Now I have been broadmindedness itself about the banks’ little troubles since last March, and have said to any number of people: “Oh, banks are all right! Just a little irresponsible, that’s all. Let them alone and don’t scold, and everything will turn out all right.” And everything is turning out all right, I am sure. But I do think that the banks ought to take my attitude into account and give me credit for it. Only about fifty dollars credit is all it would take at any one time. Well, let’s say a hundred and be on the safe side.
What is needed most in the personal relations between a bank and its depositors is a sense of fun. If I, in a happy-go-lucky vein, happen to sign a check “Peter Rabbit” (as I did once, in a playful mood), the bank ought to know that I wasn’t trying to forge Peter Rabbit’s name. And, if the amount of the check doesn’t happen to be in my account at that particular moment, they should cash it in the spirit that it was written, and perhaps drop me a kidding line in return, saying:
Dear Peter Rabbit: Your check received and was sure glad to get it. We knew that it was yours by the handwriting and only wish we had been there that night to see the fun. Drop in whenever you are in the neighborhood and add perhaps twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents to your account, just to make the thing legal. Yours for fun – The Molly Cottontail Trust Company.
Now a note like that would put me at my ease and would make me want to do all that I could to cooperate with them by getting the $28.50 into the vaults as soon as possible. There wouldn’t be any of this friction that the old system engendered, and, if the time ever came when I could do the bank a favor in return, you may be sure that I would do it with the same idea of genial burlesque and make a joke of the whole thing.
This surely isn’t too much to ask, with all the readjustment that is going on in the business affairs of the nation. All that would be necessary to change would be the tone of things. We could still keep up the old overdrawing on my part and the same notification of my delinquency on theirs. We would simply be doing it as a lark, that’s all. And there wouldn’t be this constant feeling that I am doing something wrong, a feeling which, sooner or later, could drive a fellow into melancholia. Money isn’t everything, you know.
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The Questionnaire Craze
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Professors in our universities are getting awfully nosy of late. They are always asking questions or sending out questionnaires inquiring into your private life. I can remember the day when all that a professor was supposed to do was to mark “C minus” on students’ examination-papers and then go home to tea. Nowadays they seem to feel that they must know just how much we (outside the university) eat, what we do with our spare time, and how we like our eggs. I, for one, am inclined not to tell any more. I have already filled in enough stuff on questionnaires to get myself divorced or thrown into jail.
A particularly searching series of questions has just come from an up-state university trying to find out about my sleeping habits. The director of the psychological laboratory wants to know a lot of things which, if I were to give them out, would practically put me in the position of sleeping in John Wanamaker’s window. I would have no more privacy than Irvin Cobb.
The first question is a simple one: “How many hours do you sleep each night, on the average?”
Well, professor, that would be hard to say. I might add “ – and what’s it to you?” but I suppose there must be some reason for wanting to know. I can’t imagine any subject of less general interest than the number of hours I sleep each night on the average. No one has ever given a darn before, and I must say that I am rather touched at this sudden display of interest on the part of a stranger. Perhaps if I were to tell him that I hardly sleep at all he would come down and read to me.
But I would like to bet that the professor gets a raft of answers. If there is one thing that people like to talk about it is their sleeping habits. Just get a group started telling how much or how little they sleep each night and you will get a series of personal anecdotes which will put the most restless member of the party to sleep in no time.
“Well, it’s a funny thing about me,” one will say. “I get to bed, we’ll say at eleven-thirty, and I go to sleep the minute my head hits the pillow and sleep right through until seven-thirty.”
He will be interrupted at this point by someone who insists on having it known that the night before he heard the clock strike two, three and four. (People always seem to take a great deal of pride in having heard the clock strike two, three and four. You will very seldom find one who admits to having slept soundly all through the night. Just as a man will never admit that the suit he has on is new, so is he loath to confess that he is a good sleeper. I don’t understand it but, as I am getting pretty old now, I don’t much care.)
You will be very lucky if, in an experience-meeting of this kind, you don’t start someone off telling the dream he had a few nights ago. “It was the darndest thing,” someone will say, as the rest pay no attention but try to think up dreams they themselves have had recently, “it was the darndest thing. I seemed to be in a sort of big hall, only it wasn’t exactly a hall either, it was more of a rink or schoolhouse. It seemed that Harry was there and all of a sudden instead of Harry it was Lindbergh. Well, so we all were going to a football game or something and I had on my old gray suit, except that it had wheels on it—”
By this time everybody is engaged in lighting cigarettes or looking at newspapers or even talking to someone else in a low tone of voice, and the narrator of the dream has practically no one to listen to him except the unfortunate who happens to be sitting next. But he doesn’t seem to care and goes right on, until he has finished. There is a polite murmur of “What had you been eating?” or “That certainly was a corker,” and then someone else starts. The professor who sent this questionnaire will have to watch out for this sort of thing or he will be swamped.
The whole list is just a temptation to garrulousness. Question No. 3, for example, is likely to get people started on an hour’s personal disclosure. “Do you notice ill effects the day after sleeping on a train?” is the way it is worded.
Well, now take me, for example, I’m glad you asked that, professor. I do notice ill effects the day after sleeping on a train. I notice, in the first place, that I haven’t got my underthings buttoned correctly. Dressing in a Pullman berth is, at best, a temporary form of arraying oneself, but if I happen to have to go right from the train to my engagement without going first to a hotel and doing the whole thing over again, I find, during the day, that I have buttoned the top button of my running-drawers into the bottom buttonhole of my waistcoat and that one whole side of my shirt is clamped, by some mysterious process, half way up my back. This, as the day wears on, exerts a pull on the parts affected until there is grave danger of the whole body becoming twisted to the right, or left, as the case may be. This, in turn, leads to an awkward gait in walking and is likely to cause comment. Of course, if it is a strange town, people may think that you walk that way naturally and, out of politeness, say nothing about it, but among friends you are pretty sure to be accused of affectation, or even worse.
Another ill effect, Professor, which I feel after having slept on a Pullman (leaving aside the inevitable cold in the head acquired from sleeping with a light brown blanket piled high on one hip) is the strange appearance I present when I take my hat off. As I am usually the last man in the washroom, I am constantly being harried by the porter who keeps coming to the door and telling me that the train is pulling out into the yards in three minutes. (It is always three minutes, never less and never, by any chance, more.) Now, with this unpleasant threat hanging over me, I am in no state of mind to make my customary exquisite toilet. I brush my teeth and possibly shave one half of my face, but almost invariably forget to brush my hair. It is all right going through the station with my hat on, but later in the day, when I come to my business appointments, I notice that I am the object of considerable curious
attention from people who do not know me, owing to my hair standing on end during an entire conference or even a luncheon. It is usually laid to my being a writer and of an artistic temperament, but it doesn’t help me in a business way.
Now you will see what you got yourself into by merely asking me that one question, Professor. I could go on like this for hours, telling about the ill effects I feel the day after sleeping in a Pullman, but maybe you aren’t interested any longer. I am afraid that I have bored you already.
The next question, however, is likely to start me off again. “Do you usually sleep through the night without awakening?”
It is funny that you should have asked that. I was just about to tell you anyway. Some nights I do, and some nights I don’t. I can’t be any more explicit than that. When my little boys were small, I really can’t say that I did. Not that they meant to be mean about it, or did it deliberately, but, as I look back on it, it seems that there was always something. A glass of water was usually the ostensible excuse, but a great many times it turned out to be just a desire on their parts to be chummy and have someone to cry with. I would say that, during the infancy of my bairn, my average was something like ten complete arisings from bed during the night and fifteen incomplete ones. By “incomplete” I mean those little starts out of a sound sleep, where one leg is thrust out from under the bed-clothes while one waits to see if maybe the disturbance will not die down of its own accord. These abortive arisings are really just as disturbing to the sleep as the complete ones, and should count as much in any scientific survey. (I do not want to convey the impression that I did all the hopping up during the night. The mother of the boys did her share, but it was a good two-man job on which turns had to be taken. It also depended a lot on which one could best simulate sleep at the time of the alarm.)
Now that the boys are old enough to get up and get Daddy water when he wants it, things are a little different, but I find that the amount of undisturbed sleep that I get in one night’s rest is dependent on so many outside factors that it is almost impossible to make up any statistics on the subject. A great deal of it depends on the neighbors and how much fun they happen to be having. Then there is the question of what tunes I happen to have been hearing during the day. One good, monotonous tune firmly imbedded in my consciousness will make going to bed merely a mockery. Two nights ago I retired early for a good rest (my first since 1921) but unfortunately spent seven out of my possible eight hours trying to get “What Is This Thing Called Love?” out of my mind. If I had only known some more of the words it wouldn’t have been quite so bad, but one can’t go on, hour after hour, mentally singing “What is this thing called love – what is this thing called love – what is this thing called love – what is this thing called love” without suffering some sort of nervous breakdown. It would have been much better for me to have been walking the streets than lying there in bed plugging a song for nobody in particular.
It is this sort of thing which makes it difficult to answer Question No. 4. One night I am one way – the next night I am another way. The only means that I can think of for the professor to employ to get an accurate check-up on my sleeping habits would be for him to come down to my place and sleep on an army-cot at the foot of my bed himself. He would have to bring his own blankets, though, as I have hardly enough for myself as it is.
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Home Sweet Home
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In these days when one is forced to stay at home more, on account of the expense of going out, it is discouraging to learn that the home is one of the most dangerous places to stay if you don’t want to get hurt. The National Safety Congress in London has recently announced that 1,800 British women are killed annually just sticking around their homes. Nobody knows how many British men are killed, what with the British women and everything.
According to Miss Bondfield, former Minister of Labor in the British Cabinet, these 1,800 housewives met their deaths falling down stairs, tripping over buckets and broom-handles and in other domestic pursuits. “But falling over a bucket or broom-handle,” said Miss Bondfield, “or even falling down stairs, is a human failing.” This is very broadminded of Miss Bondfield, but it doesn’t make the situation any the less grim.
The argument advanced by the congress was that too many houses nowadays are filled with unnecessary sharp edges and corners or cluttered up with too many sharp-edged tables and other pieces of furniture. This is all very well, but it doesn’t take care of the stair-problem, nor does it explain just how corners are to be done away with unless everybody can live in a rotunda. And it doesn’t seem to me that it exhausts the sources of death and destruction which lurk in every household, whether well-ordered or not.
What, for example, is to be done about cellar-stairs with too low a ceiling? A man may take care of a furnace for twenty-five years and still forget to duck his head when he starts going down the cellar-stairs. And, even if he never quite kills himself with one bump, the constant banging at his forehead, year after year, night after night, is going eventually to result in a general concussion or softening of the brain, with an early and unpleasant death as a result.
What of bureau-drawers which stick until the puller has got himself quite off balance, and then throw him over backward against his rowing-machine? What of slipping in the shower-bath or getting out of the tub and crashing into unresisting porcelain? And, while on the subject of showers, what of those which stop for a second in the middle of a warm bath and then give forth a gush of scalding hot water? What of sectional book-cases which topple over on top of one while trying to get a volume from the top stratum?
It would seem that, in doing away with stairs (a dangerous experiment in the first place, what with the jumping it would entail) and eliminating corners and mop handles, the work of making the home safe has only just begun. Perhaps it would be better if we all just went out and lived in fields.
But even there, certain people are going to be always falling down on rocks. Things look pretty black.
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Literary Notes
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This being the centenary of the death of Mrs. Felicia Hemans, perhaps we ought to give a thought to the Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck, and possibly, if time remains, to the Breaking Waves Which Dashed High. Those who do not wish to join in this sport will find falcons and shuttlecocks in the Great Hall. Ask Enoch to give them to you.
Everyone knows how Mrs. Hemans’ famous poem begins:
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but him had fled;
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The question is: How does it go from there? Darned if I know.
How typical this slipshod knowledge of great literary works is! How often do we find ourselves able to recite the first four lines of a poem, and then unable to keep our eyes open any longer!
Not many people know that the name of the boy in the poem was Giacomo, and that his father’s name was Louis, and that the ship was the Orient. Or possibly it was the other way ’round. Anyhow, there they were!
So things went on like this for quite a while, and then Mrs. Hemans wrote a poem about it and called it Casabianca, because if she hadn’t used the name in the title she couldn’t have jammed it into the poem itself in the meter she had picked out. If she had wanted to use the name Casabianca in the poem she would have had to do it in this meter:
Casabianca, through the woods
To grandmother’s house we go.
Then she couldn’t have got in about the burning deck. She was in a pretty tough spot all around.
We don’t hear much about Mr. Hemans, probably because he and Mrs. Hemans separated in 1818. (See – I know everything!) The Casabiancas went right ahead, however, and only last month one of their descendants helped launch the new French submarine Casabianca at Saint-Nazaire, which only goes to show how those t
hings work out. This 1935 Casabianca, however, is the last remaining member of the family, whereas there are two Hemans listed in the Minneapolis telephone directory alone.
A lot of people claim that it does no good to cram one’s head with facts, but I hope that this little essay has proved that facts may be very fascinating things if properly assembled. I am holding out one or two facts (for example, that Mrs. Hemans was the original Egeria in Maria Jane Jewsbury’s Three Histories), because I didn’t want to make this too rich a mixture.
I will say, however, that the French poets, Lebrun and Chenier, both wrote poems about the boy Casabianca, neither of which I know. As soon as I find out something about Lebrun and Chenier I will tip you off. In the meantime, you might run over this centenary sketch again, just to get it fixed in your mind.
Now you may come in, kiddies!
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The Correspondent-School Linguist
(Showing How a Few Words of Foreign Extraction Will Help Along a Border Story)
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It was dark when we reached Chihuahua and the cabronassos were stretched along the dusty cartoucheras like so many paneros.
It had been a long day. We had marched from Benavides and were hot and thirsty. As El Niño, the filthy little rurale who carried our balassus, remarked in his quaint patois, “Oyga, Señor, Quien sabe?”
And we all agreed that he was right. It wasn’t much like Bryant Park. And, after all, why should it be? Weren’t these men fighting for their rights and their pendicos?
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