If you should have any ideas, let me know.
Your admirer and crony,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Miss Nancy Frisgig.
Charming Nancy:
Of course you will get parking tickets if you leave a sports-car with a mink coat in it double-parked for two hours; only soft-drink trucks are permitted such liberties. And it is hopeless to try your charms on the police; they are the kind of men Cromwell used to recruit for his Ironsides, and to them feminine charm is as piffle before the wind.
My dentist, who is a man of wide and principally sad experience, tells me that he has professionally attended soldiers, sailors, hardrock miners, tax-collectors, and other nerveless and fearless people, and that they all bear pain like heroes; the exceptions are policemen, who are as sensitive as children to a touch of the drill.
So don’t try to charm them. Pay your fine, shout, “Yah, who’s chicken at the dentist?”, put your foot on the accelerator and get away.
Subversively,
Sam.
*
To Miss Minerva Hawser.
Dear Miss Hawser:
You are forever asking me questions; how would it be if you answered a question of mine, for a change? What makes my goldfish die?
A few weeks ago a false friend gave me a small bowl containing a goldfish and another black fish, with long transparent trailing stuff hanging from it, so that it looked like Salome in all her seven veils. Salome had pop eyes, in which it was possible to read the secrets of her fishy soul. Almost from the time she entered my house she pined, and it became obvious to her best friends that she was covered with a rather nasty scum. It was no surprise to me when, one day, I found her floating on the top of the bowl, a husk from which the lovely spirit had flown.
Being a humane man I trotted to the pet shop and bought a companion for the goldfish. I got a small sardine with stripes on it. I also bought a snail, as the woman in the shop said it would keep my fish from growing scummy. Within a week the goldfish was no more. The vital spark had fled. And my sardine is beginning to look a trifle peaked.
Soon I shall be left with nothing but the snail. I cannot love my snail. It grips the side of the bowl with its single foot in a way which repels me. Have you ever examined the sole of a snail’s foot through a magnifying-glass? I have. It is a sight to make the gorge heave. Indeed, I almost hove my gorge right into the goldfish bowl.
What have I done wrong? Do I simply lack a green thumb with goldfish, or what?
Yours in deep puzzlement,
Samuel Marchbanks.
P.S. Just looked in the bowl, and the snail is now in Abraham’s bosom. A merciful deliverance, perhaps.
*
To Chandos Fribble, ESQ.
Dear Fribble:
Isn’t it odd how the same bit of information will crop up two or three times in the course of a week’s reading? Recently I have run across several references to the nineteenth century custom of drinking champagne out of a lady’s slipper, upon occasions of merrymaking. The usual thing, when the party was at its height, was to hoist the belle of the ball onto a table, laughingly remove her slipper, fill the heel of it with champagne, and quaff it off, while the lady shrieked with delight, and other fellows stood about, enviously wishing that they had thought of it first.
Plagued with a desire to test this for myself I have tried an experiment: I have a fairly new pair of bedroom slippers, and I poured some tap water into one of them and attempted to drink it. It is very hard to do this without slopping, and the liquid has a tendency to run down into the toe. It was a rather woolly drink. Further, it took my slipper eight hours to dry.
Now what do you suppose happened at those parties? When the toast had been drunk from the slipper was it then squelchily replaced on the dainty foot? And if not, how did the lady get home? So far as I know, these matters have never been satisfactorily settled. Are there any old-timers who have performed this slipper feat, who can throw light on what came later?
Yours curiously,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Apollo Pishorn, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Fishorn:
You want to be a Canadian playwright, and ask me for advice as to how to set about it. Well, Fishorn, the first thing you had better acquaint yourself with is the physical conditions of the Canadian theatre. Every great drama, as you know, has been shaped by its playhouse. The Greek drama gained grandeur from its marble outdoor theatres; the Elizabethan drama was given fluidity by the extreme adaptability of the Elizabethan playhouse stage; French classical drama took its formal tone from its exquisite candle-lit theatres. You see what I mean.
Now what is the Canadian playhouse? Nine times out of ten, Fishorn, it is a school hall, smelling of chalk and kids, and decorated in the Early Concrete style. The stage is a small raised room at one end. And I mean room. If you step into the wings suddenly you will fracture your nose against the wall. There is no place for storing scenery, no place for the actors to dress, and the lighting is designed to warm the stage but not to illuminate it.
Write your plays, then, for such a stage. Do not demand any processions of elephants, or dances by the maidens of the Caliph’s harem. Keep away from sunsets and storms at sea. Place as many scenes as you can in cellars and kindred spots. And don’t have more than three characters on the stage at one time, or the weakest of them is sure to be nudged into the audience.
Farewell, and good luck to you,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Haubergeon Hydra, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Hydra:
The five-day week is undoubtedly a fine thing; the less work people do the less mischief they are likely to cause. It has been my observation that it is men’s work, rather than their recreations, which create trouble. But, Oh, Mr. Hydra, do you think you could do anything to prevent those who work a five-day week from using Saturday to pester those who don’t?
I make this appeal to you, as Special Commissioner of Nuisances. There is springing up in our fair land a whole class of people who use Saturday morning, especially, as a time for social calls, practical jokes, foolish questions, and kindred knavery. As one who works a six-and-a-half-day week I find that it adds intolerably to my burdens. Could you not form a Sixth Day Alliance, to protect Saturday workers from the floating population?
Yours distractedly,
Samuel Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Marchbanks:
Capital news, Mr. Marchbanks, sir! At last we see our way clear to bring your case against Richard Dandiprat to court. I fear that perhaps the proceedings may not be precisely as you have envisioned them in your layman’s imagination. You have asserted that Mr. Dandiprat, with malice aforethought, induced a skunk to enter your car, and there to comport itself in such a manner as to constitute a nuisance. But as you appear to have lost all the documents which establish you as owner of the car our case breaks down at that point. We can only bring action against Dandiprat on charges of having behaved with cruelty toward a skunk, by incarcerating it in a stationary vehicle without food or water. You enter the case only as undoubted owner of the garage in which the car stood at the time. If the defence should claim that you were negligent in not locking the garage you may be censured by the judge, but I doubt if you will be asked to share Dandiprat’s fine.
If we are very fortunate we may be able to get this case on the docket for the Autumn Assizes; otherwise it will hold over until Spring. The law is a dreadful engine, Mr. Marchbanks, and when set in motion it moves with frightening speed.
Yours in high glee,
Mordecai Mouseman
(for Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat).
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
This is a world of rush and bustle, but I have found one point of calm in the maelstrom, one unfailing fountain of surcease. For some years I have subscribed to two or three English w
eekend papers, deceiving myself that I do so in order to keep up with what is doing abroad. I take the New Statesman, and the Spectator, and the Sunday Times, but I have long realized, at the back of my mind, that I do not read these to keep up with the news, but to put a brake on the news. When I get these journals—or I suppose they should be called hebdomadals—they are about a month old, and I have the delightful sensation of reading about the past, laughing at the predictions which have been proved untrue, and the fears which have become groundless. It is a thoroughly god-like amusement.
Why they arrive so late I cannot really discover. In my grandfather’s day it took about a month to get a paper from England, and it still does. The English attitude toward such things is leisurely. I imagine the Editor of the New Statesman saying to his secretary, “Oh, Elsie, have you sent the parcel to that Canadian chap—Matchbox or whatever his name is?” And Elsie says, “Not this week; the new ball of twine hasn’t come yet; I shall attend to it first thing next week.” Then the Editor says, “Oh, plenty of time; the mail-packets leave Tilbury every second Thursday.” And thus it goes. I pray that modern efficiency may never reach the circulation departments of the radical journals, or I may lose this delicious sensation of repose.
Your crony,
Sam.
*
• A GARLAND OF MUSINGS •
BARN ENCHANTMENT / Visited a friend who has recently acquired a house with a barn behind it. I am fond of barns; there is a pleasant air of mystery about them, particularly when they have not had cement floors, aluminum mangers and fluorescent lighting installed in them. This was a good old barn, smelling still of horses, and it carried me back to my childhood so powerfully that I climbed the ladder into the haymow, and discovered that I am either less nimble than I was as a child, or that the ladders leading to haymows are frailer. The ladder trembled, and I trembled, but at last I reached the top and cracked my head smartly on a beam which was over the ladder-hole. The loft was just as dark and full of exciting possibilities as I had hoped it would be, and when I dimly descried the stuffed head of a bison hanging on one wall my cup of joy was full. A visit to a good barn is like a plunge into the fountain of youth.
DISINGENUOUS DEDICATIONS / Picked up a book, a new edition of a classic of fully a hundred years standing, and found that it had been dedicated, not by the author, but by the illustrator, to somebody called Alison. There were the words, “The illustrations in this volume are dedicated to Alison.” I consider this impertinent. If one may dedicate the illustrations of a book, why not the binding? Why should not the paper manufacturers insert a note saying, “The genuine mashed pine parchment upon which this volume is printed is dedicated to Susan”? … The whole business of dedications is interesting. What does a dedication really mean? I have never heard of an author who made over the royalties on a book to the person to whom it was dedicated. The person to whom the dedication is addressed—the dedicatee, I suppose he should be called—has no control over what appears in the book. I shrewdly suspect that dedications are, in nine cases out of ten, attempts on the part of an author to seem generous without incurring any painful outlay of money. The saddest dedications are those which scholars make to their wives, as when the dedication of A New Exegetical Consideration of Second Thessalonians reads, “To Effie, who read the proofs and prepared the index.”
CAPTIVE AUDIENCE / Received a letter from a wretch who is obviously suffering from a bad case of Stenographer Fever. This disease, which is well known in business circles but unaccountably ignored by medical science, is a condition in which a man dictates letters to impress his stenographer, rather than the true recipient of his message. His letter becomes rhetorical and hectoring in tone. He tends to call his correspondent by name several times, thus;—“Now, Mr. Marchbanks, as you are no doubt well aware, it is not my custom to mince words with such a man as you, Mr. Marchbanks, seem to be …”—generally I deal with such letters by replying in this strain:—“Samuel Marchbanks has received your note. His answer is No.” … No man, we are told, is a hero to his valet, but the world of business abounds with men who wish to be heroes to their stenographers and to this end they soar and bombinate, keeping an appreciative eye on the Captive Audience on the other side of the desk.
*
• FROM MY FILES •
To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
I have just had a brilliant idea which, if you can make it practical, will revolutionize medical science. I am, as you know, of partly Celtic ancestry, and I have for many years been fascinated by the institution of the Sin Eater, once so popular in Wales and its border country. At every funeral there attended some old man who, at the proper time, accepted across the body of the corpse a piece of cake, a cup of wine, and a small piece of money; he ate these—not the money, of course—saying before everyone present that he took upon him the sins of the dead person, whose soul was then free to go to Heaven without any burden upon it.
Could not medical skill arrange for someone, to be called the Fat Eater, to undertake a similar service for people whose metabolism disposes them to put on excess weight? As the stout party sat down to meals he could hand a few victuals across the table to the Fat Eater, on the understanding that the latter would take upon himself any poundage which might result from his feeding. And thus, while the employer had the fun of the food, the Fat Eater would take on the burden of the weight.
Like all great ideas, this is essentially simple. It just needs a little working out, which I am sure you can manage easily.
Your perennial patient,
Samuel Marchbanks,
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
I attended an admirable concert recently and enjoyed myself very much, but whenever the singer was about to tackle a song in a foreign language I would cast my eyes at the translation of the words which was included on my program, and would see something like this: “Beautiful lips, shuffling to and fro with indecision, why don’t you render me the delicious happiness to say yes, again yes, oh yes, lips, hurry up lips, yes, yes.” I am no great hand at understanding German and Italian, but I venture to say that the words of the songs were on a slightly higher literary level than the translations indicated.
Do you suppose that in Italy and Germany songs in English are translated in the same way for concert audiences? If so, I can imagine Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes working out something like this: “Let us agree, when drinking, to employ the eyeballs only; similarly with kisses; I sent you some flowers recently and you sent them back after blowing on them; they are still alive but are impregnated with your personal odour.”
Could UNESCO do anything about this confusing question of translating songs?
Your crony,
Sam.
*
To Haubergeon Hydra, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Hydra:
There is a matter of some delicacy which I feel should be brought to your notice, as Deputy Expediter of the Plan for the Beautification of the Dominion Capital. I had occasion to visit Ottawa recently, and as I entered the city by train, and again as I left it, I was painfully struck by its resemblance to a foreign capital which I shall only describe as M-sc-w.
Pause, Mr. Hydra, before you put the RCMP to work to investigate me. I mean no disloyalty. Quite otherwise. This resemblance grieved me more than I can say, and I would like it to be minimized. I am sure that it has not come to your personal attention because, like all Civil Servants, you rarely leave the capital, and when you do you take a sack full of papers to work at on the train, and never look out of the window. Consequently you have never been struck, as I was, by the resemblance of Parliament Hill to the Kr-ml-n. Those spires, surrounded by grey mist, that air of brooding secrecy, that sense of doom—oh, Hydra, they won’t do at all! They give quite the wrong impression.
Do you think that in beautifying the capital you could alter all its architecture to something jollier—something more suggestive of democracy at
work? Could the spires be swelled out a little, so that they became domes? Or perhaps the spires could be sawed off at the roots? For I assure you, sir, that those spires, rising above the low skyline of Hull, give quite the wrong impression to the visitor.
Yours for democratic architecture,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Marchbanks:
This lawsuit you are bringing against me is getting to be a nuisance. I only put the skunk in your car for a joke. Have you no sense of humour?
I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You like pictures, I believe. If you will tell your lawyers to drop the case I’ll give you a picture my Aunt Bessie brought back from her tour of Italy before Great War I. I think she said it was Venus Rising from the Sea, by Botticelli. The family have always called it The Stark Tart, and we keep it in the attic. I believe it is the original, but maybe it is just a copy. Anyhow, it looks like the kind of thing you would like. It is a little stained by damp, but otherwise all right.
If this isn’t generosity, I don’t know what you could call it.
Yours fraternally,
Dick Dandiprat.
*
To Richard Dandiprat, ESQ.
Presumptuous Dandiprat:
I would call it gross impudence, and an attempt to clog the mighty engine of justice. Keep your foreign pornography, wretch, to comfort you in prison.
Disdainfully,
Marchbanks.
*
To Chandos Fribble, ESQ.
Dear Fribble:
You are a great investigator of the phenomena of our civilization. Can you tell me why magazines are getting smaller? Yesterday I wanted a magazine—an unusual thing with me—and hied me to a news stand. I counted 82 magazines on the racks, of which 53 were little ones. Many of these were called Digests of one sort and another. I have noticed the tendency for years for big papers to shrink into magazines, and for magazines to dwindle into digests, but I did not realize that it had gone so far.
Where will it all end? After digestion—what? The smallest of the digests—a new one—was about the size of a pocket notebook. What will happen if somebody decides to digest it? The result will have to be read with a microscope. Not that I care. They can get as small as they like without any protest from me. But I am curious to know the reason for this sudden passion for miniature magazines. Is it shrinking reading matter to suit the shrinking brain?
Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack Page 9