Love Conquers All

by Robert Benchley

  Or perhaps it is because he reads each day of how jealous we are, as a Nation, of the sanctity of our Constitution, how we revere it and draw a flashing sword against its detractors, and then sees this very Constitution being flouted as a matter of course in those districts where the amendment giving the negroes a right to vote is popularly considered one of the five funniest jokes in the world.

  Perhaps he hears candidates for office insisting on a reign of law or a plea for order above all things, by some sentimentalist or other, or public speakers advising those who have not respect for American institutions to go back whence they came, and then sees whole sections of the country violating every principle of law and order and mocking American institutions for the sake of teaching a “nigger” his place.

  Perhaps during the war he heard of the bloody crimes of our enemies, and saw preachers and editors and statesmen stand aghast at the barbaric atrocities which won for the German the name of Hun, and then looked toward his own people and saw them being burned, disembowelled and tortured with a civic unanimity and tacit legal sanction which made the word Hun sound weak.

  Perhaps he has heard it boasted that in America every man who is honest, industrious and intelligent has a good chance to win out, and has seen honest, industrious and intelligent men whose skins are black stopped short by a wall so high and so thick that all they can do, on having reached that far, is to bow their heads and go slowly back.

  Any one of these reasons should have been sufficient for having written “Darkwater.”

  It is unfortunate that Mr. Du Bois should have raised this question of our own responsibility just at this time when we were showing off so nicely. It may remind someone that instead of taking over a protectorate of Armenia we might better take over a protectorate of the State of Georgia, which yearly leads the proud list of lynchers. But then, there will not be enough people who see Mr. Du Bois’s book to cause any great national movement, so we are quite sure, for the time being, of being able to devote our energies to the solution of our other problems.

  Don’t forget, therefore, to write your Congressman about a universal daylight-saving bill, and give a little thought, if you can, to the question of the vehicular tunnel.

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  The New Time-Table

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  The new time-table of the New York Central Railroad (New York Central Railroad, Harlem Division. Form 113. Corrected to March 28, 1922) is an attractive folder, done in black and white, for the suburban trade. It slips neatly into the pocket, where it easily becomes lost among letters and bills, appearing again only when you have procured another.

  So much for its physical features. Of the text matter it is difficult to write without passion. No more disheartening work has been put on the market this season.

  In an attempt to evade the Daylight-Saving Law the New York Central has kept its clocks at what is called “Eastern Standard Time,” meaning that it is standard on East 42d Street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues. Practically everywhere else in New York the clocks are an hour ahead.

  It is this “Eastern Standard Time” that gives the time-table its distinctive flavor. Each train has been demoted one hour, and then, for fear that it would be too easy to understand this, an extra three or four minutes have been thrown in or taken out, just, so that no mistake can help being made.

  In order to read the new time-table understandingly the following procedure is now necessary:

  Take a room in some quiet family hotel where the noise from the street is reduced to minimum. Place the time-table on the writing-desk and sit in front of it, holding a pencil in the right hand and a watch (Eastern Christian Time) in the left. Then decide on the time you think you would like to reach home. Let us say that you usually have dinner at 7. You would, if you could do just what you wanted, reach Valhalla at 6:30. Very well. It takes about an hour from the Grand Central Terminal to Valhalla. How about a train leaving around 5:30?

  Look at the time-table for a train which leaves about 2:45 (Eastern Standard Time). Write down, “2:45” on a piece of paper. Add 150. Subtract the number of stations that Valhalla is above White Plains. Sharpen your pencil and bind up your cut finger and subtract the number you first thought of, and the result will show the number of Presidents of the United States who have been assassinated while in office. Then go over to the Grand Central Terminal and ask one of the information clerks what you want to know.

  They will be glad to see you, for during the last three days they have been actually hungering for the sight of a human face. Sometimes it has seemed to them that the silence and loneliness there behind the information counter would drive them mad. If someone – anyone – would only come and speak to them! That is why one of them is over in the corner chewing up time-tables into small balls and playing marbles with them. He has gone mad from loneliness. The other clerk, the one who is looking at the tip of his nose and mumbling Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, has only a few more minutes before he too succumbs.

  And that low, rumbling sound, what is that? It comes from the crowd of commuters standing in front of the gate of what used to be the 5:56. Let us draw near and hear what they are discussing. Why, it is the new time-table, of all things!

  “Listen, Ed. This is how it goes. This train that goes at 4:25 according to this time-table is really the old 5:20. See? What you do is add an hour—”

  “Aw, what kind of talk is that? Add an hour to your grandmother! You subtract an hour from the time as given here. This is Eastern Standard Time. See, it says right here: ‘The time shown in this folder is Eastern Standard Time, one hour slower than Daylight-Saving Time.’ See? One hour slower. You subtract.”

  “Here, you guys are both way off. I just asked one of the trainmen. The 5:56 has gone. It went at 4:20. The next train that we get is the 6:20 which goes at 5:19. Look, see here. It says 5:19 on the time-table but that means that by your watch it is 6:19—”

  “By my watch it is not 6:19. My watch I set by the clock in the station this morning when I came in—”

  “Well, the clock in the station is wrong. That is, the clock in the station is an hour ahead of all the other clocks.”

  “An hour ahead? An hour behind, you mean.”

  “The clock in the station is an hour ahead. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Now listen, Jo. Didn’t you see in the paper Monday morning—”

  “Yaas, I saw in the paper Monday morning, and it said that—”

  “Look, Gus. By my watch – look, Gus – listen, Gus – by my watch—”

  “Aw, you and your watch! What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Now looka here. On this time-table it says—”

  “Lissen, Eddie—”

  Whatever else its publishers may say about it, the new New York Central time-table bids fair to be the most-talked-of publication of the season.

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  Mr. Bok’s

  Americanization

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  If ever you should feel important enough to write an autobiography to give to the world, and dislike to say all the nice things about yourself that you feel really ought to be said, just write it in the third person. Edward Bok has done this in “The Americanization of Edward Bok” and the effect is quite touching in its modesty.

  In “An Explanation” at the beginning of the book Mr. Bok disclaims any credit for the winning ways and remarkable success of his hero, Edward Bok. Edward Bok, the little Dutch boy who landed in America in 1870 and later became the editor of the greatest women’s advertising medium in the country, is an entirely different person from the Edward Bok who is telling the story. You understand this to begin with. Otherwise you may misjudge the author.

  “I have again and again found myself,” writes Mr. Bok, “watching with intense amusement and interest the Edward Bok of this book at work. . . . His tastes, his outlook, his manner of looking at things were totally at
variance with my own. . . . He has had and has been a personality apart from my private self.”

  The only connection between Edward Bok the editor and Edward Bok the autobiographer seems to be that Editor Bok allows Author Bok to have a checking account in his bank under their common name.

  Thus completely detached from his hero, Mr. Bok proceeds and is able to narrate on page 3, in the manner of Horatio Alger, how young Edward, taunted by his Brooklyn schoolmates, gave a sound thrashing to the ringleader, after which he found himself “looking into the eyes of a crowd of very respectful boys and giggling girls, who readily made a passageway for his brother and himself when they indicated a desire to leave the school-yard and go home.”

  He can also, without seeming in the least conceited, tell how, through his clear-sighted firmness in refusing to write in the Spencerian manner prescribed in school, he succeeded in bringing the Principal and the whole Board of Education to their senses, resulting in a complete reversal of the public-school policy in the matter of handwriting instruction.

  The Horatio Alger note is dominant throughout the story of young Edward’s boyhood. His cheerfulness and business sagacity so impressed everyone with whom he came in contact that he was soon outdistancing all the other boys in the process of self-advancement. And no one is more smilingly tolerant of the irresistible progress of young Edward Bok in making friends and money than Edward Bok the impersonal author of the book. He just loves to see the young boy get ahead.

  It will perhaps aid in getting an idea of the personality and confident presence of the Boy Bok to state that he was a feverish collector of autographs. Whenever any famous personage came to town the young man would find out at what hotel he was staying and would proceed to hound him until he had got him to write his name, with some appropriate sentiment, in a little book. In advertising the present volume the publishers give a list of names of historical characters who feature in Mr. Bok’s reminiscences – Gens. Grant and Garfield, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson and dozens of others. And so they do figure in the book, but as victims of the young Dutch boy’s passion for autographs. Still, perhaps, they did not mind, for the author gives us to understand that they were all so charmed with the prepossessing manner and intelligent bearing of the young autograph hound that they not only were continually asking him to dinner (he usually timed his visit so as to catch them just as they were entering the dining-room) but insisted on giving him letters of introduction to their friends.

  Only Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson neglected to register extreme pleasure at being approached by the smiling lad. Both Mrs. Lincoln and Emerson were failing in their minds at the time, however, which satisfactorily explains their coolness, at least for the author. In Mrs. Lincoln’s case an attempt was made to interest her in an autographed photograph of Gen. Grant. But “Edward saw that the widow of the great Lincoln did not mentally respond to his pleasure in his possession.” Could it have been possible that the widow of the great Lincoln was a trifle bored?

  The account of the intrusion on Emerson in Concord borders on the sacrilegious. Here was the venerable philosopher, five months before his death, when his great mind had already gone on before him, being visited by a strange lad with a passion for autographs, who sat and watched for those lucid moments when then sun would break through the clouded brain, making it possible for Emerson to hold the pen and form the letters of his name. Then young Edward was off, with another trophy in his belt and another stride made in his progress toward Americanization. Lovers of Emerson could wish that the impersonal editor of these memoirs had omitted the account of this victory.

  Americanization seems, from the present document, to consist of, first, making as many influential friends as possible who may be able to help you at some future time; second, making as much money as possible (young Edward used his position as stenographer to Jay Gould to glean tips on the market, thereby cleaning up for himself and his Sunday-school teacher at Plymouth Church), and third, keeping your eye open for the main chance.

  In conclusion, nothing more fitting could be quoted than the touching caption under the picture of the author’s grandmother, “who counselled each of her children to make the world a better and more beautiful place to live in – a counsel which is now being carried on by her grandchildren, one of whom is Edward Bok.”

  Could detachment of author and hero be more complete?

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  Zane Grey’s Movie

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  The hum of the moving-picture machine is the predominating note in “The Mysterious Rider,” Zane Grey’s latest contribution to the literature of unrealism. All that is necessary for a complete illusion is the insertion of three or four news photographs at the end, showing how they catch salmon in the Columbia River, the allegorical floats in the Los Angeles Carnival of Roses and the ice-covered fire ruins in the business section of Worcester, Mass.

  In order that the change from book to film may be made as quickly as possible, the author has written his story in the language of the moving-picture subtitle. All that the continuity-writer in the studio will have to do will be to take every third sentence from the book and make a subtitle from it. We might save him the trouble and do it here, together with some suggestions for incidental decorations.

  Remember, nothing will be quoted below which is not in the exact wording of Zane Grey’s text. We first see Columbine Belllounds, adopted daughter of old Belllounds the rancher of Colorado. She is riding along the trail overlooking the valley.

  Today girlish ordeals and griefs seemed back in the past: She was a woman at nineteen and face to face with the first great problem in her life.

  (Suggestion for title decoration:

  A pair of reluctant feet standing at the junction of a brook and a river.)

  She stops to pick some columbines and soliloquizes. The author says: “She spoke aloud, as if the sound of her voice might convince her,” but it is not clear from the text just what she expected to be convinced of. Here is her argument to herself:

  Columbine! . . . So they named me –those miners who found me – a baby – lost in the woods – asleep among the columbines.”

  (Decorative nasturtiums.)

  Having convinced herself in these reassuring words as she stands alone on the ridge in God’s great outdoors, she explains that she has promised to marry Jack Belllounds, the worthless son of her foster-father, although anyone can tell that she is in love with Wilson Moore, a cow-puncher on the ranch. You will understand what a sacrifice this was to be when the author says that “the lower part of Jack Belllounds’s face was weak.”

  To the ranch comes “Hell-Bent” Wade, the mysterious man of the plains. He applies for a job, and not only that, but he gets it, which gives him a chance to let us know that:

  Eighteen years ago he had driven the woman he loved away from him, out into the world with her baby girl. . . Jealous fool! . . . Too late had he discovered his fatal blunder. . . . That was Bent Wade’s secret.

  (Fancy sketch of a secret.)

  And as we already know that Columbine is almost nineteen (I think she told herself this fact aloud once when she was out riding alone, just to convince herself), the shock is not so great as it might have been to hear Wade murmur aloud (doubtless to convince himself too), “Baby would have been – let’s see – ’most nineteen years old now – if she’d lived.”

  Any bets on who Columbine really is?

  Let us digress from the scenario a minute to cite a scintillating passage, one of many in the book. Wade is speaking:

  “‘You can never tell what a dog is until you know him. Dogs are like men. Some of ’em look good, but they’re really bad. An’ that works the other way round.’”

  Oscar Wilde stuff, that is. How often have you felt the truth of what Mr. Grey says here, and yet have never been able to put it into words! It is this ability to put thoughts into words that makes him one of our most popular authors today
.

  But enough of this. “Hell-Bent” Wade determines that his little gel shall not know him as her father, and, furthermore, that she shall not marry Jack Belllounds. So he goes to the cabin of Wils Moore and tells him that Columbine is unhappy at the thought of her approaching – you guessed it – nuptials.

  “Pard! She loves me – still?”

  “Wils, hers is the kind that grows stronger with time, I know.”

  (Heart and an hour-glass intertwined.)

  Let it be said right here, however, that Jack Belllounds, rough and villainous as he is, is the kind of cow-puncher who says to his father: “I still love you, dad, despite the cruel thing you did to me.” No cow-puncher who says “despite” can be entirely bad. Neither can he be a cow-puncher.

  It is later, after a thrilling series of physical encounters, that Columbine tells Jack Belllounds in so many words that she loves Wils Moore. “Then Wade saw the glory of her – saw her mother again in that proud, fierce uplift of face that flamed red and then blazed white – saw hate and passion and love in all their primal nakedness.

  “Love him! Love Wilson Moore? Yes, you fool! I love him! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  (Decorative heart, in which a little door slowly opens, showing the face of Columbine.)

  But time is short and there is a Semon comedy to follow immediately after this. So all that we can divulge is that Jack has Wils Moore wrongly accused of cattle-rustling, bringing down on his own head the following chatty bit from his affianced bride:

  “So that’s your revenge. . . . But you’re to reckon with me, Jack Belllounds! You villain! You devil! You—”

  It would be unfair to the millions of readers who will struggle for possession of the circulating-library copies of “The Mysterious Rider” to tell just what happens after this. But need we hesitate to divulge that the final subtitle will be: