Read Ebook: Peeps at People by Holliday Robert Cortes Duncan Walter Jack Illustrator

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Ebook has 155 lines and 13632 words, and 4 pages

It is easy to give Ida pleasure. She has not been satiated, perhaps, with pleasure. A very little quite overjoys her. I turn about in my chair to reach a book, and discover Ida silently dusting the furniture. "Why! I didn't know you were in here," I say to Ida. Ida breaks into great light at this highly entertaining situation. "Didin you know I was in here! Didin you!" Her eyebrows go up with delight. Her pose might be the original of Miss Rogson's "Merely Mary Ann."

NOT GULLIBLE, NOT HE

"Sir," said Doctor Johnson, "a fallible being will fail somewhere," So far as penetration, at least, is concerned, this is not true of Dean. He is never caught without his grains of salt.

Dean believes nothing that he reads in newspapers. He is not caught, for one thing, believing anecdotes of celebrated persons. These anecdotes are pretty stories yearned for by a sentimental public. The public is amusing, composed as it is of simple, guileless people who know nothing of the world. Newspapers are concoctions of press agents, for the most part--bait for the gullible. A citizen of the word is Dean, and he has, alas! lost his innocence. This pleases him. You can't impose on Dean's credulity. He hasn't got any credulity. In this respect he has much the same effect upon his company as the Mark Twain dog that didn't have any hind legs had upon the mind of his antagonist. That dog was hardly a pleasure to his opponent. He was baffling.

It is perhaps a man's misfortune that he should be so without delusions. Dean has found out there is no Santa Claus, in a manner of speaking, while the rest of us are yet humbugged. So while we may be pleased with our callings or our hobby-horses, our coins, or our cockle-shells, our drums, our fiddles, our pictures, our talents, our maggots and our butterflies, he can only shrug his shoulders and depreciate them to the best of his ability, saying that they are very poor cockle-shells, to be sure, though no man more than he deplores it that this is so. Though no doubt it must be a melancholy thing to feel so severely the failings of all, Dean's cavilings are cheerfully made always, and they come to us filtered through a humorous nature. And to do him justice, he is whimsically aware of his own idiosyncrasies, and readily acknowledges them as he sees them, which is in a mellow, kindly light. "Now I could never make money," he says humorously, as it were. But that is not the sum of life, he knows perhaps too well.

He sees the vanity of it all, does Dean. He sees the vanity of all useful endeavor. He sees the vanity most of all perhaps, of success. What is this success we see around us, after all? What is the fame of this man, this Mr. So-and-So, but sensationalism? Of what the success of that other, but cheap notoriety, and a rich wife? They are both of them, very probably, at heart as miserable as Dean. Ah me! 'tis a profitless world, and there's no satisfaction in it anywhere. "Though probably you are hardly of an age to see it yet," says Dean, and he smiles at the juvenility of ambition. You will see it, however, when you too have failed.

CRAMIS, PATRON OF ART

"Have you got any tobacco?" I inquired of Cramis.

"Sure," he replied, "I'm never without it."

He is a slave to the weed, a hopeless smoker. He hands me his pouch; the tobacco is a little old and mildewed. When Cramis comes to visit me he always brings a most disreputable looking pipe along in his mouth, charred and cold. This he calls attention to, musingly, as it were, by remarking that "that looks natural."

"I shouldn't have known you without it," I answer. Then we are the best of friends. An old Swede, an engineer of some rare sort, a whimsical fellow, quite a character--Cramis is greatly interested in characters--was much addicted to his pipe . It was a limb of his body. He was one of those inveterate smokers that you find here and there about the world. One day placards announcing that smoking was prohibited among employees in the building were posted at conspicuous places in the mill where Olie was employed. Olie went on smoking. The manager came through; he paused at Olie.

"Look-a-here," he said, "don't you see that sign? No smoking among employees in this building." Olie slowly took the pipe from his mouth, regarding it thoughtfully in his out-stretched hand as he blew a great cloud of blue smoke.

"Where my pipe goes," he said, replacing it between his teeth, "I goes." You may notice it: there is something of the same idiosyncrasy between that picturesque character and Cramis.

For all the idler and the dilettante that he is, no man ever more conscientiously attended to business than Cramis. He is at it early and late. He is very successful. Yet he knows himself to be an impractical cuss, a dreamer, an aesthetic visionary. No man so thoroughly reliable was ever before so irresponsible.

On his visits at my place, Cramis writes a great quantity of letters. All globe trotters do this, I suppose, whether it is necessary or not. It is only natural. If Cramis did not, many of his friends would not, no doubt, be aware that he was in Connecticut, or, indeed, that he ever got off the island of Manhattan.

Though Cramis is by nature shrewd, saving, and methodically economical, he is very careless about money. He has no more idea of the value of it than Oliver Goldsmith. It is pitiful--yet lovable.

Among Cramis's curious circle of acquaintances--his collection of acquaintances is a regular menagerie, as he so often says--was a painter, a fellow twenty-four years old and with nobody to support him. Cramis believed, after carefully inquiring, that the fellow had talent and might amount to something. He loaned him money. The scoundrel squandered it, probably; at any rate, he bought no fame with it. That was a year ago, and Cramis is eight dollars out of pocket. Still, his heart is a brother to genius. He consulted me on the question of the very least amount upon which a man could live, the length of time at the smallest estimate wherein he could reasonably be expected to attain greatness, and was for setting the fellow up in a studio elsewhere. I pointed out to Cramis that it might possibly be years before the hungry man became famous, and he abandoned the idea. It was too great a risk.

BARBER SHOPS AWESOME

To patronize barbers' shops is a trying affair. Nothing but a crying need of services obtained there can drive one who knows them well into one of them. When you enter a barber shop, a long row of barber's chairs, like a line of guns down the deck of a man-o'-war, stretching away in perspective, confronts you. Three barbers, say, are engaged with patrons; and they go calmly on. They are unaware of your existence. The rest have been enjoying newspapers and leisure. You interrupt them; and they spring, as one man, each to the head of his chair, and stand at attention. To find such a company of well-fed, well-groomed, better-men than-you-are suddenly at your service is disturbing; to have to insult all the others in your selection of one is an uncomfortable thought. They are all equally friendly toward you; but it is impossible for them all to shave you; you must turn against some of them. There is no retreat for you; you cannot turn around and go out. You choose the nearest man, as the only solution: and the others show their displeasure by returning to their seats. A fiend is in this man whom you have chosen; his suavity was a diabolical mask. He gloats in publicly humiliating you. He forces you to confess there before his "gang" that you do not want anything but a shave. You have brought this man from his newspaper simply to shave you! Now the number of things the barber manages to do to you against your desire is a measure of the resistant force of your character. You deny that you need a shampoo. There is no denying that your hair is falling out. There is no denying that you sometimes shave yourself. You need try to conceal nothing from this man. He sees quite through you. He has Found You Out! All you ask is to be allowed to go. He washes your face for you and turns you out of the chair. You pass into the hands of a boy, the same boy you denied to polish your shoes, a boy that has his opinions, who plays the tune of "Yankee Doodle" on you with a whisk-broom very much as if he snapped his fingers in your face; and you may go.

MUCH MARRIED STRATFORD

What an excellent thing it is that Stratford is comfortably married. He is built for marriage. That is the life for him; a nice, quiet, wholesome, unexciting life of home comforts. Mr. and Mrs. Stratford dwell happily in a little nest called a cottage. Here they are surrounded by all the sundry and divers chattels and effects incident to the life they follow.

In order that he may be properly protected against the elements, Stratford is plentifully supplied with overshoes, earbobs, Storm King chest protectors, mufflers, and umbrellas. He arms himself with these instruments according to the precise demand of each different occasion. Going out into the weather is an undertaking, and an adventure, accompanied by hazardous risks. With Stratford, preparation for it is a system and a science. Sometimes, however, Stratford's judgment errs in the matter of precaution. One day last week Stratford went downtown. Yielding to his vanity on that day, he recklessly wore kid gloves instead of his mittens, which were so much more suited to the then prevailing inclement weather. Now he suffers from it. He has a cough, and is compelled to keep his breast goose-greased.

Few people realize the importance of health, and the relation of diet to health. Pork is not wholesome. New potatoes are very hard to digest. Cream should never be eaten with peaches. This pernicious combination curdles. Stratford knows much more about these things than does the writer, which is fortunate for Stratford; the writer has only attempted to point out and warn you against a few of the most important, which he learned from Stratford. Stratford learned all this from experience. Last evening at dinner Stratford drank two cups of coffee. He did not sleep a wink all the night in consequence. Coffee is very bad for the nerves, very bad.

It may be that there are many persons like the writer in not knowing how to serve coffee. The cream should always be put in the cup first, then the coffee poured on. Though you may not be aware of the fact, it absolutely ruins coffee to serve it any other way. It is better to put sugar on oatmeal after the cream is on. The writer does not know why; but it is better.

Though one would hardly suspect it, in his youth Stratford was considerable of a rake. He often tells the story. It appears that in a spirit of reckless dare-deviltry on an occasion Stratford partook of some spirituous liquor. Now Stratford has a tolerably strong head. But this wine--or was it cocktail?--proved almost too much for him. Ah, well! those wild and lawless days are past and gone. Stratford has reformed, and will not fill a drunkard's grave. No one, we hope, respects Stratford the less for having been a little wild. We all hate a milksop, you will agree.

A HUMAN CASH REGISTER

Across the table from a lodger sits Mr. Fife. Mr. Fife is a clerk. This statement comprises, not inadequately, his memoirs.

When a man speaks to you of the useful piece of mechanism called a cash register, you comprehend him perfectly. You know what a cash register is, for what purpose it was designed, how it looks, how much approximately it is worth, what it will perform, and what it will remain--a cash register. A cash register could not have been born a toy balloon, spent its youth as a bicycle, been educated as a pulpit, have imprudently married a footlight, been forced to obtain employment as a cash register, but cherishes a secret ambition to be a typewriter and solace itself in turn as a violin, a mug of ale, and a tobacco pipe. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife is no better in any way than a cash register. A mother nursed him at her breast, watched him as he slept; he was somebody's baby. A grown man was strangely moved, probably, when he was born. He played somewhere as a child. Dirty little brothers and sisters, perhaps, were his. He was spanked and had diseases and suffered and was frightened and rejoiced. Hearts have been glad when he was near. One or two little girls, no doubt, have admired him very much. Some woman, probably somewhere, admires him still. A lodger does not say that Mr. Fife has no inner life. He does not say that the forces of existence constantly, ceaselessly beating in on this man are not here slowly, inevitably shaping a moral character, this way or that. But as this human life sits here at Mrs. Wigger's board a clerk is here, with his past and his future.

Mr. Fife has a "furnished room" somewhere around on the next street, and only takes his meals at Mrs. Wigger's.

IT STANDS TO REASON

But what of the disquisition had been caught gave rise to an important reflection. When you examine the subject you find there are three fundamental phrases in arguing, in the dexterous use of which is largely constituted the talent of the born arguer. These home-driving phrases, which are his stock in trade, are: "It stands to reason," "between man and man," and "that's human nature." With these, strongly used, one can do almost anything. "Does capital meet labor?" says the born arguer. "No; what is the consequence? It stands to reason. Labor goes to the wall." Or, again: "You take the generations we have now, the young people." He smokes a while in silence. "It's human nature," comes the philosophical conclusion. And when the arguer addresses his audience "as between man and man," when in this direct, blunt way all the frangipani of class and convention is cleared aside, and only their manhood stands between them, he has got at the bed-rock of argument.

A THREE-RINGED CIRCUS

Our friend MacKeene is a very interesting person. One of his most pronounced characteristics is an assiduous striving on his part to increase his vocabulary. We are always made aware of any of his new acquisitions in this direction by its frequent repetition during a conversation, the loving way in which he appears to dwell upon it, to hug it to his heart, allow it gradually to mount to his throat, roll it in his mouth to suck its flavor, to send it forth at length, to watch it tenderly and admiringly until it loses itself in the flow of speech that comes after it. We relish this new word ourselves. It is like a play; it thrills our soul, and we sigh when it is gone--but we know it will come again many times before the night is passed.

It has never been our fortune to see a man that enjoyed the show of life more than does MacKeene. He reads newspapers with a relish that is positively amazing; he smacks his lips over them; their contents are to him the headiest romance. MacKeene goes to the finest theater in the world every evening when he reads his penny paper. The anxiety with which he awaits the account of each new murder, swindle, election, disaster, marriage, or divorce of a special publicity, the mental agility with which he pounces upon it, the astonishing variety of points of view he can take of the thing, and the application with which he follows through successive installments the story to the very end, are delightful to behold.

He invariably winds up his observations upon life with the comment that "it is a funny world; such funny people in it."

The other evening, after he had devoured his newspaper and sat staring at the wall, we started him going by the remark:

"Well, what's in the paper to-night, MacKeene?"

"What's in the paper to-night?" cried he.

SNAPSHOTS IN X-RAY

What a terrible thing is the X-ray!

Terrible?

Listen. Contemplate the prospect of this invention's being brought into popular use, so that, say, anybody might have such an attachment to his kodak. In such case, science, which has been so powerful a force in refining the civilization of man, would by one stroke lay waste the whole of her handiwork. Civilized society would collapse.

A German professor at one time went pretty well into the subject of clothes and the philosophy thereof, and reasoned among other things that society would instantly dissolve without them. Nothing could more vividly bear out this gentleman than contemplation of the possibilities of the Roentgen ray. It is an exciting prospect. A press of the button, and there would be Herr Teufelsdrockh's "straddling Parliament." But a thousand times more grotesque: gentlemen stripped not only of the tailored habiliment of the bodies, the symbols of their gentility, as it were, but of the fleshly garments of their frame, laying bare their mortality. And humorously, witheringly, for among the other distinctions man is said to possess above his brethren the beasts, being the only animal that laughs, and so forth, it is certainly true that of all creation he has the funniest skeleton. It would be the end. No candidate for public office would dare to come forth upon the platform. What stout lady could give a party?

Unless, indeed, as would probably result, for the preservation of society the use and carrying of kodaks would be regulated, like the carrying of revolvers, by statute. To photograph a gentleman or lady on the street would be a criminal deed carrying a penalty of twenty years' imprisonment. For though ladies blessed by nature might not, in this lingerie-less, tube-skirt age, shrink from further perception of their loveliness, it is doubtful if any man could make love to a woman after having seen an effigy of her skeleton. To snap the President would be equivalent, in the eyes of the law, to assassinating him. To take an X-ray photograph of a fashionable assembly would be, like discharging a dynamite bomb in the midst, punishable with death.

BACHELOR REMINISCENCES

Sometimes my thoughts carry me away from my solitary strife with the world; back to my boyhood, when all men were not thieves and scoundrels, as they are now; back to my old home and my family, where we loved one another and did not, lynx-eyed, watch for a grip upon our neighbors' throats nor count our every friend as a possibility of our own advancement, and every favor we did another a business investment.

In one such mood as this, on an evening, I was pleased, upon answering the knock at my door, to usher in my neighboring lodger Harrison. In reminiscence we would renew our youth; and to that purpose I started him off upon the desired track.

Harrison poses as something of a philosopher, and he began with some of his customary rot.

"Well," said he, "I have never known a man that talked at all upon the subject who did not follow a calling which was the most trying of all those at which men labor in this world, who did not have a most remarkably hard time in early life, and who did not fondly imagine that he was a very bad boy in his youth. These, I take it, are the three most familiar hallucinations in life. I am a victim to them myself. But I shall not regale you with them to-night. I was thinking of my own boyhood, the wickedness of it, and the happiness. Ah! boyhood, that is the happy time; girlhood may be, too--but I doubt it.

"These many years have I been like poor Joe in 'Bleak House,' I must keep moving along; but when I was a boy I had a home. A strange word it is to me now. I am reminded of the old vaudeville 'stunt': Any old place I hang my hat is home, sweet home, to me. I follow a trunk about the world, and a devil of a globe-trotter of a trunk it is.

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