Love Conquers All

by Robert Benchley

  For instance, under Oct. 27, 1659, we find that William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson were banished from New Hampshire on the charge of being Quakers and were later executed for returning to the colony. Imagine!

  And on Dec. 8, 1837, Wendell Phillips delivered his first abolition speech at Boston in Faneuil Hall, as a result of which he got himself known around Boston as an undesirable citizen, a dangerous radical and a revolutionary trouble-maker. It hardly seems possible now, does it?

  And on July 4, 1776 – but there, why rub it in?

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  A Week-end with Wells

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  In the February Bookman there is an informal article by John Elliot called “At Home with H.G. Wells” in which we are let in on the ground floor in the Wells household and shown “H.G.” (as his friends and his wife call him) at play. It is an interesting glimpse at the small doings of a great man, but there is one feature of those doings which has an ominous sound.

  “The Wells that everyone loves who sees him at Easton is the human Wells, the family Wells, the jovial Wells, Wells the host of some Sunday afternoon party. For a distance of ten or twenty miles round folks come on Sunday to play hockey and have tea. Old and young – people from down London who never played hockey before in their lives; country farmers and their daughters, and everybody else who lives in the district – troop over and bring whoever happens to be the week-end guest. Wells is delightful to them all. He doesn’t give a rap if they are solid Tories, Bolsheviks, Liberals, or men and women of no political leanings, Can you play hockey? is all that matters. If you say No you are rushed toward a pile of sticks and given one and told to go in the forward line; if you say Yes you are probably made a vice captain on the spot.”

  I am frank to confess that this sounds perfectly terrible to me. I can’t imagine a worse place in which to spend a week-end than one where your host is always boisterously forcing you to take part in games and dances about which you know nothing. A week-end guest ought to be ignored, allowed to rummage about alone among the books, live stock and cold food in the ice-box whenever he feels like it, and not rushed willy-nilly (something good could be done using the famous Willy-Nilly correspondence as a base, but not here), into whatever the family itself may consider a good time.

  In such a household as the Wells household must be you are greeted by your hostess in a robust manner with “So glad you’re on time. The match begins at two.” And when you say “What match,” you are told that there is a little tennis tournament on for the week-end and that you and Hank are scheduled to start the thing off with a bang. “But I haven’t played tennis for five years,” you protest, thinking of the delightful privacy of your own little hall bedroom in town. “Never mind, it will all come back to you. Bill has got some extra things all put out for you upstairs.” So you start off your week-end by making a dub of yourself and are known from that afternoon on by the people who didn’t catch your name as “the man who had such a funny serve.”

  Or if it isn’t that, it’s dancing. Immediately after dinner, just as you are about to settle down for a comfortable evening by the fire, you notice that they are rolling back the rugs. “House-cleaning?” you suggest, with a nervous little laugh. “Oh, no, just a little dancing in your honor.” And then you tell them that your honor will be satisfied perfectly without dancing, that you haven’t danced since you left school, that you don’t dance very well, or that you have hurt your foot; to which the only reply is an encouraging laugh and a hail-fellow-well-met push out into the middle of the floor.

  A pox on both your house parties!

  And yet, in a way, that is just what one might expect from Mr. Wells. He has done the same thing to me in his books many a time. I personally have but little facility for world-repairing. I haven’t the slightest idea of how one would go about making things better. And yet before I am more than two-thirds of the way through “Joan and Peter” or “The Undying Fire” or “The Outline of History,” Mr. Wells has me out on the hockey-field waving a stick with a magnificent enthusiasm but no aim, rushing up and down and calling, “Come on, now!” to no one in particular.

  No matter how discouraging things seem when I pick up a Wells book, or how averse I may be to launching out on a crusade of any sort, I always end by walking with a firm step to the door (feeling, somehow, that I have grown quite a bit taller and much handsomer) and saying quietly: “Meadows, my suit of armor, please; the one with a chain-mail shirt and a purple plume.”

  This, of course, is silly, as any of Mr. Wells’s critics will tell you. It is the effect that he has on irresponsible, visionary minds. But if all the irresponsible, visionary minds in the world become sufficiently belligerent through a continued reading of Mr. Wells, or even of the New Testament, who knows but what they may become just practical enough to take a hand at running things? They couldn’t do much worse than the responsible, practical minds have done, now, could they?

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  About

  Portland Cement

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  Portland cement is “the finely pulverized product resulting from the calcination to incipient fusion of an intimate mixture of properly proportioned argillaceous and calcareous materials and to which no addition greater than 3 per cent has been made subsequent to calcination.”

  That, in a word, is the keynote of H. Colin Campbell’s “How to Use Cement for Concrete Construction.” In case you should never read any more of the book, you would have that.

  But to the reader who is not satisfied with this taste of the secret of cement construction and who reads on into Mr. Campbell’s work, there is revealed a veritable mine of information. And in the light of the recent turn of events one might even call it significant. (Any turn of events will do.)

  The first chapter is given over to a plea for concrete. Judging from the claims made for concrete by Mr. Campbell, it will accomplish everything that a return to Republican administration would do, and wouldn’t be anywhere near so costly. It will make your barn fireproof; it will insure clean milk for your children; it will provide a safe housing for your automobile. Farm prosperity and concrete go hand in hand.

  In case there are any other members of society who have been with me in thinking that Portland cement is a product of Portland, Me., or Portland, Ore., it might as well be stated right here and now that America had nothing to do with the founding of the industry, and that the lucky Portland is an island off the south coast of England.

  It was a bright sunny afternoon in May, 1824, when Joseph Aspdin, an intelligent bricklayer of Leeds, England, was carelessly calcining a mixture of limestone and clay, as bricklayers often do on their days off, that he suddenly discovered, on reducing the resulting clinker to a powder, that this substance, on hardening, resembled nothing so much as the yellowish-gray stone found in the quarries on the Isle of Portland. (How Joe knew what grew on the Isle of Portland when his home was in Leeds is not explained. Maybe he spent his summers at the Portland House, within three minutes of the bathing beach.)

  At any rate, on discovering the remarkable similarity between the mess he had cooked up and Portland stone, he called to his wife and said: “Eunice, come here a minute! What does this remind you of?”

  The usually cheerful brow of Eunice Aspdin clouded for the fraction of a second.

  “That night up at Bert and Edna’s?” she ventured.

  “No, no, my dear,” said the intelligent bricklayer, slightly irked. “Anyone could see that this here substance is a dead ringer for Portland stone, and I am going to make heaps and heaps of it and call it ‘Portland cement.’ It is little enough that I can do for the old island.”

  And so that’s how Portland cement was named. Rumor hath it that the first Portland cement in America was made at Allentown, Pa., in 1875, but I wouldn’t want to be quoted as having said that. But I will say that the total annual production in this country is now over 90,000,000 barr
els.

  It is interesting to note that cement is usually packed in cloth sacks, although sometimes paper bags are used.

  “A charge is made for packing cement in paper bags,” the books says. “These, of course, are not redeemable.”

  One can understand their not wanting to take back a paper bag in which cement has been wrapped. The wonder is that the bag lasts until you get home with it. I tried to take six cantaloups home in a paper bag the other night and had a bad enough time of it. Cement, when it is in good form, must be much worse than cantaloup, and the redeemable remnants of the bag must be negligible. But why charge extra for using paper bags? That seems like adding whatever it is you add to injury. Apologies, rather than extra charge, should be in order. However, I suppose that these cement people understand their business. I shall know enough to watch out, however, and insist on having whatever cement I may be called upon to carry home done up in a cloth sack. “Not in a paper bag, if you please,” I shall say very politely to the clerk.

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  Open Bookcases

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  Things have come to a pretty pass when a man can’t buy a bookcase that hasn’t got glass doors on it. What are we becoming – a nation of weaklings?

  All over New York city I have been, – trying to get something in which to keep books. And what am I shown? Curio cabinets, inclosed whatnots, museum cases in which to display fragments from the neolithic age, and glass-faced sarcophagi for dead butterflies.

  “But I am apt to use my books at any time,” I explain to the salesman. “I never can tell when it is coming on me. And when I want a book I want it quickly. I don’t want to have to send down to the office for the key, and I don’t want to have to manipulate any trick ball-bearings and open up a case as if I were getting cream-puffs out for a customer. I want a bookcase for books and not books for a bookcase.”

  (I really don’t say all those clever things to the clerk. It took me quite a while to think them up. What I really say is, timidly, “Haven’t you any bookcases without glass doors?” and when they say “No,” I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room table.)

  But if they keep on getting arrogant about it I shall speak up to them one of these fine days. When I ask for an open-faced bookcase they look with a scornful smile across the salesroom toward the mahogany four-posters and say:

  “Oh, no, we don’t carry those any more. We don’t have any call for them. Everyone uses the glass-doored ones now. They keep the books much cleaner.”

  Then the ideal procedure for a real book-lover would be to keep his books in the original box, snugly packed in excelsior, with the lid nailed down. Then they would be nice and clean. And the sun couldn’t get at them and ruin the bindings. Faugh! (Try saying that. It doesn’t work out at all as you think it’s going to. And it makes you feel very silly for having tried it.)

  Why, in the elder days bookcases with glass doors were owned only by people who filled them with ten volumes of a pictorial history of the Civil War (including some swell steel engravings), “Walks and Talks with John L. Stoddard” and “Daily Thoughts for Daily Needs,” done in robin’s-egg blue with a watered silk bookmark dangling out. A set of Sir Walter Scott always helps fill out a bookcase with glass doors. It looks well from the front and shows that you know good literature when you see it. And you don’t have to keep opening and shutting the doors to get it out, for you never want to get it out.

  A bookcase with glass doors used to be a sign that somewhere in the room there was a crayon portrait of Father when he was a young man, with a real piece of glass stuck on the portrait to represent a diamond stud.

  And now we are told that “everyone buys bookcases with glass doors; we have no call for others.” Soon we shall be told that the thing to do is to buy the false backs of bindings, such as they have in stage libraries, to string across behind the glass. It will keep us from reading too much, and then, too, no one will want to borrow our books.

  But one clerk told me the truth. And I am just fearless enough to tell it here. I know that it will kill my chances for the Presidency, but I cannot stop to think of that.

  After advising me to have a carpenter build me the kind of bookcase I wanted, and after I had told him that I had my name in for a carpenter but wasn’t due to get him until late in the fall, as he was waiting for prices to go higher before taking the job on, the clerk said:

  “That’s it. It’s the price. You see the furniture manufacturers can make much more money out of a bookcase with glass doors than they can without. When by hanging glass doors on a piece of furniture at but little more expense to themselves they can get a much bigger profit, what’s the sense in making them without glass doors? They have just stopped making them, that’s all.”

  So you see the American people are being practically forced into buying glass doors whether they want them or not. Is that right? Is it fair? Where is our personal liberty going to? What is becoming of our traditional American institutions?

  I don’t know.

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  Trout-Fishing

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  I never knew very much about trout-fishing anyway, and I certainly had no inkling that a trout-fisher had to be so deceitful until I read “Trout-Fishing in Brooks,” by G. Garrow-Green. The thing is appalling. Evidently the sport is nothing but a constant series of compromises with one’s better nature, what with sneaking about pretending to be something that one is not, trying to fool the fish into thinking one thing when just the reverse is true, and in general behaving in an underhanded and tricky manner throughout the day.

  The very first and evidently the most important exhortation in the book is, “Whatever you do, keep out of sight of the fish.” Is that open and above-board? Is it honorable?

  “Trout invariably lie in running water with their noses pointed against the current, and therefore whatever general chance of concealment there may be rests in fishing from behind them. The moral is that the brook-angler must both walk and fish upstream.”

  It seems as if a lot of trouble might be saved the fisherman, in case he really didn’t want to walk upstream but had to get to some point downstream before 6 o’clock, to adopt some disguise which would deceive the fish into thinking that he had no intention of catching them anyway. A pair of blue glasses and a cane would give the effect of the wearer being blind and harmless, and could be thrown aside very quickly when the time came to show one’s self in one’s true colors to the fish. If there were two anglers they might talk in loud tones about their dislike for fish in any form, and then, when the trout were quite reassured and swimming close to the bank they could suddenly be shot with a pistol.

  But a little further on comes a suggestion for a much more elaborate bit of subterfuge.

  The author says that in the early season trout are often engaged with larvae at the bottom and do not show on the surface. It is then a good plan, he says, to sink the flies well, moving in short jerks to imitate nymphs.

  You can see that imitating a nymph will call for a lot of rehearsing, but I doubt very much if moving in short jerks is the way in which to go about it. I have never actually seen a nymph, though if I had I should not be likely to admit it, and I can think of no possible way in which I could give an adequate illusion of being one myself. Even the most stupid of trout could easily divine that I was masquerading, and then the question would immediately arise in its mind: “If he is not a nymph, then what is his object in going about like that trying to imitate one? He is up to no good, I’ll be bound.”

  And crash! away would go the trout before I could put my clothes back on.

  There is an interesting note on the care and feeding of worms on page 67. One hundred and fifty worms are placed in a tin and allowed to work their way down into packed moss.

  “A little fresh milk poured in occasionally is sufficient food,” writes Mr. Garrow-Green, in the style of Dr. Holt. “So disposed, the wor
ms soon become bright, lively and tough.”

  It is easy to understand why one should want to have bright worms, so long as they don’t know that they are bright and try to show off before company, but why deliberately set out to make them tough? Good manners they may not be expected to acquire, but a worm with a cultivated vulgarity sounds intolerable. Imagine 150 very tough worms all crowded together in one tin! “Canaille” is the only word to describe it.

  I suppose that it is my ignorance of fishing parlance which makes the following sentence a bit hazy:

  “Much has been written about bringing a fish downstream to help drown it, as no doubt it does; still, this is often impracticable.”

  I can think of nothing more impracticable than trying to drown a fish under any conditions, upstream or down, but I suppose that Mr. Garrow-Green knows what he is talking about.

  And in at least one of his passages I follow him perfectly. In speaking of the time of day for fly-fishing in the spring he says:

  “‘Carpe diem’ is a good watchword when trout are in the humor.” At least, I know a good pun when I see one.

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  “Scouting for Girls”

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  “Scouting for Girls” is not the kind of book you think it is. The verb “to scout” is intransitive in this case. As a matter of fact, instead of being a volume of advice to men on how to get along with girls, it is full of advice to girls on how to get along without men, that is, within reason, of course.