Love Conquers All

by Robert Benchley

  The only thing left is for you to call him up and say that you have just killed a man and are being arrested and can’t possibly keep your appointment. But any dentist would see through that. He would laugh right into his transmitter at you. There is probably no excuse which it would be possible to invent which a dentist has not already heard eighty or ninety times. No, you might as well see the thing through now.

  Luncheon is a ghastly rite. The whole left side of your jaw has suddenly developed an acute sensitiveness and the disaffection has spread to the four teeth on either side of the original one. You doubt if it will be possible for him to touch it at all. Perhaps all he intends to do this time is to look at it anyway. You might even suggest that to him. You could very easily come in again soon and have him do the actual work.

  Three-thirty draws near. A horrible time of day at best. Just when a man’s vitality is lowest. Before stepping in out of the sunlight into the building in which the dental parlor is, you take one look about you at the happy people scurrying by in the street. Carefree children that they are! What do they know of Life? Probably that man in the silly-looking hat never had trouble with so much as his baby-teeth. There they go, pushing and jostling each other, just as if within ten feet of them there was not a man who stands on the brink of the Great Misadventure. Ah well! Life is like that!

  Into the elevator. The last hope is gone. The door clangs and you look hopelessly about you at the stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How can people be so clownish? Of course, there is always the chance that the elevator will fall and that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts as too impractical, too visionary. Things don’t work out as happily as that in real life.

  You feel a certain glow of heroic pride when you tell the operator the right floor number. You might just as easily have told him a floor too high or too low, and that would, at least, have caused delay. But after all, a man must prove himself a man and the least you can do is to meet Fate with an unflinching eye and give the right floor number.

  Too often has the scene in the dentist’s waiting-room been described for me to try to do it again here. They are all alike. The antiseptic smell, the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the 1921 “Literary Digests,” and the silent, sullen, group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room, – all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think that they are greater than mine, but that’s the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven’t got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better than it has ever been done before).

  I can only say that, as you sit looking, with unseeing eyes, through a large book entitled, “The Great War in Pictures,” you would gladly change places with the most lowly of God’s creatures. It is inconceivable that there should be anyone worse off than you, unless perhaps it is some of the poor wretches who are waiting with you.

  That one over in the arm-chair, nervously tearing to shreds a copy of “The Dental Review and Practical Inlay Worker.” She may have something frightful the trouble with her. She couldn’t possibly look more worried. Perhaps it is very, very painful. This thought cheers you up considerably. What cowards women are in times like these!

  And then there comes the sound of voices from the next room.

  “All right, Doctor, and if it gives me any more pain shall I call you up? . . . Do you think that it will bleed much more? . . . Saturday morning, then, at eleven. . . . Goodbye, Doctor.”

  And a middle-aged woman emerges (all women are middle-aged when emerging from the dentist’s office) looking as if she were playing the big emotional scene in “John Ferguson.” A wisp of hair waves dissolutely across her forehead between her eyes. Her face is pale, except for a slight inflammation at the corners of her mouth, and in her eyes is that far-away look of one who has been face to face with Life. But she is through. She should care how she looks.

  The nurse appears, and looks inquiringly at each one in the room. Each one in the room evades the nurse’s glance in one last, futile attempt to fool someone and get away without seeing the dentist. But she spots you and nods pleasantly. God, how pleasantly she nods! There ought to be a law against people being as pleasant as that.

  “The doctor will see you now,” she says.

  The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than “The doctor will see you now.” I am willing to concede something to the phrase “Have you anything to say before the current is turned on.” That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn’t last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal “The doctor will see you now.” But I’m not narrow-minded about it. I’m willing to consider other possibilities.

  Smiling feebly, you trip over the extended feet of the man next to you, and stagger into the delivery-room, where, amid a ghastly array of death-masks of teeth, blue flames waving eerily from Bunsen burners, and the drowning sound of perpetually running water which chokes and gurgles at intervals, you sink into the chair and close your eyes.

  * * *

  But now let us consider the spiritual exaltation that comes when you are at last let down and turned loose. It is all over, and what did it amount to? Why, nothing at all. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Nothing at all.

  You suddenly develop a particular friendship for the dentist. A splendid fellow, really. You ask him questions about his instruments. What does he use this thing for, for instance? Well, well, to think, of a little thing like that making all that trouble. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! . . . And the dentist’s family, how are they? Isn’t that fine!

  Gaily you shake hands with him and straighten your tie. Forgotten is the fact that you have another appointment with him for Monday. There is no such thing as Monday. You are through for today, and all’s right with the world.

  As you pass out through the waiting-room, you leer at the others unpleasantly. The poor fishes! Why can’t they take their medicine like grown people and not sit there moping as if they were going to be shot?

  Heigh-ho! Here’s the elevator-man! A charming fellow! You wonder if he knows that you have just had a tooth filled. You feel tempted to tell him and slap him on the back. You feel tempted to tell everyone out in the bright, cheery street. And what a wonderful street it is too! All full of nice, black snow and water. After all, Life is sweet!

  And then you go and find the first person whom you can accost without being arrested and explain to him just what it was that the dentist did to you, and how you felt, and what you have got to have done next time.

  Which brings us right back to where we were in the beginning, and perhaps accounts for everyone’s liking to divulge their dental secrets to others. It may be a sort of hysterical relief that, for the time being, it is all over with.

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  Malignant Mirrors

  * * *

  As a rule, I try not to look into mirrors any more than is absolutely necessary. Things are depressing enough as they are without my going out of my way to make myself miserable.

  But every once in a while it is unavoidable. There are certain mirrors in town with which I am brought face to face on occasion and there is nothing to do but make the best of it. I have come to classify them according to the harshness with which they fling the truth into my face.

  I am unquestionably at my worst in the mirror before which I try on hats. I may have been going along all winter thinking of other things, dwelling on what people tell me is really a splendid spiritual side to my nature, thinking of myself as rather a fine sort of person, not dashing perhaps, but one from whose countenance shines a great light of honesty and courage which is even more to be desired than physical beauty. I rather imagine that little children on the street and grizzled Supreme Court justices out for a walk turn as I pass and say “A fine face. Plain, but fine.”

  Then I go in to buy a
hat. The mirror in the hat store is triplicate, so that you see yourself not only head-on but from each side. The appearance that I present to myself in this mirror is that of three police-department photographs showing all possible approaches to the face of Harry DuChamps, alias Harry Duval, alias Harry Duffy, wanted in Rochester for the murder of Nettie Lubitch, age 5. All that is missing is the longitudinal scar across the right cheek.

  I have never seen a meaner face than mine is in the hat-store mirror. I could stand its not being handsome. I could even stand looking weak in an attractive, man-about-town sort of way. But in the right hand mirror there confronts me a hang-dog face, the face of a yellow craven, while at the left leers an even more repulsive type, sensual and cruel.

  Furthermore, even though I have had a hair-cut that very day, there is an unkempt fringe showing over my collar in back and the collar itself, (a Wimpet, 14½, which looked so well on the young man in the car-card) seems to be something that would be worn by a Maine guide when he goes into Portland for the day. My suit needs pressing and there is a general air of its having been given to me, with ten dollars, by the State on my departure from Sing Sing the day before.

  But for an unfavorable full-length view, nothing can compare with the one that I get of myself as I pass the shoe-store on the corner. They have a mirror in the window, so set that it catches the reflection of people as they step up on the curb. When there are other forms in the picture it is not always easy to identify yourself at first, especially at a distance, and every morning on my way to work, unless I deliberately avert my face, I am mortified to discover that the unpleasant-looking man, with the rather effeminate, swinging gait, whom I see mincing along through the crowd, is none other than myself.

  The only good mirror in the list is the one in the elevator of my clothing-store. There is a subdued light in the car, a sort of golden glow which softens and idealizes, and the mirror shows only a two-thirds length, making it impossible to see how badly the cuffs on my trousers bag over the tops of my shoes. Here I become myself again. I have even thought that I might be handsome if I paid as much attention to my looks as some men do. In this mirror, my clothes look (for the last time) as similar clothes look on well-dressed men. A hat which is in every respect perfect when seen here, immediately becomes a senatorial sombrero when I step out into the street, but for the brief space of time while I am in that elevator, I am the distingué, clean-cut, splendid figure of a man that the original blue-prints called for. I wonder if it takes much experience to run an elevator, for if it doesn’t, I would like to make my life-work running that car with the magic mirror.

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  The Power of the Press

  * * *

  The Police Commissioner of New York City explains the wave of crime in that city by blaming the newspapers. The newspapers, he says, are constantly printing accounts of robberies and murders, and these accounts simply encourage other criminals to come to New York and do the same. If the papers would stop giving all this publicity to crime, the crooks might forget that there was such a thing. As it is, they read about it in their newspapers every morning, and sooner or later have to go out and try it for themselves.

  This is a terrible thought, but suggests a convenient alibi for other errant citizens. Thus we may read the following NEWS NOTES:

  Benjamin W. Gleam, age forty-two, of 1946 Ruby Avenue, The Bronx, was arrested last night for appearing in the Late Byzantine Room of the Museum of Fine Arts clad only in a suit of medium-weight underwear. When questioned Gleam said that he had seen so many pictures in the newspaper advertisements of respectable men and women going about in their underwear, drinking tea, jumping hurdles and holding family reunions, that he simply couldn’t stand it any longer, and had to try it for himself. “The newspapers did it,” he is quoted as saying.

  Mrs. Leonia M. Eggcup, who was arrested yesterday on the charge of bigamy, issued a statement today through her attorneys, Wine, Women and Song.

  “I am charged with having eleven husbands, all living in various parts of the United States,” reads the statement. “This charge is correct. But before I pay the extreme penalty, I want to have the public understand that I am not to blame. It is the fault of the press of this country. Day after day I read the list of marriages in my morning paper. Day after day I saw people after people getting married. Finally the thing got into my blood, and although I was married at the time, I felt that I simply had to be married again. Then, no sooner would I become settled in my new home, than the constant incitement to further matrimonial ventures would come through the columns of the daily press. I fell, it is true, but if there is any justice in this land, it will be the newspapers and not I who will suffer.”

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  Home for the Holidays

  * * *

  As a pretty tribute to that element of our population which is under twenty-two years of age, these are called “the Holidays.”

  This is the only chance that the janitors of the schools and colleges have to soak the floors of the recitation halls with oil to catch the dust of the next semester, and while this is being done there is nothing to do with the students but to send them home for a week or two. Thus it happened that the term “holidays” is applied to that period of the year when everybody else is working just twice as hard and twice as long during the week to make up for that precious day which must be lost to the Sales Campaign or the Record Output on Christmas Day.

  For those who are home from school and college it is called, in the catalogues of their institutions, a “recess” or “vacation,” and the general impression is allowed to get abroad among the parents that it is to be a period of rest and recuperation. Arthur and Alice have been working so hard at school or college that two weeks of good quiet home-life and home cooking will put them right on their feet again, ready to pitch into that chemistry course in which, owing to an incompetent instructor, they did not do very well last term.

  That the theory of rest during vacation is fallacious can be proved by hiding in the coat closet of the home of any college or school youth home for Christmas recess. Admission to the coat closet may be forced by making yourself out to be a government official or an inspector of gas meters. Once hidden among the overshoes, you will overhear the following little earnest drama, entitled “Home for the Holidays.”

  There was a banging of the front door, and Edgar has arrived. A round of kisses, an exchange of health reports, and Edgar is bounding upstairs.

  “Dinner in half an hour,” says Mother.

  “Sorry,” shouts Edgar from the bath-tub, “but I’ve got to go out to the Whortleberry’s to a dinner dance. Got the bid last week. Say, have I got any dress-studs at home here? Mine are in my trunk.”

  Father’s studs are requisitioned and the family cluster at Edgar’s door to slide in a few conversational phrases while he is getting the best of his dress shirt.

  “How have you been?” (Three guesses as to who it is that asks this.)

  “Oh, all right. Say, have I got any pumps at home? Mine are in the trunk. Where are those old ones I had last summer?”

  “Don’t you want me to tie your tie for you?” (Two guesses as to who it is that asks this.)

  “No, thanks. Can I get my laundry done by tomorrow night? I’ve got to go out to the Clamps’ at Short Neck for over the week-end to a bob-sledding party, and when I get back from there Mrs. Dibble is giving a dinner and theater party.”

  “Don’t you want to eat a little dinner here before you go to the Whortleberry’s?” (One guess as to who it is that asks this.)

  But Edgar has bounded down the stairs and left the Family to comfort each other with such observations as “He looks tired,” “I think that he has filled out a little,” or “I wonder if he’s studying too hard.”

  You might stay in the coat-closet for the entire two weeks and not hear much more of Edgar than this. His parents don’t. They catch him as he is
going up and down stairs and while he is putting the studs into his shirt, and are thankful for that. They really get into closer touch with him while he is at college, for he writes them a weekly letter then.

  Nerve-racking as this sort of life is to the youth who is supposed to be resting during his vacation, it might be even more wearing if he were to stay within the Family precincts. Once in a while one of the parties for which he has been signed up falls through, and he is forced to spend the evening at home. At first it is somewhat embarrassing to be thrown in with strangers for a meal like that, but, as the evening wears on, the ice is broken and things assume a more easy swing. The Family begins to make remarks.

  “You must stand up straighter, my boy,” says Father, placing his hand between Edgar’s shoulder-blades. “You are slouching badly. I noticed it as you walked down the street this morning.”

  “Do all the boys wear soft-collared shirts like that?” asks Mother. “Personally, I think that they look very untidy. They are all right for tennis and things like that, but I wish you’d put on a starched collar when you are in the house. You never see Elmer Quiggly wearing a collar like that. He always looks neat.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Eddie,” says Sister, “take off that tie. You certainly do get the most terrific-looking things to put around your neck. It looks like a Masonic apron. Let me go with you when you buy your next batch.”

  By this time Edgar has his back against the wall and is breathing hard. What do these folks know of what is being done?

  If it is not family heckling it may be that even more insidious trial, the third degree. This is usually inflicted by semi-relatives and neighbors. The formulæ are something like this: