XVII
SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS
"By Jingo!" said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at thebreakfast-table the other morning, "but I'm just regularly tuckeredout."
"Late hours again?" asked the Lawyer.
"Not a late hour," returned the Idiot. "Matter of fact, I went to bedlast night at half-after seven and never waked until nine this morning.In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I'd been putthrough a threshing-machine. Every bone in my body from the funny to themedulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair ofshoes on a school-boy in church, they are so stiff."
"Oh well," said the Doctor, "what of it? The pace that kills is boundto have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution. If you, like otheryoung men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle,what can you expect? You push nature into a corner and then growl likeall possessed because she rebels."
"Not I," retorted the Idiot. "Mr. Pedagog and the Poet and Mr. Bib maylead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing.I'm not striving after the unattainable. I'm not wasting my physicalsubstance in riotous living. The cold and clammy touch of dissipation isnot writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow.Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of theSubway to the other you won't find another man of my age who in generaltakes better care of himself. I am as watchful of my own needs as thoughI were a baby and my own nurse at one and the same time. No mother couldwatch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and--"
"Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?" cried the Lawyer,irritated. "If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaimingyourself as a physical wreck? There must be some cause for yourcondition."
"There is," said the Idiot, meekly. "I went Christmas shopping yesterdaywithout having previously trained for it, and this is the result. Isometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public healthmore or less in your hands, don't take the initiative and stave offnervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run-down physicalcondition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying tocure it after the fact. The ounce-of-prevention idea ought to beincorporated, it seems to me, into the _materia medica_."
"What would you have us do, move mountains?" demanded the Doctor. "I'mnot afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science,but the shopping-fever--well, it is incurable. Once it gets hold of aman or a woman, and more especially a woman, there isn't anything thatI know of can get it out of the system. I grant you that it is as muchof a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yetbeen discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty,and even that has been known to fail."
"That's true enough," said the Idiot, "but what you can do is to make itharmless. There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regardas necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, becausepeople can be put physically into such a condition that they arepractically immune to their ravages."
"Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out byit. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evileffects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump youfull of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounceof prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton ofradium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in hispocket," said the Doctor.
"Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling," said the Idiot. "A collegepresident might as well say that boys will play football, and thatthere's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences ofplaying the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well asanybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year anepidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know thatit will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanksto our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that themen and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for theexigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically andnervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energyexhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you cando nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thusto account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'dbounce him, that's what."
"Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,"sneered the Doctor.
"Certainly," quoth the Idiot. "I dreamed it all out in my sleep lastnight. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series ofestablishments all over the country--"
"To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor. "A sort of KeeleyCure for shopping inebriates?"
"Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot. "The shopping inebriate is too much of afactor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as thatpopular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium."
"A what?" roared the Doctor.
"A shopnasium," explained the Idiot. "We have gymnasiums in which weteach gymnastics. Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what wemight call shopnastics? Just think of what a boon it would be for a lotof delicate women, for instance, who know that along aboutChristmas-time they must hie them forth to the department stores, thereto be crushed and mauled and pulled and hauled until there is scarcelyanything left to them, to feel that they could come to our shopnasiumand there be trained for the ordeal which they cannot escape."
"Very nice," said the Doctor. "But how on earth can you train them?That's what I'd like to know."
"How? Why, how on earth do you train a football team except bypractice?" demanded the Idiot. "It wouldn't take a very ingenious mindto figure out a game called shopping that would be governed by rulessimilar to those of football. Take a couple of bargain-counters for thegoals. Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other. Thenlet sixty women start from number one and try to get to number twoacross the field through another body of sixty women bent on getting tothe other one, and _vice versa_. You could teach 'em all the arts of therush-line, defence, running around the ends, breaking through themiddle, and all that. At first the scrimmage would be pretty hard on thebeginners, but with a month's practice they'd get hardened to it, andby Christmas-time there isn't a bargain-counter in the country theycouldn't reach without more than ordinary fatigue. An interestingfeature of the game would be to have automatic cars and automobiles andcabs running to and fro across the field all the time so that they wouldbecome absolute masters of the art of dodging similar vehicles when theyencounter them in real life, as they surely must when the holiday seasonis in full blast and they are compelled by the demands of the hour to goout into the world."
"The women couldn't stand it," said the Doctor. "They might as well beknocked out at the real thing as in the imitation."
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "They wouldn't be knocked out if you gavethem preliminary individual exercise with punching-bags, dummies fortackle practice, and other things the football player uses to makehimself tough and irresistible."
"But you can't reason with shopping as you do with football," suggestedthe Lawyer. "Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains thefootball player through the toughest of fights. The knowledge that thenation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is halfthe backing of your quarter-back."
"That's all right," said the Idiot, "but the make-up of the averagewoman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, thechase after a bargain does for a woman. I have known women so worn andweary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strengthan hour later at a Monday marked-down sale of laundry soap and Yeats'spoems. What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so onthe question of incentive to action, Mr. Brief, the sexes are abouteven. I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me tomake a fortune. Dr. Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for thetraining and development of expert shoppers in all branches ofshopnastics, u
nder the medical direction of yourself and my businessmanagement would be a winner. Moreover, it would furnish a businessopening for all those football players our colleges are turning out,for, as our institution grew and we established branches of it all overthe country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city,and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist ofthe hour?"
"Oh, well," said the Doctor, "perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, afterall; but I don't think I care to go into it. I don't want to be rich."
"Very well," said the Idiot. "That being the case, I will modify mysuggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Vassar andother heads of women's colleges. As things are now they all ought tohave a course of shopping for the benefit of the young women who willsoon graduate into the larger institution of matrimony. That is the onlyway I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be ableto cope with the strenuous life that is involved to-day in the purchaseof a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas. I know,for I have been through it; and rather than do it again I would let theAll-American eleven for 1908 land on me after a running broad jump ofsixteen feet in length and four in the air."
The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews Page 18