Yours,
Sam.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Marchbanks:
May I ask you a somewhat intimate question? What do you do with your empty bottles? For some years I have been accustomed to convey mine privately to a hardware store, which used them as containers for turpentine. But now, alas, they buy their turpentine ready-bottled, and a situation of the deepest embarrassment is pending in my cellar.
My bottles are, of course, of the type generally associated with vinegar.
Yours in perplexity,
Simon Goaste.
*
To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Rector:
I, too, have a mounting source of concern in my cellar. I know some people who drive by night to distant farms, where they dump their bottles. Yet others throw their bottles into nearby lakes. Quite a few people, the Librarian tells me, deposit their bottles in the alley behind the public library. But I, like yourself, have not as yet found any solution for the problem. Alack that the rag-bone-and-bottle entrepreneur has vanished from our midst!
My bottles, too, are of a sort that might well contain vinegar.
Yours unhelpfully,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear S.M.:
Last night I was at a party at which someone commented on the premature greyness of Canadians, and at once three English people present hastened to attribute this to the great heat in our houses during the winter months.
I reflected that this theory about us and our hair has been held by the English for a century. Hearken to Susanna Moodie’s opinion of our women, from Roughing It In The Bush:
The Canadian women, while they retain the bloom and freshness of youth are exceedingly pretty; but these charms soon fade, owing, perhaps, to the fierce extremes of their climate, or the withering effect of the dry, metallic air of stoves, and their going too early into company and being exposed, while yet children, to the noxious influence of late hours, and the sudden change from heated rooms to the cold, bitter winter blast.
Do you think there is anything in this? Are our women so early faded because of exposure to hot stoves, or exposure to the chilling blast of Canadian masculinity? Or to both at once? This is a matter upon which I ruminate.
Yours,
A. Pilgarlic.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Honoured Sir:
You have been most indiscreet, Mr. Marchbanks, indeed you have! Now that Mr. Dandiprat’s lawyers have been brought into the matter, I confess that I scarcely know which way to turn. Craven and Raven, whatever you may say to the contrary, are very astute. Indeed, they took a case to court and won it, so recently as 1924. I have consulted with the elder Mr. Mouseman, and also with Mr. Cicero Forcemeat, and we are agreed that we are pitted against some of the keenest legal talent in the country.
Oh, Mr. Marchbanks, why, oh why did you utter libel against Mr. Dandiprat? Before we know where we are this matter will come to court and, as I have told you before, anything can happen in court.
Your grieving attorney,
Mordecai Mouseman
(for Mouseman, Mouseman & Forcemeat).
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
Business called me to Montreal this week, and I found myself in a nightclub. You are a wise man, and have delved deeply in the mysteries of the human mind: can you tell me why nightclubs are always so dark? In this one I could hardly see my plate, and twice dug a fork into my partner’s hand, mistaking it for a devilled chop.
Returning home I found myself the sole inhabitant of the parlour car from Montreal to Westmount, where an old lady came aboard. Later in the day a few other people joined us, but by that time the old lady and I had established ourselves as the Old Families of the parlour car, the aristocracy; we frowned upon the upstarts and shushed them when they dared to raise their voices. When caste asserts itself in such trivial things, how can anyone talk seriously of social democracy? Why, the old lady and I were barely ready to grant political democracy to the poor whites who joined us at Cornwall and Smith’s Falls.
Yours sincerely,
Sam.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Sam:
I have been curious lately to discover what notable or merely notorious persons in history have at some time been actors. The list is surprisingly long and contains some strange fish. Did you know, for instance, that Oliver Cromwell once appeared, when a young man, in a play called Lingua, or the Combat of The Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority? It sounds rather a dull piece. Cromwell played Tactus, which, as you are rather an ignorant creature, I hasten to explain means Touch. Appropriate, is it not, that a man with Cromwell’s views on taxation should have played such a part? It is said that his experience as an actor inspired him with ambition to rule.
Possibly so. Many a man who has had a taste of acting takes to politics. The critics are less severe toward politicians than toward those who pursue the player’s art in its more demanding form.
Yours,
A. Pilgarlic.
*
To Mrs. Morrigan.
My dear Mrs. Morrigan:
I went to Montreal this week to make a speech to a ladies’ club there, and while I held forth I noticed a woman in the second row of my audience who was fast asleep. I have written the following lines to her, which I offer for your inspection, as I know you dote on poetry:
TO A LADY WHO FELL ASLEEP DURING MY ADDRESS
Lullaby lady,
Lullaby dame;
While I address ye,
Slumber caress ye:
Sleep without fear, madam,
Sleep without shame.
Speeches are boring;
Tend to thy snoring:
I, too, am bored
But my sleep is to come.
Restful and numbing,
I go on humming—
Why?
’Cause it brings me
A flattering sum.
Let my words weave thee
A tent dark and deep:
You’ve paid your fee, dame;
Sleep, madam, sleep.
Yours most devotedly,
Samuel Marchbanks.
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
I suppose that even you, buried in your academic boneyard, have heard something of the uproar caused by the visit of the Royal Ballet to Canada. By a stroke of entirely undeserved good luck I obtained admission to two of their performances, and found them all that their most enthusiastic trumpeters had avouched.
One question about ballet I address to you as a scholar, and a professional unveiler of mysteries. Why do male dancers shave their armpits, but leave their chests hairy? Is the wool of the oxter in some arcane sense less aesthetically pleasing than the wool of the bosom? Perpend, Pilgarlic, and reply.
Yours impatiently,
Sam.
*
• PONDERINGS •
A FANCIFUL NOTION / Bruce Hutchison, whose love-affair with the Canadian nation takes many a strange turn, writes this of Sir John A. Macdonald who gave us, he says, “our first portrait of a Canadian.” Here, it appears, is the portrait: “In that strange old man with the wine-red face and fantastic nose, in all the queer clutter, contradiction, comedy and tragedy of his life, we can see ourselves as in a mirror.” … Can we, indeed? I look eagerly at my fellow-Canadians, and not a wine-red face do I behold, except in early spring, when the sun-bathing mania claims its first victims. Fantastic noses, likewise, are all too few. Clutter, contradiction, comedy and tragedy are, I confess, to be met with on every hand, but they are not exclusive to Canadians.… No, I cannot think that Sir John A. was much like a Canadian, or like anything else, except his excellent self. As well say that Laurier was a mirror of Canadians. If any statesman really epit
omized the Canadian character and appearance, it was probably Sir Oliver Mowat. I do not hold with pretending that our exceptional and great men are made in our image. We honour and follow them for the very reason that they are not.
NOT TO THE HAVANA BORN / Read in a paper about a man in Vancouver who made one pipeful of tobacco last for an hour and 57 minutes; this same smoker said that anybody whose pipe is exhausted in less than 40 minutes smokes too fast, and lacks the proper phlegmatic attitude for a pipe-smoker. This humbled me, for although I smoke a pipe regularly I am a hasty, hot smoker, and produce vast clouds of gas and mountains of ash. A large pipe lasts me 7 mins. 30 secs. In an attempt to solve my problem I have lately taken to cigars, but they are not for me. There are two kinds of cigar smokers—patrician fellows, who look as though they had been born to smoke the finest Havana, and people like myself, who look like cannibals gnawing a finger from their latest victim. If one does not belong to the very small first class, one should smoke cigars in private; nothing makes a man look so degraded as a drool-soaked, tattered, burning stump of tobacco stuck in one corner of his mouth. Whatever a man does, he should try to do with a certain decency and regard for the feelings of others. I know that when I smoke a cigar I bring sorrow to many hearts, and regret for the degradation of mankind.
MARRIAGE IS AS YOU LIKE IT / A bachelor was talking to me about the insistent and sour propaganda against marriage which is to be found everywhere in our civilization. “Do you wonder that I am unwed,” said he, “when the movies, the comic strips, the newspaper jokes and hundreds of novels and short stories are founded upon the theme that marriage is a long, rancorous fight in which a trapped and wretched male is victimized by a scheming, mercenary, domineering wife?” I admitted that this was true. Although we are assured from time to time that marriage is sacred, and that divorce, polygamy and adultery are hideous things, a surprising amount of popular entertainment is devoted to showing marriage in the worst possible light. Personally I know a great number of married people, and in my opinion most of them are much happier than they would be if they were single. Marriage is not the ideal condition for everybody, but the persistent representation of marriage as a condition of degrading servitude is nonsense. Nobody has to live in the pattern of Dagwood and Blondie or like a creation of Jimmy Hatlo, who does not choose to do so. “Cherish in your hearts some images of magnificence,” said W. B. Yeats to the youth of Ireland. It should be engraved on every marriage certificate.
GOURMET’S PICNIC / There is an indescribable, pure delight about eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking coffee in the open air. A stuffiness about both the flavour of coffee and that of peanut butter makes them a somewhat heavy combination indoors; they are oily, strong, and faintly nauseating tastes; they are things you never long for when your digestion is out of order. But to sit on the grass on a fine May day and champ mouthfuls of peanut butter sandwich, occasionally washing them down with coffee—well, I fancy there will be a good deal of that in Heaven. Fussy people object to the washing down part of this pleasure; they refer to it vulgarly as “swilling.” My old school nurse, Miss Toxaemia Dogsbody, Reg. N., advised most strongly against it. But I recommend it to gourmets. And if, by any chance, you are able to add a banana to this picnic repast, you have a treat indeed. Dip the banana in your coffee for a moment; bite it; add a big mouthful of sandwich; float the whole thing in coffee—it was thus that the gods picknicked on the slopes of Olympus.
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY / The place of my birth is not far from London (Ont.) and recently I made a pious pilgrimage thither and retraced the steps of my childhood. There it all was: the house in which I was born (for I am so incredibly old that I was born in a bed in a house, and not on a table in a hospital), the Town Hall where the Town Clerk’s dog would do tricks, the church in which I sucked ghostly wisdom from the knees of several Sunday School teachers, the Tecumseh House Hotel, and—best of all—the Ferguson Opera House in which, at the age of three, I made my first appearance upon the stage as an Israelite child in an opera about Queen Esther. As theatres go, it has more of the atmosphere of the drama than many more modern playhouses, and possesses a drop-curtain upon which virtually every picturesque feature of the Continent of Europe is represented. I saw two houses which, as a child, I believed to be inhabited by witches, and The Pit—a dreadful Sheol on the edge of town, believed in my youth to be a favourite haunt of German Spies, who doubtless wanted to blow up the local canning factory. I found this Sentimental Journey quite exhausting, and returned to London in the shaky condition of a man who has had a good long look at his past.
*
• COMMUNIQUÉ (thrust under my door) •
To Big Chief Marchbanks.
How, Marchbanks:
Maybe you not know me, Marchbanks. How, anyhow.
You got money? I got no money. Get out of jail two day ago. Want money. Beg. Cops chase me. So I ask fat woman in house for money. You clean up yard I give you two dollar, she say. Awful mean face, Marchbanks. So I clean up dirt in nice pile behind garage. Then she say I got no cash but I give you cheque. She give me piece of blue paper. This no money, I say. Ha ha you poor ignorant savage, she say. You take cheque to bank, she say. I tear up cheque and steal three dollars worth her tools. She squawk. Cops chase me and take tools. Then I got no money and no tools. So I work one hour to dirty her yard again. Put back all her dirt and some new and stale dead cat I find under snowbank. Lots of work for nothing. Women awful hard to manage and fat ones worst. You got money? I need money.
How again,
Osceola Thunderbelly,
Chief of the Crokinoles.
*
• CULLED FROM THE APOPHTHEGMS OF WIZARD MARCHBANKS •
The bitter truth about women is that their minds work precisely like those of men: the bitter truth about men is that they are too vain to admit it.
(May 22 to June 21)
GEMINI IS the sign of the Twins, and people born under it are strongly excitable, and often experience the sensation of being beside themselves. As they are dominated by the planet Mercury, it is small wonder that they are constantly “up and down,” as they themselves express it. You who are born under this sign, being of a dual nature, understandably want to have everything both ways at once, and by a little judicious application of the intelligence you have it should not be impossible to manage this; it is principally a matter of never saying anything so bluntly and irrevocably that you cannot afterward get out of it. Politics has a strong attraction for those born under Gemini and you may do well at it. It lies in your power to eat your cake and have it, too: the cake may become a little messy under these circumstances, but there is always some drawback to all good fortune.
• ENCHANTMENT-OF-THE-MONTH •
As you will undoubtedly want to dress in the most astrologically acceptable way, your lucky colours are yellow-brown, orange, slate-grey and gold. Wear them and you will have good fortune; if they do not become you, you will have to be content with thinking how lucky you are to have good taste. Your lucky flowers are mayblossom, myrtle, bittersweet and lily-of-the-valley, and you had better reconcile yourself to living without this particular sort of luck, for they all have a very short season and florists cannot make enough out of them to be bothered growing them in greenhouses. Your lucky stones are the beryl, the emerald and the topaz. If your fiancé wants to give you an appropriate stone, you may be excused for forgetting about the beryl and the topaz.
• HEALTH HINTS FOR THOSE BORN UNDER GEMINI •
You are said to be especially prone to ailments of the nervous system and rheumatic complaints. A century ago this would have been dismissed as bad luck; nowadays you may turn such disabilities into positive good fortune. To be nervous is to be one of the elect in the Twentieth Century; you can accept it either as a hobby or a career. One word of warning, however: if you intend to let nervous troubles dominate your life, you must be certain at all times to get plenty of rest, for neurosis is apt to prove exhausting to yourself and
not, as it should be, to those around you. Ten hours sleep a night and a nap after lunch are the minimum for you. As for the rheumatic illnesses, they are a passport to the South every winter. They are also a protection against all the shoving, lifting and carrying expected of persons not gifted in this respect. Play your cards carefully, and a life of splendid ease lies before you.
*
• MEDITATIONS AT RANDOM •
GARDENER’S PROBLEM / I am always a little later than other people getting my garden in, but it is the autumn flowers, and asters in particular, which appeal to me. While I made my careful map of my garden on ruled paper, as the garden book said to do, I reflected how hard it is to get a satisfying bed of annuals which sounds good when you describe it. Spiderflower and feverfew look well together, but they sound as though the garden had been planted by Frankenstein’s monster. And though Mourning Bride and Bouncing Bet make a nice combination, it seems to be tactless to put them together. As for bugbane, gasplant, tickseed and sneeze-weed, nothing would induce me to plant them, pretty as they are. I would not know how to mention them to people who wanted to see my garden.
YOUR PET BETRAYS YOU / A man I know who is very fond of dogs called my attention to a newspaper article today, which said that a dog grows to be like its owner. Nervous people have nervous dogs; savage people have savage dogs; stupid people have stupid dogs. Well, it may be so, though I have never seen any dog-owners among my acquaintance nosing their pets away from a garbage can, or chasing each other amorously over a newly seeded garden. But it is a fact that married people grow alike from living together, and no true dog-owner would admit that his dumb chum was less sensitive to atmosphere than his married partner. It may be that this theory about dogs throws new light on some of my friends: Professor A, the celebrated economist, has a dog which always forgets where it has buried its bones; Madame B, the fortune-teller, has a dog which cannot foresee what will happen when it goes to sleep with its tail under the rockers of Madame’s chair; modest little Miss C owns a pooch of notorious wantonness and infidelity. Can it be that these beasts reveal the truth about their owners? Beware of the Dog!
Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack Page 5