in seventy-nine. But tipping today! Yours truly and his gang was called bandits, and train robbers, and highwaymen, and I don’t know what all, when we was carryin’ on our profitable little business of forty years ago, but we had nothing on the members of the Amalgamated Association of Tip Extractors of 1922. We were pikers, that’s all, plain, everyday pikers. We had no organization, no system, no nothing. It was just about the difference between running a peanut stand and a billion-dollar trust. I suppose if we were operatin’ today with our old gang we’d have a cash register and an addin’ machine and a private telephone exchange and a card index of past and prospective customers and a publicity department, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight. But, shucks! Even then we couldn’t compete with the great national hold-up game that’s going on all the time. On that last trip down below I was never so discouraged and humiliated in my life. I sat in a hotel restaurant and watched a head waiter at work. From the professional standpoint it was beautiful. Nothing could have been more artistic. But it made me feel blue, made me realize how I had neglected my opportunities. There he stood, no mask on his face, no gun in his hand, dressed in a swallowtail and biled shirt, takin’ toll so fast he hadn’t time to count it. Everybody gave up, without a murmur. And the next day, too, he was there at the same old stand, as if there wasn’t any such thing as a sheriff within fifty miles. No look-out men on guard, no disguise, no frisking the victims for concealed weapons. The folks just handin’ out the coin as meek as lambs. It was a revelation to me. In the old days we never stayed two days in the same place, nor two hours neither, believe me. But somebody said that head waiter had been on that same job for fifteen years. Fifteen years! I’d have owned the state of Missouri if they’d let me alone that long.

“It made me positively sick to see how the hold-up boys are getting away with it so easy these days, and a friend recommended an ocean trip. ‘Take a run over to Europe and back,’ he says. ‘You’ve never been to sea and it’ll do you good.’ The day I boarded the boat I asked a stranger who had the next cell to put me wise to this tipping business, because I wanted to do the right thing. ‘Five dollars to your stateroom steward,’ he said, ‘and five to the saloon steward.’ ‘I don’t drink any more,’ I said. ‘Saloon means dining room.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘And two-fifty to the deck steward and the same to the library steward. The smoke room steward will expect a couple of dollars and the boy who blacks your boots about one-fifty. Bath steward, two dollars. Card room steward, one dollar. And of course you’ll tip the barber and anyone else who does you a service.’

“Going into the washroom, the first sign I saw read: ‘Please tip the basin.’ And I walked right out and went to bed for two days. The waiter brought in all my meals—a dollar tip a meal. When I had recovered enough to sit on deck in one of them overgrown Morris chairs, I couldn’t get that tipping idea out of my head. A friend introduced me to a fat fellow in uniform. I didn’t catch the name, but automatically handed him fifty cents and then learned that he was the captain. The day we arrived at Liverpool the passengers were all drawn up on deck and so were the pirates—excuse me, I mean the crew. Then came the ringing words of command: ‘Present alms!’ And we handed over all the coin we had left. I only wished Captain Kidd had been there. He’d have learned something new about his old game.

“I confess I had thought some of going back into the hold-up business, just to keep my hand in, but never again now. Too much competition, and I’m too old to learn new ways. Good-bye, young man, and if you want to say a good word for an old man who never did you any harm, put this in your article:

“‘Jesse James may have had his faults, but he was different from some of the folks who are now carrying on the business—he never robbed the same man twice.’”

X

SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES

The thought of interviewing a gentlemanly genius like William Shakespeare after stacking up against such remote and formidable characters as Bluebeard, Brigham Young and Jesse James was most refreshing, though it took some nerve after all to tackle the world’s champion dramatic poet. I had feared he might be slightly disinclined to talk, not being familiar with the ways of modern journalism, but I was speedily set at ease on that point.

“Not talk for publication?” said the shade of Shakespeare, as he resumed his seat in his Morris chair upon my entrance, and tried to look like his pictures. “Not talk for publication? Did you ever know an actor, playwright or a poet who wouldn’t? And I’ve been all three, and a theatrical manager thrown in. It’s quite a while since I trod the boards, or walked the ties, but I’ve managed to keep fairly in touch with the times from frequent trips down below to oblige my mediumistic friends. There’s a great boom on just now. I could get an engagement every night in the week, and a pair of matinées, if I cared to perform. But there’s nothing in it. If they’d let me perform in my own plays it would be different. But there’s not much demand for them, it seems. All they’ll let me do is play the tambourine in a dark cabinet and scribble on slates and turn tables—just vaudeville I call it. And I see they’re beginning to censor my plays and cut out all references to booze on account of the new prohibition law. They made one of my actors quit giving the line: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Said it gave a wrong impression and tantalized men in the audience who thought the speaker was referring to his private stock down cellar. Well, all the world’s a stage—and the last time I was down I noticed most of the girls seemed to believe in making up for their parts. Talk about fresh paint!

“But you wished me to compare modern theatrical conditions with those of my day. This is an age of specialists, but as I have said, when I was on earth, ‘One man in his time plays many parts.’ I used to write a play, hire a company, rehearse it, take the leading part myself, sell tickets at the door, usher, beat the bass drum, fill the lamps and sweep out. I’ve died on the stage and two minutes later gone up into the top gallery to bounce a couple of rowdies. But we were all trained to versatility in those days. No women were allowed to act, you know. You can’t imagine how nice and peaceful it was in our companies. Nobody ever threatened to quit because the type of his name on the posters was an eighth of an inch smaller than somebody else’s. Nobody ever cried all over the stage because somebody made disparaging remarks about his complexion or said his teeth showed he was ten years older than he claimed. But there were disadvantages, too, from the absence of the girls. Men had to take feminine parts. And you take an Ophelia, for instance, who chews tobacco and is drunk half the time, and it’s hard to invest the part with the genuine pathos it demands. I remember one time I hired a tall, gawky youth to play the part of Desdemona. He was all right the first week, but after that his voice suddenly began changing, and it sounded like a phonograph record that’s had a fall and got twisted. A Desdemona with a deep bass voice that switches to a shrill soprano without warning and then back again to the husky rumbling in the space of thirty seconds is bound to incur adverse criticism.

“I once had a Lady Macbeth, too, who had a habit of smoking his pipe behind the scenes while waiting for his cue. And one time, when he got the call, he absent-mindedly forgot to put his pipe away. It is entirely contrary to tradition for Lady Macbeth to smoke a pipe in the sleep-walking scene, and I had to dispense with his services the next Saturday night. And barring absent-mindedness, he was the best Lady Macbeth I ever had, too. I suppose our performances were pretty bum. But there were no daily newspaper dramatic critics then, and we didn’t know how rotten we were. Ignorance was bliss, both for us and for our audiences. We were handicapped, also, by lack of scenery. Our property man had a sinecure. The only ‘set’ we had consisted of a couple of kitchen chairs and a tin pan—the latter for the thunder. We used the chairs for thrones or mossy banks or anything else that happened to be needed. The audience had to picture the rest of the scenery. There was no curtain and the orchestra consisted of one performer. That insured harmony in the orchestra. Our equipment was ahead of your modern companies in only one respect: that of costumes. We always had plenty of costumes, such as they were. The last time I was down below I attended a musical comedy performance, and I was pained to observe how badly handicapped the management was in the matter of costumes. There weren’t half enough to go around. And the thermometer was below zero, too. As I said, we always had enough costumes, because we used the same ones in every performance. Everybody, from Romeo to old King Lear, wore an antiquated red bathrobe and slippers. At least we managed to keep warm. Unlike your modern managers, we never had to hang out the ‘Standing room only’ sign. Nobody would have gone if he couldn’t get a seat. But I’ve been told that nowadays theater audiences will stand for anything. I can believe it after seeing some of your plays. As I have remarked in one of my own compositions, ‘Sweet are the uses of advertisements.’

“But to return to our discussion. The present generation has witnessed a wonderful addition to the dramatic art. I refer to the moving pictures. You thought I wouldn’t be for them? I am. I think they’re wonderful. I only wish we’d had them in my day. I’d have been able to retire about ten years sooner. You see, the highest salary I ever got was about twenty-five a week, and out of that I had to pay my board and traveling expenses—everything but hauling trunks to the hotel. Then I went into the producing game and did a little better. But even then, some Saturday nights, the ghost didn’t walk—except the one in Hamlet. I understand the average salary of a modern moving picture actor is a million dollars a year and accident insurance. Newcomers learning the business draw down nominal pay of five thou’ a week. Small my-lord-the-carriage-waits parts get only two thousand a week, and so on down to the supes and scene-shifters and deckhands struggling to support their families on a hundred or so a day. I figure that the salary of a first-class movie actor for one year would have supported in luxury all the actors of my day for their entire lifetimes. And they’d have saved money. In my day an actor was about the next thing to a professional pauper. Like the dentist, he eked out a hand-to-mouth existence, but unlike the dentist he didn’t often have the opportunity of filling an aching void—his stomach. Life was just one bill collector after another. When anybody was needed to play the rôle of the half-starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet there was no trouble finding a fellow who looked the part. There was always a rush of volunteers for the banquet scenes—if real food was provided. But I don’t begrudge your modern actors their prosperity. I only wish the stuff had been handed around a little earlier. That’s all.”

“Are you so enthusiastic over the movies, Mr. Shakespeare, that you like to have them produce your own plays? Or is that sacrilege?”

“I’d like to have my plays in the movies if they’d produce them properly. But what makes me sore is to have them leave out all the pep. When a play is transferred from the book or the stage to the movie, certain necessary changes should be made. The first requirement of the picture play is action. There’s no place for talk. Now, if they’re going to have my plays in the movies, I wish they’d popularize ’em. For instance, in my day there wasn’t an actor who knew how to throw a pie. Nobody could fire a pistol without ever taking aim—the way the movie actors do it. I hate to see my plays fail just for lack of a few pies and pistols, artistically handled. When one of my productions is put on the screen they engage some long-faced tragedian who’s immersed in great gobs of gloom all the time—some impressive individual with a St. Bernard voice that’s entirely wasted in the movies. What I say is: get somebody like Charlie Chaplin for Romeo and Mary Pickford for Juliet, Mary Carr or Nazimova for the nurse, and put some punch into it. Take Hamlet: imagine Ben Turpin and his fat side kick as grave diggers! What a rattling good duel Doug Fairbanks and Bill Hart could pull off with pistols at forty paces! If they’re going to have my plays in the movies, then have movie actors give them; that’s all I say. And make them real movie plays while they’re about it.”

“One question more, Mr. Shakespeare. You have described most graphically the seven ages of man. In view of femininity’s wonderful progress, could you not give me a parting message on the ages of woman?”

The great dramatist pondered deeply for a moment and then replied in an impressive tone. “Woman has only two ages nowadays,” he said with a sigh. “Her real one and the one she uses to vote.”

His air of finality showed me that our interview was at an end.

XI

ADAM CONDEMNS FEMININE FASHIONS

I had been assigned to interview Eve on the feminine fashions of 1922, but the maid said she was out, and so I had to fall back on old Adam instead. I approached the father of the race not without diffidence, feeling so painfully young and fearing he would not care to talk for publication, but his opening remarks set me entirely at ease.

“Not care to be quoted!” he exclaimed. “I’m mighty glad of the opportunity. I don’t have one so often, now that Eve stays home so much. You see, she calls only on people of the first families, and they’re not very numerous around here. The neighbors say she gives herself airs, and so they don’t call on her. It’s been a lasting source of grief that she’s ineligible to join the Daughters of anything. She arrived too early on the scene. It used to be awfully galling to her to hear the women all talking about their family trees and boasting of their ancestors, and swapping lies about what their great-great-grandfathers said to George Washington at the battle of San Juan Hill, or whatever it was, and giving an expurgated edition of what George Washington said to Lord Cornwallis, as handed down to posterity in the family records. Eve used to sit in a corner and weep while the Daughters of the Mexican Revolutions or the Granddaughters of Russian Independence (to be eligible for the latter you must have an ancestor who shot at least one grand duke, five assassinations making you an ace; and if your relative happened to pot a Czar your social position is assured forever) were spinning their yarns and trying to make each other jealous. But now she’s organized a new society, the Mothers of Humanity, and she’s president, secretary, treasurer and chairman of the committee on membership. She’s away this afternoon calling on Mrs. Methuselah and they’re trying to get up some scheme that will induce all the women they want to blackball to apply for membership.

“Yes, poor Eve has had a pretty hard time right from the start, and I don’t believe her descendants have appreciated what she did for them. I’ll say this for her: she’s been as true as steel, even if she hasn’t always kept her temper so well. It’s a fact that after that first little unpleasantness she always kept a broomstick handy for any peddler who might come along trying to sell ‘nice eating apples,’ but consider the provocation! There we were, nicely settled in the garden, no work, nothing to do but step out in the yard and help ourselves to all the fruit and vegetables in sight. All the trees and vines were of the self-cultivating variety. We’d never even heard of the high cost of living. No family to support. No neighbors to scrap with. No money, and no pockets to put it in if we had had, but, glorious thought! No bills to pay. We had our little disagreements, of course. The first day she arrived, Eve said I’d been doing the dishes the wrong way, letting ’em all go until the end of the month and then turning the hose on ’em out in the front yard; she insisted on washing ’em after every meal. But, as I said, who was there to know the difference? She had to learn the names of all the animals, and she was especially glad to hear about the bear, so that she could tell me what I was as-cross-as when I got the grip that first winter.

“Yes, life is real and wife is earnest, but, as I said, ours was very happy. The first quarrel? I don’t know that I remember just what it was about. I recall a dispute over Eve’s new bathing suit, which was intensified by my innocent remark that it was an exceedingly small thing to quarrel about, but I think our initial serious disagreement occurred when I respectfully declined to go into hysterics over Cain’s first tooth.

“And this reminds me: our first social event in Eden was little Cain’s inaugural bawl. I’m sure you’ll pardon me for getting that off my mind at this stage of the interview. If I tried that joke on Eve once I tried it fifty times, and every time I was met by the same blank stare. I’ve been waiting seven thousand years to tell it to somebody who would appreciate it. Thank you for smiling. I was the originator of the saying that women have no sense of humor. Man was made to mourn, and he never realizes it so keenly as when he hears a woman try to tell a funny story. I could talk to you all day about Eve, the only girl I ever loved—because there wasn’t any other. It didn’t take us long to get out of the Garden that time—principally because Eve didn’t have to wait to dress. Today it would be a different story. If clothes had been in vogue in the year one I suppose I might have waited two hours down in the front hall while Eve was getting ready and packing the trunks—and then probably I’d have had to go back two or three times for something she thought she’d forgotten after we got outside. Well, what I started to say was that little Eve bore up bravely under her misfortunes. She put up a splendid bluff. I’ll say that for her. Why, do you know, instead of sitting down and bewailing her hard fate after being put out of the Garden, she actually gave a coming out party! I certainly admired her nerve, one day, when I overheard her telling the new neighbors that Eden was all very well for young couples just starting housekeeping, but the neighborhood was getting so crowded and it was so near the zoo that we just really had to move. And then she remarked that she had never been able to get me to take enough exercise anyway and she thought gardening would now be just fine for me. It takes a woman to carry a thing off like that. Women are the world’s champion bluffers and yet we men think we know how to play poker. Why—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Adam, but I was asked to get an interview on feminine fashions of 1922, and whether you think they have changed for the better.”

“Oh, beg pardon, I’m sure. But when I get talking about Eve my tongue runs away with me. I suppose all married men are that way. It’s so delightful sometimes to have the chance of talking without feeling that you’re interrupting anybody. Feminine fashions, eh? Well, I’ve seen some changes in the last seven thousand years. I thought nothing could shock me any more, but I’ve had a few stiff jolts the last few months. I guess I’m not as strong as I used to be. Back in the old days, in the garden, fashions weren’t so much. That was before the trouble, but after we moved, plain, simple fig-leaves became passée, hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date. I read a book the other day entitled ‘How to Dress on Nothing a Year.’ That described our case exactly, in the early, happy, carefree days. There wasn’t a dressmaker in the world. If anybody had mentioned the word ‘modiste’ I’d have thought it was some new kind of animal I’d overlooked in taking the census. I wouldn’t have known what he meant. Ever have a sewing woman come to your house and stay a week at a time and always sit down with the family at table and be a damper on the conversation? Well, that’s one trouble we never experienced. Eve never came home from a walk in the woods and remarked carelessly that she’d just seen a hat downtown that could be bought for a song, and then it turned out that the song was ‘Old Hundred.’ Not for a minute. Nobody gave a hang in those days what others might be wearing as the latest style. We knew they might wear more, but they couldn’t well wear any less. When anybody wanted a Spring or Fall outfit, all he had to do was to go out in the woods and pick a new suit off a tree. If you were getting a bit shabby and resolved to dress better in the future, you just turned over a new leaf.

“Then came moving day, and what a change! First crack out of the box the girls all began clamoring for clothes, real clothes. I remember one hot day—the thermometer would have been registering about ninety-five, if there had been one—the girls all set up a howl for furs—furs, mind you, with the sun hot enough to boil a cold storage egg. I tried to reason with ’em. ‘You don’t mean furs,’ I said, ‘you mean bathing suits or peek-aboo waists or mosquito netting. This is summer, the hottest weather since the year one. The heat has affected your brains. Go take a swim in the Euphrates and cool off.’ But they insisted that they knew what they were talking about, and so there was nothing for it but I must shoulder my old club and go off and kill a bear and a couple of foxes and a mink and fit ’em all out with a set of furs to wear while most folks were busy trying to dodge sunstrokes. That was the start, I believe, of this modern movement of the girls, wrapping themselves up in ‘summer furs’ just as soon as the weather gets hot enough. That next winter Eve and the girls started going around in the snow and ice in low shoes and short, open-work stockings and wish-bone waists and pneumonia sleeves, and defying the doctors. And that’s the worst of it, that’s what makes me mad. The girls do defy every last rule of health when it comes to dress and get away with it. The strongest man that ever lived couldn’t do it without a call from the undertaker, but the girls seem to thrive on their foolishness.

“The fashions of 1922! Well, looking at them pro and con, without blinders or smoked glasses or anything at all, I may say that they have nothing on the fashions of the year one. And the fashions of the year one (I am merely stating the naked truth) had nothing on anybody. One word more, and I trust you are strong enough to stand it: It’s all right for the women to be eager rivals, but they ought to draw the line at trying to outstrip each other.”

The next thing I knew I was in the ambulance headed for the Olympus Homeopathic Hospital. Old Adam had done his worst.

XII

CAPTAIN KIDD ON TAG DAYS

“Yes, I have observed that your country is now experiencing one of those unprecedented waves of crime for which it is justly celebrated,” remarked Captain Kidd as he unsheathed a huge bowie knife and proceeded to cut off a man’s dose of particularly black eating tobacco. “For a nation that’s been so busy makin’ the world safe for democracy you don’t seem to be doing much to make it unsafe for the gunmen and stick-up artists. A few months ago everybody was talkin’ about the ‘uplift.’ And now they’re trying to dodge the hold-ups. I was down below the other night. Had a date at a Philadelphia seance. And the moment I appeared the whole audience started bombarding me with questions about the location of my buried treasure. I didn’t tell ’em, of course, but I did give ’em some good advice for the present emergency. I told ’em that any man who carried more than carfare and lunch money in his pockets these days, and nights, was a fool. And I also suggested that anybody who buried his treasure in a sand bank instead of a savings bank or a safe deposit vault was entitled to admission to the nearest home for the feeble-minded without an entrance examination.