The first thing to do was, obviously, to discover the personal habits of the tsk-tsk and try to upset them. It was discovered (probably by Dr. Hassenway, as he was the only one in the Uganda at the time who knew how to read and write or even part his hair) that the tsk-tsk midge was dependent on a certain set of antennae, cleverly concealed under a sort of raglan-like coat, for its pleasure in biting people. The bite of the tsk-tsk midge, by the way, is barely noticeable at the time of biting. The victim merely feels that he has forgotten something. It is not until later that he begins to rub two sticks together and look out of the corners of his eyes. And, by then, it is too late.
Now, in order to remove these antennae, or “antlers,” it is necessary to get the tsk-tsk midge into an awkward position, such as a big bonfire or a printing press. He must be convinced that he is among friends, and then set upon – a rather nasty trick, if you ask me. The difficulty comes in locating the midge, for he is (I don’t know why I keep referring to the midge as “he.” “Midge” is certainly a girl’s name.) – it is able to change its color, and even its shape, at the drop of a hat. This completely confused Dr. Hassenway.
The next complication to arise in this mammoth battle of man against midge was the discovery of the fact that the female midge did not lay eggs, but bought them from a sort of common egg supply. (If I am not making myself clear to you, you have nothing on me. I am, frankly, in a panic about the thing.) All that we know is that the female midge, when she wants to hatch a couple of million eggs, goes to the corner egg place and, in exchange for some bits of old moss and acorn ends, gets the required number of larvae. These she takes home and puts into a quick oven, and, in fifteen or twenty minutes, there you are, bitten by a whole new set of tsk-tsk midges. The only way to fight this sort of thing was, obviously, to close up the egg supply stations. Try and do it, however.
The problem called for outside help. Dr. Hassenway cabled to America, imploring the authorities to start a drive in behalf of this humanitarian campaign, and, as a result of a whirlwind publicity avalanche, the good people of that country sent an expedition of five scientists to the Uganda with instructions to stay there. These scientists, under leadership of Dr. Joe Glatz, set out on October 12, 1929, and, so far as anyone has ever found out, never arrived.
So far, so good. The tsk-tsk midges had, by this time, so firmly entrenched themselves in the more tender sections of the Uganda that the natives were looking up timetables and planning business trips into the interior. It was a young Ugandan, Tanganyika Tangan (yika) by name, who finally came forward with a plan which was destined at least to postpone this hegira and to give his countrymen a good night’s sleep.
Tangkanyika was a college man (Harvard, 1915) who had returned to his native land on a visit after graduation and had never got around to putting on his collar again. He saw the crisis and he decided that it was up to him to meet it. So he called a council of chiefs and told them that, unless they worked up some way to get rid of this devastating pest (pointing, by mistake, to his father), the country would be the laughingstock of the civilized world. “A people of our caliber,” he said, “a people of our traditions, do not go on forever being bitten by tsk-tsk midges.” (There were cries of “Hassenway’s crab-flies!” from the Extreme Left, but he frowned them down.)
He then brought out some maps and charts which he had left over from his botany course at Harvard and showed them that, for every tsk-tsk midge which was born, 300,000 Ugandan babies woke up in the night and asked for a drink of water. He showed them that Dr. Hassenway had been doing all the work and that nothing had come of it (Dr. Hassenway was on his sabbatical at the time, a fact which was noticed only when Tanganyika mentioned it), and that if the Uganda was to have any national pride left, the tsk-tsk midge must go. Then he threw himself on the ground in a tribal doze.
It was, at this time, what is known as “the rainy season” in the Uganda, which means that everybody had lost interest. Everybody, that is, except the midges, and they were working in three shifts. Tanganyika tried to start grass fires, with a view to burning the midge nests, but succeeded only in burning his fingers badly. He instituted a spraying contest, in which the youths on the left side of the village street tried to spray more poison around than the youths on the right side of the street, with the result that the youths on both sides of the street were made violently ill. In fact, he tried everything known to science, but the only thing that happened was that the next litter of tsk-tsk midges was larger and had better color.
This is where the matter stands now. Dr. Hassenway and Tanganyika are both at French Lick Springs and don’t seem to care any more. The tsk-tsk midges are having the time of their lives. The only ones who are concerned in the elimination of this little animal are the scientists, and I don’t know how much longer their interest can be held. I am issuing this as a sort of appeal that Something Be Done!
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The Railroad Problem
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I understand that there is a big plan on foot to consolidate the railways of this country into four large systems. This doesn’t interest me much, as I walk almost everywhere I go. (I discovered that I was putting on quite a bit of weight and was told that walking was fine for that sort of thing, but, since making the resolution to walk everywhere I go, I find that I just don’t go anywhere. As a result, I have gained six pounds and never felt better in my life.)
However, there must be people who use the railroads or they wouldn’t keep blowing those whistles all the time. And it is in behalf of these people that I would like to make a few suggestions to the new consolidated systems, suggestions based on my experiences when I used to be a traveler myself. I jotted down notes of them at the time, but notes made on a moving train are not always very legible the next day, and I am afraid that I shall have to guess at most of them (especially those written with the pen in the club car) and rely on my memory for the rest.
What I want to know is – what are they going to do about the heating systems? In the new arrangement, something very drastic has got to be done about running those steam pipes under my individual berth. I have tried every berth from Lower One to Upper Fourteen on every line in the country except the Montour and the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton, and in every damned one of them I was the central point for the heating system of the whole train.
It wouldn’t be so bad if, when I had finally accommodated myself to lying beside a steam pipe by throwing off all the flannel pads which serve as blankets and going to sleep like Diana at the Bath (oh, well, not exactly like Diana but near enough for the purpose of this story), they didn’t then run ammonia through that very pipe and set up a refrigerating system along about four in the morning. They might at least make up their minds as to whether they want to roast or freeze me. It’s this constant vacillating that upsets me.
Now in this new system of railroads, while they are deciding so many questions, they might as well decide about me. I will be a good sport about it, whatever they say. But I do want to know what the plan is. Is it to roast or freeze Benchley? Then I can make my own plans accordingly.
And while they are at it, they might work up some system of instruction which would eliminate new engineers taking their driving lessons on night runs. As I have figured it out, this is the way the thing is worked now:
The regular engineer takes the train until about three in the morning. Then the new man gets aboard and is shown the throttles and is instructed about how to put on his overalls and gloves. If the system is working well, this is the first time the new man has ever been near an engine in his life. A porter then comes rushing up from back in the train and announces: “O.K., boys! Benchley is asleep! Let-er ride!”
At this point the instructor tells the new man to start her up easy. The man, with that same enthusiasm which makes a beginner in automobile driving stall the engine right off the bat, starts “her” up as if he were trying to take off in a helicopter and rise right up off the
ground. The result is that all the cars in the train follow for the distance of one foot and then crash together, forming one composite car.
“No, no, no, Joe!” shouts the instructor, laughing. “Take her easy! Let her in slowly. Look, let me show you!” So he does it, and the cars unscramble themselves and stand trembling, waiting for the next crash. I myself have, by this time. sat bolt upright in my berth in spite of a broken collar bone. It is not until I have snuggled down again that the novice up in the cab tries his hand again. This time he is a little better and gets the train ahead about ten feet before he forgets what to do next, grows panicky, and jams on his emergency. I venture to say that, on his second try, he sends me a good four inches into the headboard of the berth.
“At-a-boy, Joe!” encourages his mentor. “You’ll learn in no time. Now, just give her one more bang and then I’ll take it over. You’ve had enough for one night.”
So Joe has one more, or maybe two more bangs and then goes back to take his first lesson in coupling and uncoupling. This is no small job to undertake for the first time in the dark, and he does awfully well under the circumstances. All that he does is to drive the Anastasia into the Bellerophon so far that the occupant of the Lower Two in the first-named car finds himself in bed with the occupant of Lower Fourteen in the second. Not bad for a starter, Joe. You’ll be a brakeman and an engineer before you know it. (I take it for granted that it is the same pupil who is driving the engine and coupling the cars. There couldn’t be two men like that on one train.)
Now, if there can be no way devised under the new system to have these new boys try out their lessons in some school in the yards, using dummy trains instead of real ones full of real passengers, then the least that the roads can do is to have the lesson hour come during the day when people are sitting upright and have a little resistance power. When these crashes come in the daytime (and they do, they do) you can at least brace yourself and look out of the window to see whether or not the train has landed in the branches of a tree. The new railroad systems should recognize that there is a time for work and a time for play and that four A.M. is not the time for romping among the younger engineers.
There are one or two other points which ought to be brought out in this little petition, points which the roads would do well to take to heart if steam travel is ever to supplant flying as a mode of transportation.
(1) Those two men who shout under my window whenever a train comes to a halt in a station during the night. I have heard what they have to say, and it really isn’t worth shouting. One of them is named Mac, in case the officials want to go into this thing any further.
(2) The piling up of bags in the vestibule by the porters on day trains. In the old days we used to carry our bags out ourselves, and, irksome as it was, we at least got out of the train. As it is today, the train has been in the station a good half hour before the porter has dug into the mountain of suitcases in the vestibule so that it is low enough for a man on a burro to climb over it. The roads should either add this half hour to their running time on the time-tables (Ar. N.Y. 4:30. Disembark N.Y. 4:55) or else cut a hole in the roof to let out those passengers who have other connections to make.
(3) The polish used by porters in shining shoes. This should either be made of real gum so that it will attract articles of value, like coins and buttons, or of real polish so that the shoes will shine. As it is, the shoes neither shine nor are they sticky enough to attract anything more tangible than dust and fluff.
Here again it is a case in which the roads must make up their mind. Before they can amalgamate they must make up their mind on a lot of things. I have already made up mine.
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“Accustomed as I Am—”
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It can’t really be that there are fewer banquets being held than in the old days. It is probably that I myself am attending fewer. I know that was my intention several years ago, and I must be living up to it. It makes me very proud to think that at least one thing that I set out to do in my life I have done. I have attended fewer banquets.
But, just as when your own headache stops you think that there are no such things as headaches in the world, so now that I have stopped going to banquets it seems to me that the practice is dying out. I see notices in the newspapers that a testimonial dinner has been given to Lucius J. Geeney, or that the convening salesmen of the A.A.O.U.A.A.A. have got together for one final address by the “Big Boss” over the coffee cups filled with cigarette ends, but I don’t read them. Oh, how I don’t read them! I should say that there was no reading matter in the world, including the Koran in the original, which is so unread by me as the newspaper accounts of banquet speeches. But they tell me that, even under this handicap, they are still going on.
The bitterness on my part arises from two rather dark splotches in my past. I used to be a newspaper reporter, and, not being a particularly valuable one, I was sent every night to cover whatever banquet there might be at the old Waldorf or at the Astor. My records show that I attended ninety-two banquets in one winter, which meant that I listened to about three hundred and sixty-eight after-dinner speeches during that time, all of them beginning “I shall not take much of your time tonight,” and ending, forty-five minutes later, with “but I have already taken too much of your time.”
Finally, unable to control myself any longer, I began mocking after-dinner speakers. I worked up some after-dinner speeches of my own, built along the conventional lines, and wormed my way into banquet programs, where I would deliver them in hopes of offending some of the old boys who had tortured me for so long. But, instead of flying into a rage, they drafted me into their ranks, and the first thing 1 knew, instead of waging war on after-dinner speakers I found that I was one myself! Tie that for irony!
It took me quite a long time to realize that I was actually a professional banqueteer and not an amateur crusader against banquets. I began to suspect the truth when I started getting letters from chairmen of banquet committees in Pennsylvania or Missouri suggesting that I come and make a speech before the Men’s Club of the Rumbold Association or at the annual dinner of the Assistant Bankers’ Club, adding: “We haven’t very much money in our treasury, but you would be our guest for the duration of your stay in town and we can assure you of a royal good time.” Then I knew that I was really a member of the Journeymen Talkers, and a great flush of shame swept my brow. I was hoist by my own, or, at any rate, a borrowed petard.
Imagine my predicament. (All right, don’t then! I’ll tell it to you.) Having stood all the after-dinner speeches that I could as a reporter, I now had to listen to a lot more, including my own. I tried to make mine so insulting that I would be thrown out of the union. I tried to impress it on my brothers in the bond of boredom that I was against them and not with them. But they were so busy running over their own speeches in their minds, or so firmly convinced that what they had just said was beyond being kidded, that water on a duck’s back was a permanent institution compared with my weak lampoons. It was then that I admitted myself licked, and withdrew from the field.
But, during my brief membership in the ranks of the Coldstream Guards, I learned to have a little pity for them in their chosen calling. Not much, but a little. They have a pretty tough fight at times. Of course, they wouldn’t be making speeches if they didn’t want to (the exceptions being those poor wretches who get roped into the thing against their wills and bend four coffee spoons and crumble up eight bits of bread in terror before they are called upon), but also entertainment committees wouldn’t have asked them if they weren’t wanted. So the entertainment committees are equally to blame and probably more so. Now that we have got rid of the open saloon, I recommend that we get rid of all entertainment committees. They are a menace to the nation.
Granted that the speaker has been asked, even urged, to make a speech. Granted that he really loves doing it. What does he do for his money besides bore the living life out of his audience? He h
as to eat broiled jumbo squab bonne femme, combination salad Henri, and raspberry baiser in a paper cuff, talking with a strange master of ceremonies at his left who is so nervous about his part of the program that he eats his notes instead of his celery and gives the impression of being very cross with the guest. He (the speaker) is asked, at the last minute, by someone who comes up behind his chair enveloped in an aroma of rye, to insert in his speech some funny crack at Harry Pastwick, P-a-s-t-w-i-c-k, who has just been appointed Sales Manager. He is introduced by the nervous master of ceremonies as somebody else or in terms which indicate that the master of ceremonies is only vaguely familiar with his name and record and cares less. And then he begins his speech.
That is, he begins as soon as thirty or thirty-five guests have scraped their way out of the banquet hall to the gentlemen’s room, and thirty or thirty-five more have scraped their way back to their seats. He begins as soon as the boys at Table 48 in the back of the room have stopped Kentucky Moon, and as soon as the representative from the Third Sales District has been convinced that if he stays under the table he will catch cold. And he begins without waiting for the waiters to get fifteen hundred coffee cups quiet.
“Mr. Chairman, fellow guests, members of the American Association of Aromatics: When your chairman asked me to speak to you tonight, I felt somewhat in the position of the Scotchman who, when asked—”
At this point one of the members, probably technically in the right, but distinctly out of order, yells, “Louder and funnier!” There is probably no more devastating or bloodcurdling cry in the world to a man who is on his feet trying to make a speech. There can be no answer, only a sickly smile. A sensitive man will sit down then and there, but sensitive men aren’t usually up making speeches. As for the man who yells “Louder and funnier!” he ought to be made to get up himself and be funny. The only trouble is that he probably would love it.
Bits and Pieces Page 13