Chapter III: Part 3

“I went out for a walk down Chestnut Street and in going four blocks had my pocket picked three times. The fellow who was supposed to be looking after that other block must have been off his beat. I got scared and wanted to hustle back up here, but to oblige the medium I stayed over until the next day. I took another walk, down Market street this time, and found it was a tag day. There were female hold-up artists at every corner. I turned over what the pick-pockets had missed the night before and made my escape. Terra firma is no place these days for a reformed pirate. It reminds him too painfully of the many good bets he overlooked.

“Sometimes, especially after I’ve been readin’ of the activities of your cabaret waiters, bootleggers and Pullman porters, I can’t help thinkin’ that history has been too hard on us plain, unornamental pirates. We had to pick up a livin’ best we could. We didn’t have our tools and equipment provided for us. We had to furnish our own cutlasses and pistols, while your modern waiters and porters have their trays and whisk-brooms anyhow supplied free of charge. There wasn’t an unwritten law, either, that anybody who didn’t cough up freely was a piker, and we had the greatest difficulty sometimes in getting a victim to produce. Folks found all sorts of mean little schemes for hiding away their valuables. That’s why we had to invent the ingenious device known as ‘walking the plank’ to make ’em give till it hurt. But nowadays it’s amazing to me to see the way the people hand over without even a pistol clapped at their heads. They’re meek as lambs. The pirate business would have been a lot less wearing on the nerves if the public had co-operated then the way it does now.

“Holding up a shipload of passengers used to be a complicated, annoying business. First, we’d run up the black flag with the skull and crossbones on it. Then we’d fire a round shot across the vessel’s bows to bring her to. We’d paint our faces sometimes to make ourselves look as horrible as possible, and taking a pistol in each hand and a cutlass in our teeth, board the ship and line up the passengers and crew in a row. By the time we’d gone through their pockets and searched the cabin and lugged out the strong box we’d put in an eight-hour day, straight time. Hard, exhausting work, and all because people hadn’t been properly trained in those days to hand over quickly and gracefully so that we could get on to the next job.

“If I were flying the Jolly Roger today on my old pirate ship, with my crew of hard-boiled sinners around me, possibly we’d find merchant and passenger ships pestering us to come and take their money away from them. I’d be taking a quiet snooze in my cabin, maybe, when the bosn’s mate would wake me up and say: ‘Cap’n, a vessel on the starboard bow has just signalled for us to stand by and it will send over a boatload of treasure.’ And we’d have to get a cash register and a card index of customers and a press agent, to see that the papers got our names and pictures straight, as Jesse James suggests, and an ad writer to put a piece in saying: ‘Why go elsewhere to be robbed? Come to old reliable Captain Kidd & Co., Inc., and be immediately relieved.’ But at that I don’t suppose with my old-fashioned ideas I’d be able to compete with your up-to-date hold-up games.

“I guess the best plan, if I were ever able to resume business, would be to start a ‘drive’ or hold a tag day. From the way the public gives up, I don’t know but a drive for a $100,000 fund to establish a home for worn-out pirates would bring in a lot of coin. First thing I’d get up a dinner for my executive committee of one hundred. You can’t start anything without a lot of eating these days. Then we’d have a daily luncheon to receive reports from the captains of the various teams, winding up with a mass meeting where we’d take up a collection and announce the result of the house-to-house canvass. Still, a general tag day might bring in more money. I’d have pretty girls at all the street corners to pin a miniature artificial lemon on every contributor to the Captain Kidd Refuge for Reformed Robbers. What do you think?”

“There are many excellent causes, Captain, that have adopted these devices to raise money and I hope you don’t intend to reflect upon them.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. But don’t you think yourself that the idea has been worked a little hard? It’s all right for the public to give to the things it knows about, but I was thinking it was becoming such an easy mark I might as well have my share. What I object to is being set down in history as the world’s champion pirate and all around bad man, when the fact is I was naturally the most peaceable individual you ever met. The trouble is, I was born about a hundred years too soon. If I were in business today I wouldn’t be a pirate; I’d be a head waiter in a New York hotel, with a foreign accent but able to understand all languages. Money talks. Probably I’d have served an apprenticeship at the place where they check your hat and coat.

“If I wasn’t a head waiter I’d be a steward on an ocean ship. Perhaps I’d feel more at home on the sea anyway. I was talking to my old friend, Jesse James, the other day and he said the difference between him and the modern professional tip extractor was that he never robbed the same man twice. But I suppose his successors believe that anybody who is worth doing at all is worth doing well. One of these days the American people will probably adopt a new Declaration of Independence against foreign waiters and resolve to give the enemy no quarter—and no half dollar either. They’ll change the old naval hero’s slogan to ‘Don’t give up the tip.’ ‘Millions for good meals, but not one cent for tribute.’ ‘All things come to him who waits.’ Well, I’m sorry for the waiter if he ever gets all that’s coming to him. Ta, ta! young man.”

And as he hobbled off to splice the main brace I could hear the old fellow muttering to himself: “And they used to call me a pirate!”

XIII

ALFRED THE GREAT TRIES TO FIND PROSPEROUS KING

“You want me to talk about modern monarchs!” Alfred the Great responded with a trace of irritation. “Why don’t you ask me to talk about the snakes in Ireland or the best method of preserving hen’s teeth? Why not interview me on the habits of the dodo? How about a little chat concerning that common domestic animal, the long-toed diplodocus, or that popular indoor pet, the megatherium? Let’s discuss that numerous class of estimable citizens, the mound builders. Let’s—”

“I beg pardon, your Majesty,” I hastened to interrupt, “but I had no intention of offending. I know kings are very few and far between these days, but I thought your views on the two or three who have managed to survive would be most interesting to the present generation. You yourself were such a mighty monarch, so generally respected for your honesty and ability and bravery and regal appearance, that I am sure—”

“There, there, say no more,” he replied with condescending affability, “I am just a trifle sensitive, I suppose, on the subject. When I see so many of my brothers sacrificed to the onrushing tide of democracy, naturally it makes me a bit sad.

“It’s just a month,” continued King Alfred, as he lighted his long meerschaum and settled down comfortably in his armchair, which was fashioned like a throne, “it’s just a month since I took my first trip down below to see how the earth had been getting along in my absence of a thousand years plus. And I am frank to confess I found some changes. I went down under the auspices of a spiritualist who wanted me to tell a woman’s club how to make griddle cakes. I suppose you’ve read about the time I let the cakes burn in the farmer’s cottage and the housewife bawled me out when she came back. It’s in every school reader. Well, the next day I called in my chief cook and had him show me how to make griddle cakes that would melt in your mouth. There’s no trick at all to it, really. The only thing is you must keep your mind on it. That time in the cottage I got to thinking about a new way to fight the Danes, and the first thing I knew there was a smell like burning rubber and the old dame rushed in and called me down. I’d have ordered her off to instant execution, but just then our side needed all the votes it could get, and I didn’t know whether her husband would thank me or be annoyed.

“Sometimes you can make a hit with a husband by giving his wife a ten-year sentence in jail, and again it makes him peevish—particularly if he has to do his own housework. So I spared her that time. Where was I? Oh, yes, as I was saying, I went down to tell the club how to make griddle cakes. After I’d filled that date I decided to take a little trip around the capitols of Europe and call on my cousins, the kings and queens. You know every king is supposed to be at least a cousin of every other one—that’s why we have such strained relations so often in royal circles. Well, I decided first to project my astral body up to Moscow, the ancient capitol of Russia. I’d never traveled that far during my previous existence on earth, because I couldn’t spare the time—our wars were a continuous performance. Arrived at the palace, I walked right up to the front door and was going in when a big fellow, roughly clad, his countenance concealed beneath a tangled growth of whiskers, barred my passage.

“‘Who do you want to see?’ he inquired gruffly.

“‘Whom do I want to see?’ I said, ‘Why—’

“‘No, _who_, not _whom_,’ he returned. ‘Anybody who uses good grammar is bourgeois and an enemy of the Commune. Down with fool laws and rules. This is the land where all speak and do as they choose.’

“‘But you’re not letting me speak as I choose,’ I retorted. ‘How’s that for consistency?’ He said anyone who was a Bolshevik, whatever that was, didn’t have to be consistent. Consistency was a jewel. Jewelry was wealth. The Bolsheviki were opposed to wealth and private property in any form. I was about to force my way past this lunatic when a number of other rough-looking persons, armed with guns and bayonets, rushed out of the palace and surrounded me.

“‘I want to see the king!’ I exclaimed. And immediately by their faces, or as much of them as I could see peeping out from beneath the whiskers—I saw that something was wrong.

“‘He wants to see the Czar,’ they shouted, and then laughed in a way that made my blood run cold. ‘There are no more kings. They’ve been abolished.’ And one huge fellow, drawing a long knife out of his belt, shook it menacingly under my nose and began to cross-examine me. It took me about one-fifth of a second to make up my mind to be about the most enthusiastic revolutionist and all-around king hater that ever was born. ‘What did you want to see the Czar for, eh?” he asked. ‘I want to kill him,’ I replied. And a chorus of cheers rent the air. But it was an exceedingly narrow escape. I learned later that the Czar was no more, that the country was being ruled by a little band of lunatics calling themselves Bolsheviki, and that it was a crime even to utter the word king unless a strong adjective was put before it.

“I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I didn’t wait to investigate. I decided to get back to civilization by the shortest route, and so I projected my astral body over to Poland. To save time, I’ll just say that Poland was as benighted as Russia. No king. Then I hopped over to Jugo-Slovakia, I believe you call it. Same thing there. On I sped over the kingless countries of the Balkans and up to Budapest. A big sign on the front door of the palace: ‘Beggars, Peddlers and Kings Not Admitted to This Building.’ I moved on. I went hopefully to Vienna. Picking up a newspaper, I read these headlines: ‘Open Season for Aristocrats Begins. In First Day’s Shooting Twenty-nine Counts and Forty-three Barons Bagged. Slaying Parties Now Favorite Winter Sport. Special Prize Offered by Government to First Person to Kill King.’ Two minutes later I was on my aerial way to Berlin. Here, at least, I was sure I should find royal autocracy firmly entrenched. But as I went up the palace walk one glance told me that Germany, too, had cast off her royal rulers. Sitting on the front steps in his shirtsleeves, smoking a corncob pipe, was a slouchy, unshaven citizen whom I mistook for the janitor. In the old days you know no such uncouth specimen of humanity would have been permitted within half a mile of the palace. And who do you think he turned out to be? The President of the German Republic. A harness-maker, or cobbler, or something of the sort. I learned that, as in Russia, the very name of king was tabooed. Just a day or two before a prominent author had been executed for absent-mindedly remarking that he was fond of collecting his royalties. In a German deck of cards instead of having a king they have two knaves. So I lit out for France. Here I found they hadn’t had a king for many years. I inquired anxiously about my old kingdom, England. ‘Oh, they have something over there they call a king,’ I was told. ‘You might cross the Channel and have a chat with him. It would cheer him up.’

“I decided to act on the hint. I didn’t see many changes in London. I thought I recognized some familiar faces among the cab horses. I got an audience with King George by pretending to be the business agent of the Pavers’ and Rammers’ Union. Labor is all-powerful in England today (where is it not?) and George sent word to walk right in the minute he got my card. He was wearing that morning the fool dress uniform of an Honorary Vice-President in the Royal Hibernian Highlanders, Ltd. As soon as we were alone in his private office and I disclosed my identity, he fell on my neck and wept, and called me Uncle Alf. It was very affecting. ‘You’re the only king left that I can talk confidentially to,’ he said, ‘and you’re not really alive. It used to be that almost every country in Europe had its king and royal family. Everybody with a drop of royal blood in his veins was on the public payroll. It kept me busy exchanging birthday greetings with my fellow monarchs. I got a stack of letters from them every day. Today the annual convention of the European Kings’ Mutual Benefit Association could hold its meetings in a telephone booth. Where have they all gone? Some are dead and others wish they were.

“‘There’s not much to choose between the mighty dead and the mighty near dead,’ King George continued. ‘Cousin Mohammed, the last I heard of him, was running an elevator in a Swiss hotel. Cousin Ferdinand was an old clothes man in Naples. Cousin Ludwig had got a job as janitor of an apartment house—determined to be an autocrat to the end. Cousin Wilhelm was engaged in writing his auto-obituary and reading a book on ‘St. Helena As a Health Resort.’ Cousin Charles got upset and left for good. All the retired kings I know are retiring indeed. About the quickest way to unpopularity these days is to proclaim the divine right of kings. Even my oldest boy feels it, poor Wails. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ The man who wrote that knew what he was talking about. It makes the poorest nightcap on record. I’ll s’y.

“‘I feel comparatively safe myself,’ he went on, ‘because I’m not and never have been a real king. I draw the salary and hold the title and wear tailor-made uniforms without doing the work. I have no real authority. Why, I can’t dictate to anybody except the court stenographer—when she’s not too busy scrutinizing her nose. Shall I tell you who’s the real boss of Buckingham Palace? (Whisper) The wife. I can’t even spend my own money as I choose. Freedom of the ‘shes’ and all that sort of thing. Also, there’s an Hereditary Keeper of the Royal Purse, and whenever I want any coin I have to apply to him. You’ve heard of the ‘king’s touch’? Well, that’s it. George is the ruler of England, all right, but his first name is Lloyd, not King.’

“‘And is there any genuine autocrat left on earth?’ I asked King George. ‘Anybody to carry on the traditions of the old absolute monarchs?’

“‘Just one,’ he replied, ‘and he’s not called a king. His title is President. His name is—’

“‘George! George!’ a shrill voice interrupted his Majesty. ‘Did you get that pound of sugar I sent you for?’

“‘I told you I wasn’t an absolute monarch,’ George said, as he motioned me to depart while the departing was good. But I wonder whom he meant when he said there was only one world autocrat left?”

As I took my leave I could not even hazard a guess.

XIV

OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION

The city editor’s assignment read: “Interview Old King Cole if sober (I mean the king, not you) and get his photo and pictures of the pipe, the bowl and the three fiddlers, if possible, for a nice layout. Stir him up on prohibition.”

I found His Majesty at his home at the corner of Rye and Bourbon Avenues, planet of Jupiter, next door to Bacchus and across the street from Gambrinus. I entered his presence not without trepidation, for I had never interviewed a real king before, although I am personally acquainted with several apartment house janitors and the policeman on our beat. But I needn’t have feared, for he received me with the utmost urbanity. Dressed in a purple robe, he was sitting in a chair of state and looked every foot a king. I just had time to note his typical poker face, suffused with a royal flush, when he gave me greeting.

“Sit down and have something,” he exclaimed. “What’ll it be? Tea, lemonade, beerine or just a drink from the old town pump? Here’s a new soft bottled beverage that’s having quite a run with the boys. It’s made of ginger, red pepper, turpentine, cocaine, yeast and chewing tobacco. Here’s another drink the boys call the ‘lame mule,’ because it hasn’t any kick. Ha, ha! Would you like to have some more of my jokes?”

“In just a few minutes, Your Majesty, but business before pleasure. I have been asked to interview you on the subject of prohibition, but I had no idea that booze was under the ban up here.”

“Oh, yes, we had to follow the fashion. Queen Cole, as you may not know, has been president of the West Jupiter W. C. T. U. for years, and when America did the Sahara act, why there was nothing to it but we must give prohibition a whirl too. But I dunno. I kind of think we’ll be back on the old basis again some day.

“Sometimes, however, I can’t help wondering what’ll be the next great reform. Abolishing tobacco, prob’ly. The fellows who never succeeded in learning to smoke are getting busy already, I see. If I called for my bowl today I wouldn’t get it, and I suppose along about week after next, if I call for my pipe, somebody will tell me that all tobacco is prohibited except Wheeling tobies containing less than half of one per cent of the real thing. I can still call for my fiddlers three, but the next thing I know they’ll be locking me up for running a cabaret without a license and a cover charge.

“You never can tell where those measly reformers will break out next. One of these mornings you’ll pick up the paper and read: ‘Association for the Prohibition of Lemon Pie Introduces Bill in Congress. Alarming Increase in Indigestion Attributed to Seductive Delicacy. New Law Provides for Right of Search of Pantries.’ There’d be a lot of kicks, but what’s the use? Folk would go around wearing buttons inscribed: ‘No Pie, No Work.’ Orators would point out that the workingman must have his pie. Schoolboys would go on strike. New England farmers would protest that their breakfasts had been spoiled. But the pie amendment would be slipped in some appropriation bill as a joker, and then good-bye pie.

“That would be only a starter. The scheme to have the government prescribe what you shall eat and drink and smoke is only beginning to get up speed. Every domestic menu will have to be O. K’d by the Secretary of the Interior. There will be laws to make everybody go to bed at ten and get up at six, to prohibit the wearing of blue neckties with red whiskers, to compel the printing of all baseball reports in English, and to force pedestrians to wear license numbers, front and rear, and give three loud honks on approaching congested cross-walks.

“You’ll have to get up in the morning by the official whistle, eat breakfast according to the food controller, ride to work in a government street car, work so many hours, play a round of golf on the public links, don a Bureau of Health mask to kiss your wife when you get home, eat another government meal, sit on the front porch and smoke a tobaccoless cigar, fight the mosquitos awhile—remembering the anti-profanity amendment to the old Federal Constitution—and then go to bed when the curfew sounds, being careful not to transgress the state anti-snoring law. That’s what you’re coming to.

“‘Old King Cole was a merry old soul.’ Ah, my boy, I’m afraid the emphasis is going to be on the ‘was.’ I try to keep up the bluff that I’m enjoying myself; it’s a tough task. Take away my pipe, and my bowl, and my fiddlers three, and you can have my job as king. A king will have no more fun than a commoner. But here comes the Queen. Sh! Sh! Not a word of this to Her Majesty.

“Yes, my dear, this young man and I have just been having a chat about the delights and benefits of prohibition. As I was saying, what a glorious thing it is to think that husbands who used to hang around bar-rooms after office hours will now spend their evenings at home, sitting by the fireside reading Woodrow Wilson’s ‘History of the American People’ in nine volumes, net, and drinking hot lemonade. Must you go so soon? Well, good-bye. And listen: if you must print what I said, perhaps you’d better not use my name. Just say ‘one of our most prominent citizens,’ or something. Farewell.”

And as I stepped into the cockpit of my ethereal airplane I reflected that some kings, after all, are no different from other men.

XV

KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES

“King Henry the Eighth wants to see you,” said the city editor as I reported for duty. “Says he doesn’t think we’re giving him a square deal. We’ve printed interviews with Solomon and Bluebeard and Brigham Young, all much-married men, and let them make their explanations to put them in a better light with posterity, but for some reason he can’t understand we’ve passed him up. Better see what the old boy has to say.”

“Yes,” said His Majesty, as he motioned me graciously to a seat in his reception room, “I thought it only due to myself to make a statement for publication, particularly since you have been interviewing some of my noted—er—er—competitors, or perhaps I should say fellow-sufferers, and setting them right with the public. Not that I consider them exactly in my class, of course. Unlike Solomon and Bro. Young, I did not believe in what I might call numerically-simultaneous matrimony, nor like Mr. Bluebeard did I think a man justified, whatever the provocation, in resorting to the most extreme measures himself and taking the law into his own hands. Let everything be done strictly according to law, was my motto. I defy anyone, in the case of my wives, to find the coroner’s verdict defective. I am not saying there is not such a thing as justifiable uxoricide. But I can’t understand how a man could get up his nerve to do it. Certainly, speaking for myself, after being bossed by the first five, I’m sure I didn’t feel like raising my finger, or even my voice, against Mrs. Henry Tudor VI. If they lost their heads I do not think the whole blame should rightly rest on me. It takes two to make a quarrel. There were faults on both sides—especially theirs. History records the—that is—rather sudden shufflings-off of my several spouses, but it doesn’t tell the real reasons therefor. Sometimes it seems to me that the history of my case must have been written either by old bachelors or by members of the women’s rights association. Certainly if experienced married men had done the job they wouldn’t have left out all the extenuating circumstances.”

“As what, Your Majesty?”

“Well, did you ever see any reference in history to the annual earthquake at St. James’ Palace known as the Fall house-cleaning cataclasm? Of course you haven’t. And yet we husbands were afflicted with the same epidemics in those days, that seem so far away, as you are now.”

“I never thought of it before, Your Majesty. With the canning and house-cleaning seasons over, a modern married man begins to realize just how the soldiers felt the day the armistice was signed.”

“Precisely. Even though he knows the trouble is bound to recur when the germs get in the air again next Fall. But the man who has been married to only a limited extent can’t begin to sympathize with a case like mine. The first few wives are the hardest.

“Take this matter of house-cleaning. Every wife has her own system, her exclusive, copyrighted plan of offensive campaign which differs from everybody else’s. My first wife, for example, believed in moving all the furniture out of the dining room into the hall on the very first day of the attack and then served all meals for two days in the form of a stand-up free lunch in the butler’s pantry. The regular hall furniture was moved into the parlor to make room for the dining room furniture. Consequently the place was so cluttered up there was nowhere to sit down. But of course all husbands, even when house-cleaning is not prevalent, have to stand a good deal. My second wife, as soon as she was inaugurated in office as secretary of the interior and speaker of my house, reversed all the precedents of her predecessor. When the house-cleaning epidemic arrived she collected all the furniture in the palace and piled it up in the dining room. On fine days during the upheaval I got a hand-out on the back porch and on wet days I ate in the cellar. I had just become fairly accustomed to this domestic arrangement when Wife III, Series A, appeared on the scene with some entirely different and equally ingenious scheme for turning the house downside up. So it went, each new domestic administration having its own peculiar policies, not only with reference to house-cleaning but to all forms of domestic discipline. I was willing enough to obey—I realized that is the first duty of soldiers and husbands—but I had work keeping track of the orders. I perceived then why so many married men were volunteering for my new army to fight in France: they wanted to get where there would not be quite so much discipline.

“As I was saying, I got mixed on my orders and was constantly making mistakes. Wives so often fail to realize that accidents will happen to the best regulated husbands. For instance, Wife No. 1 had a rule that I must be in by eleven o’clock, but might stay out till twelve if I could tell just where I’d been. Wife No. 2 changed the hour to ten and No. 3, if I recall correctly, fixed it at ten-thirty. It’s not strange if occasionally along late in the evening I got a trifle mixed as to which administration was in office at that precise moment and consequently strayed a bit from the prescribed schedule. I could not always be sure whether I was supposed to be running on eastern or central standard time. As a result the first unvarying greeting that met my ears on my arrival home was apt to assume the sharply interrogatory form. I always answered whenever I could distinctly remember. At least I did my best. Matrimony is paved with good intentions.

“There were other disadvantages, also—connected with what I now perceive to have been my mistaken matrimonial policy—which may not occur to persons of more limited experience. For instance, how many realize that I was virtually at the mercy of a soviet of my wives’ relations? When a wife happened to shuffle off did her relatives immediately conclude that they were no longer my connections by marriage? They did not. They still considered themselves close relations—even closer, when I sought to borrow money from them. After a few matrimonial administrations I had enough ‘in-laws’ to fill a convention hall. Indeed, they did form a sort of mutual benefit association and used to meet and pass resolutions of condemnation on me and condolence with the new incumbent every time I happened to change wives. Sore, of course, because they weren’t invited to the wedding. But I had to draw the line somewhere. In those days, as now, they used to term it ‘solemnizing’ a marriage, although that word ‘obey’ in the ceremony was a joke. And half the time I felt just like a sort of comic supplement. In all my voyaging on the seven seas of matrimony I can recollect very few times when I was allowed to do any of the steering. Looking back, life seems to have been just one wife after another. Why did I do it? Well, I read in the newspapers the other day a supposedly sensational story of a Boston man who got married while under the influence of hypnotism, but I couldn’t see that the case contained any unusual feature.”

“Speaking of matrimony, Your Majesty (as you have just been doing so extensively), have you any advice to offer? What do you consider the lucky month for marriage?”

“Young man,” replied the king in solemn tones as he arose to bid me adieu, “I don’t know anything about that. But I can tell you this: there are at least six unlucky ones. That is as far as I experimented.”

And though I possessed only one-sixth of his matrimonial experience, I shook the aged monarch’s hand in silent sympathy before tiptoeing from his pathetic presence.

XVI

DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS

As the trim figure in a neatly fitted sack suit arose to greet me with an odd mixture in his manner of ancient courtesy and the modern “glad hand,” my face must have betrayed my surprise at his unexpected appearance for he exclaimed: “Astonished, eh? Most earth folk are. Seem to expect to see the shade of Don Quixote de la Mancha togged out in his old cast-iron clothes and helmet with a sword for a walking stick. They fail to make allowance for the fact that we shades progress, just like you people down below. We try to be as up-to-date as possible. I suppose you thought, too, you were going to interview a harmless lunatic and listen amusedly to his rambling conversation and perhaps have the fun of joshing him a bit. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve got over my delusions, or illusions or whatever they were. And shall I tell you what cured me? Why, watching the antics and performances of some of you down on earth. My motto is thoroughness. I want to do every job up in the most complete style. I will either be the champion, the record-holder, the biggest in the bunch or else nothing at all. I may once have been in a fair way to becoming the world’s most inspired idiot and champion all-round, catch-as-catch-can professional ‘regulator,’ but I’m now a has-been, a second-rater. There’s too much competition. I’m ashamed of myself. I throw up my hands and quit. Do you understand me?”

“Well, not entirely, Don Quixote. What modern competitors or successors have you got?”

“Do you have to ask that?” he replied. “Why, I can get materialized and take a run below and in five minutes see more fellows crazier than I ever was than I can count. Or I can just stay up here and read the newspapers. I was reading only this morning of a bill that’s going to be introduced in the Maine Legislature to prohibit women from wearing high-heeled shoes. They used to call me a fool reformer, but I never was quite so idiotic as to try to reform women’s dress in the slightest particular. Trying to dictate feminine fashions would be just about as sensible as attempting to sweep back the ocean. The next thing they know somebody will be trying to tack an amendment on to the Constitution forbidding women to wear furs in summer and low shoes and open-work waists in winter. I see one writer calls the anti-high-heels measure ‘Quixotic.’ That shows all he knows about me. I was accused of being slightly off at one time, but nobody ever charged me with utter imbecility. And I see that some other professional set-’em-all-rights are going to put the ban on tobacco—if they can. They’ll have some hard sledding. But I was glad to observe that a judge had the sense to turn down an application for a charter from an anti-tobacco association. The society’s announced object was to make the growing, manufacture, sale and use of tobacco illegal. I held my breath until I found what the judge did.

“And what did the judge do? Opening a fresh box of Havanas, he carefully selected a long, slender, chocolate-colored panatela, with a red and gold waistband, cut off the end with his gold-mounted clipper, fished a match out of his vest pocket, struck it on the ink-stand, applied the blaze to the end of the cigar, blew a fragrant cloud of incense to the ceiling in worship of the spirit of justice and perfect impartiality, gave a great big sigh of measureless content, and then proceeded to write an opinion on the subject that did my heart good to read. In dignified, judicial terms he affectionately advised the anti-tobacconists to go soak their venerable heads; he reminded them that the most admirable and wholly beneficial occupation of the human species is minding its own business; and intimated that so long as the court should continue to enjoy unimpaired intellectual vigor and be in full possession of all its faculties, it would never authorize a movement to regulate the personal conduct of rational adult beings by organized idiocy.

“It was an elegant set-back for the chronic busybodies, but I haven’t much hope it will be permanent. Mark my words, those fellows are only getting ready to break out in some new place. If they can’t prohibit tobacco they’ll attack chewing gum or ice cream soda. One of these days I expect to pick up the paper and read: ‘New Sundae Law Proposed. Association Opposed to Ice Cream Soda in Any Form Applies for Charter.’ I may have made a few mistakes that time when I was supposed to be a little off my balance, but I never made the same mistake twice. I tilted at those old windmills, as they turned out to be, but I didn’t respond to an encore. Some of your modern reformers are continually butting their heads against stone walls, and if their heads weren’t so thick they couldn’t get away with it.

“Folks laugh at that account of my exploits and adventures, but they don’t stop to notice that there are lots of fellows running around loose who are ten times funnier than Don Quixote ever was. For instance, I understand you have a good many Congressmen-at-large. There are societies already comprising some fifty-seven and one-half varieties of butters-in, advocating all kinds of reforms, including the prohibiting of flowers from growing on Sunday. The first thing we know they’ll be having each new Congress decide whether men shall wear their hair pompadour or brushed down (if they have any), rule on the question of visible suspenders in summer and settle the length of moustaches, coats, sermons, stockings, lawns, skirts, soft drinks and hatpins. And of course there’ll be a law compelling all persons to wear long faces.

“Now, I may have been a bit erratic at one time, but I never got up a Society for the Prevention of Public Enjoyment. The trouble with lots of your reformers is, that not satisfied with being ‘off’ themselves, they want to drive other folks crazy. They’re doing it. Take that proposed state anti-snoring law out in Oklahoma. It’s going to declare any person a public nuisance who keeps other folks awake at night with solos by his nasal organ. But nobody dreams of interfering with the scoundrel who dashes along the street in his automobile at two A. M. with his muffler cut-out. I see you’re surprised at my keeping tab on things down below. There’s a reason. It gratifies me to realize that if I were back on earth I should have no trouble procuring a certificate of perfect sanity after the way so many folks are behaving. I see one man was paid $300,000 for pounding another man who got $200,000 for letting him do it. And the very persons who contributed to that fund kick the loudest about the high cost of living. And yet they used to call me unsound! Puck said a mouthful when he remarked: ‘What fools these mortals be.’ The world is a place of perpetual change, and yet lots of women continue cheerfully to give up two dollars a curl for a ‘permanent’ Marcel wave. Foolish men are less concerned with how many miles they can get out of a gallon than with how many smiles they can get out of a quart.

“But what showed me more clearly than anything else whither you earth folks are drifting was a sign, on my last trip, outside a butcher’s: ‘Tongue, 48 cents a pound; brains, 33 cents.’ If tongue is getting to be worth so much more than brains, then I’m glad I shuffled off when I did.”

And as I volplaned back to earth I wondered also why our topsy-turvy world ever considered Don Quixote loco.

XVII

PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM

All the way to King Pharaoh’s house I kept wondering how I should enter the presence of decayed royalty. More modern monarchs, I knew from my reportorial experience, were frequently regular fellows whom it was perfectly safe to offer to shake hands with and perhaps, after a brief acquaintance, to slap on the back and ask for the loan of a cigarette or the “makin’s.” But the thought of conversing with a four-thousand-year-old personage who had retired from the king business, yet retained his former notions of dignity and grandeur, filled me with awe. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when in response to my ring at the front door it slowly opened about half an inch, as if someone were trying to peek out and size up the visitor, and then a moment later it was thrown back and a commanding figure, who I knew from his pictures was none other than Pharaoh himself, stood in the doorway with a smile of welcome.

“Come right in,” he exclaimed. “I was afraid at first you might be a walking delegate of the Dish-Breakers’ Union.” And there stood the erstwhile mighty monarch clad in a long blue-checked apron, the kind that pins up over the shoulders with a couple of thing-a-ma-jigs and comes ’way down below the belt. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and he had the general appearance of a cross between a chauffeur who had been digging in the garden and a butler who had taken an automobile apart and was now trying to put the pieces back again.

“Your Majesty,” I began, with a low obeisance, but that was as far as I got with my speech of introduction.

“Come right out in the kitchen,” he interrupted affably, “and we can have a chat while I’m doing up my dishes. I understand you want to interview me on the servant problem. You’ve come to the right shop. I can talk feelingly on the subject. In the course of forty-five centuries of experience I’ve hit all the high spots, from the time when I had fifteen hundred cooks and chambermaids in the house and six hundred charioteers in the royal garage down to the cruel present, when I’m reduced to doing my own work. The servant problem! I’ve solved it. I could send you out of here so chock full of information about it that you couldn’t walk straight. Have a smoke? Mrs. Pharaoh objects to my smoking a pipe and washing the china at the same time (she complained at dinner of a decided flavor of nicotine in the soup) but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t light up while I’m finishing the job. Then, after I manicure the knives and forks, massage the sink, and take a brief and exhilarating spin around the dining room with my new six-cylinder carpet sweeper, I’ll have nothing to do but fix the oatmeal for tomorrow morning, in the jackpot or whatever you call it, put it on to boil and I’ll be at your service.

“Yes, it may seem to you like considerable of a comedown,” said his former majesty when we were comfortably settled in armchairs in the library, “but during the last few days, since I let the sole remaining servant go, I’ve been experiencing the first real peace I’ve known in just four thousand five hundred and sixty-two years. Quite a long time when you come to think of it. You ask me to define the servant problem and then comment upon it. Let me tell you some of our recent troubles with ‘domestic assistants.’ That’s what they want to be called nowadays. Oh, yes, we have servants up here. This isn’t exactly heaven, you know. Somebody has said that voyaging on the sea of matrimony is all right until the cook wants to be captain. Well, our cooks have all wanted to be commanders-in-chief with the pay, pretty near, of active admirals. And among them they’ve mighty near wrecked the ship. The next to the last we got, No. 19, promised to be the light of our existence. The light went out one night and never came back. Her testimonials said she was a very good cook. They must have been referring exclusively to her moral character. Her successor was described as ‘a perfect treasure’, but, according to the proverb, ‘Riches take wings,’ and she was no exception. In her case, however, it was just as well. She claimed to have cooked ten years for John D. Rockefeller. And it did not occur to us until later that Mr. Rockefeller is a chronic sufferer from dyspepsia.

“This wasn’t home any more. It was getting to be a one-night lodging house for ‘domestic assistants.’ You mustn’t call ’em servants, you know, not since they’ve organized. And they certainly are sticklers for union rules, union hours, union wages. Why, our last laundress (excuse me, I should say ‘garment ablutionist’), refused to wash any except union underwear. Fact! And now I hear they’re agitating for the three-shift or platoon system, like the firemen, each set on duty eight hours. Well, the other day we reached a crisis when Cook 20 served notice that she’d quit unless we built an addition to the garage to accommodate her runabout, and threw in an extra allowance for gasoline. I decided to fire the whole bunch: the ‘upstairs girl’ (whom I’d often consigned to the lower regions), the waitress (who believed all things ought to come to her while waiting), and the cook (who was always getting everybody else into hot water, but wouldn’t put her own hands in). So I made a clean sweep (something we could never get any of the servants to do) and I’ve been walking delegate of the Husbands’ Labor Union, and ‘kitchen police’ myself, ever since. And it’s been as peaceful and quiet around here as the Sahara Desert. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since the day the business agent of the Children of Israel Pyramid Builders’ Union fell off the top of Cheops and they had to dig him out of the sand with a derrick.

“There are various ways of solving the so-called servant problem. Speaking from an experience of roughly four thousand years, I should say the best way is to do your own work. It is a lot less work in the long run. But if you are determined to have servants, then you must adopt the modern viewpoint, treat ’em like the high-priced specialists that they are and fix up a regular schedule providing that the mistress shall have at least one evening out a week and the use of the parlor on the nights the maids aren’t entertaining. Our last cook had ‘Wednesday’ engraved on her visiting cards (it was her receiving day), and when her cousin was released from the penitentiary after serving six months for petty larceny (he stole a Ford), she gave him a coming-out party that kept the neighborhood awake until three o’clock in the morning. I read somewhere the other day that under the modern system employers and servants are to treat each other as equals—but I don’t believe the servants will do it. They’re getting too proud for that. We made the experiment of having the cook sit with us at the dining table, but it didn’t work out very well. We were kept so busy waiting on her that we didn’t get half enough to eat and she criticized the way in which I took my soup. A better plan would be to have all the family eat at the second table.

“But speaking of servant troubles back in Egypt a few thousand years ago—those were the happy days. Suppose one of the palace cooks threatened to quit because she could get two kopecks more a week and every Sunday out from a lady on the next street. We just told her to pack up without waiting to get dinner; there were about forty-nine more cooks in the kitchen. We had so many at one time that it took six to fry an egg. There was one disadvantage, we had the worst soup I ever tasted—too many cooks, you know—but there were lots of benefits from always having plenty of help. It’s true the kitchen on Saturday night looked like a convention of the Policemen’s Mutual Benefit Association, with all the cops calling on the girls, but it made us feel quite safe from burglars. The modern housewife is handicapped because she can’t exert her authority. If she has several servants she’s afraid to fire one because the rest might quit. And if she has only one she can’t fire her because she doesn’t know where she’d get another. Even administering a mild reprimand nowadays means that you’ll have to do your own washing. It’s rather different from the times when I was king and had a list of penalties hung up in the kitchen as a warning. Tough pie-crust meant three months in jail and the cook who burnt the toast was thrown to the crocodiles. I had three servants standing behind my chair at dinner—and nowadays servants won’t stand for anything. They trembled at my slightest frown—nowadays they give me the shake. Every time I passed they’d salaam and chant: ‘Preserve our gracious ruler.’ Today they’d be shouting: ‘Can the king!’

“And so I say times haven’t merely changed; they’re turned upside down. And the folk we used to call servants are on top. What are we to do? Why, if we want to be free and independent and rich and enjoy ourselves, we’ll beat ’em at their own game, we’ll join the Bread Molders’ Union or become kitchen chemists or garment ablutionists or general domestic aides-de-camp—the real successors of royalty. There are only two ways to solve the servant problem: do your own work or go out and do somebody’s else’s. I tell you—beg pardon, I smell something burning in the kitchen.”

Out we dashed, to find the helpless oatmeal suffering a martyr’s fate. Pharaoh contemplated the ruin for a moment and it inspired his parting word:

“Good-bye, young man, and perhaps if more people did their own work for a while they would learn, after all, to have some sympathy for servants. We can’t get along without ’em. The servant girl may be a perpetual conundrum, but civilization isn’t ready to give her up.”

XVIII

NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ

I shuddered as the city editor announced my assignment. True, I had tackled departed desperadoes and undesirable citizens whom I feared about as much in the spirit as in the flesh, but they were different. None of these could be such a formidable customer to interview as an ex-emperor who was notorious for his callous cruelties.

But duty is duty, and I donned my bullet-proof vest, put a revolver in my hip-pocket with a bottle of non-spirituous nerve tonic which a kind physician prescribed for me, and sallied forth to my waiting plane.

Five minutes later I was sitting calmly in the presence of the former imperial tyrant. The ordeal of introduction I had so much dreaded proved to be nothing. I had found the ex-emperor as approachable as a presidential candidate two months before the convention and as willing to talk for publication as a grand opera star who’s just lost another $10,000 necklace.

Could this be the old monster I had read about, I wondered, as overflowing with welcome he invited me to make myself thoroughly at home.

“What do you want me to talk about?” he asked. “Modern music and musicians? Delighted. Then you still regard me as an expert? I am gratified to hear it. I had feared that some slanderous stories that were circulated might have prejudiced you earth folk against me.

“Perhaps a few words of explanation might not be amiss. You have heard, no doubt, about the time when, as the popular phrase has it, I fiddled while Rome burned? The opposition made a good deal of that circumstance at the next election. They said I ought to have got out and hustled with the firemen, regardless of the fact that I did not belong to their union. Every man to his trade, I say. The firemen played on the flames and I played on the violin.

“Possibly, on looking back now that it is all over, I might have made a happier selection of the composition I performed on that occasion. It was entitled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ a forerunner of a popular piece which I believe is not entirely unknown in your own country today. But that was a mere bit of thoughtlessness.

“The extent of that conflagration, also, has been much exaggerated. It was confined to a few old garages in the suburbs upon which, oddly enough, I had taken out insurance only a couple of days before. One of those remarkable coincidences which do occasionally occur in real life.

“My political enemies tried to make a good deal out of it, but I am glad to say they were unable to prove anything. My candidates for the Forum were elected by the largest majorities on record. And if that isn’t vindication, what is?”

“Very interesting, Mr. Nero. But how did you come to take up music as a study and attain such remarkable proficiency?”