Books: The Hohenzollerns in America
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Stephen Leacock >> The Hohenzollerns in America
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"The Queen and her consort, King Ferdinand of Aragon..."
Stop, stick him on the film.
FERDINAND OF ARAGON.. Mr. Edward Giles
(Large wig, flat velvet cap and square whiskers--same
make-up as for Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Bohemia,
or any of the Ferdinands.)
"...were immediately seized with enthusiasm for the
marvellous discovery of the Genoese adventurer."
Picture. Columbus hands his globe to Isabella and his
compasses to Ferdinand. They register delight and
astonishment. The Queen turns the globe round and round
and holds it up to Ferdinand. Both indicate with their
faces, well-what-do-you-know-about-this. Ferdinand makes
a circle with the compasses on a table--the courtiers,
fickle creatures, crowd around. They are still dressed
as in Sardinia eighteen years ago. In fact, one recognises
quite a lot of them. When Ferdinand draws the circle they
fall back in wild astonishment, gesticulating frantically.
What they mean is, "It's a circle, it's a circle."
"The King and Queen at once place three ships at the
disposal of Columbus."
On with the picture. The harbour of the port of Palos--
ships bobbing up and down (it is really the oyster boats
in Baltimore Bay but it looks just like Palos, or near
enough). Notice Queen Isabella on the right, at the top
of a flight of steps, extending her hand and looking at
Columbus. Her gesture means, "Pick a ship, any ship you
like, any colour." Just as if she were saying, "Pick a
card, any card you like."
We turn again to the history.
"...Christopher Columbus, now arrived at the height of
his desire, sets out upon his memorable voyage accompanied
by a hundred companions in three caravels, the Pinta,
the Nina and the Espiritu Santo."
Ah, here we have the movie work--the real thing. Cardboard
caravel tossing on black water--seen first right close
to us--we are almost on board of it. Notice the movie
sailors with black whiskers and bare feet (bare feet in
the movies always means a sailor, and black whiskers mean
Spaniards). Now we see the caravel a little way out--whoop!
How she bobs up and down! They give her that jolt (it's
done with the machine itself) to mean danger. There are
all three caravels--Hoop--er--oo! See them go up and
down--stormy night coming all right. See the sun setting
in the west, over the water? They're heading straight
for it. Good-night Columbus--take care of yourself out
there in the blackness.
"During the voyage Columbus remained continually on deck.
Sleeping at the prow, his face towards the new world, he
saw already in his dreams the accomplishment of his
hopes."
On goes the picture. Christopher in the prow of the
caravel (in the movies a prow is made by putting two
little board fences together and propping up a bowsprit
lengthwise over them). Columbus sits up, peers intently
into the darkness, his hand to his brow--registers a
look. Do I see America? No. Lies down, shuts his eyes
and falls into an instantaneous movie sleep. His face
fades out slowly to music, which means that he is going
to dream. Then on the screen the announcement is shown:
SPIRIT OF AMERICA... Miss E. Dickenson
and here we have Miss Dickenson floating in the air above
Columbus. She wears nothing except mosquito netting, but
she has got on enough of it to get past the censor of
the State of New York. Just enough, apparently.
Miss E. Dickenson is joined by a whole troop of Miss Dickensons
all in white mosquito netting. They go through a series of
beautiful evolutions, floating over the sleeping figure of
Columbus. The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to
signify,--as a matter of fact we needn't worry much about what
it signified. It is an allegory, done in white mosquito netting.
That is generally held to be quite enough. Let us go back to
the book--
"After a storm-tossed voyage of three months..."
Wait a bit. Turn on the picture again and toss the caravels
up and down.
"...during which the food supply threatened to fail..."
Put that on the screen, please. Columbus surrounded by
ten sailors, dividing up a potato.
"...the caravels arrived in safety at the beautiful island
of San Salvador. Columbus, bearing the banner of Spain,
stepped first ashore. Surrounded by a wondering crowd of
savages he prostrated himself upon the beach and kissed
the soil of the New World that he had discovered."
All this is so easy that it's too easy. It runs into
pictures of itself. Anybody, accustomed to the movies,
can see Columbus with his banner and the movie savages
hopping up and down around him. Movie savages are gay,
gladsome creatures anyway, and hopping up and down is
their chief mode of expressing themselves. Add to them
a sandy beach, with palm trees waving visibly in the wind
(it is always windy in the movies) and the thing is done.
Just one further picture is needed to complete the film.
"Columbus who returned to Europe to lay at the feet of
the Spanish sovereigns the world he had discovered, fell
presently under the disfavour of the court, and died in
poverty and obscurity, a victim of the ingratitude of
princes."
Last picture. Columbus dying under the poignant
circumstances known only in the movies--a garret
room--ceiling lower than ever--a truckle bed, narrow
enough to kill him if all else failed--Teresa Colombo
his aged mother alone at his bedside--she offers him
medicine in a long spoon--(this shows, if nothing else
would, that the man is ill)--he shakes his head--puts
out his hand and rests it on the little globe--reaches
feebly for his compasses--can't manage it--rolls up his
eyes and fades.
The music plays softly and the inexorable film, like
the reel of life itself, spins on, announcing
At this theatre
All next week
MAGGIE MAY
and
WALTER CURRAN
in
IS IT WORTH IT
And after that I can imagine the audience dispersing,
and the now educated children going off to their homes
and one saying as he enters--
"Gee, I seen a great picture show at school to-day."
"Yes?" says his mother, "and what was it?"
"Oh, it was all about a gink that went round the cabarets
trying to sell an invention what he'd got but nobody
wouldn't look at it till at last one dame gave him three
oyster boats, see? and so he and a lot of other guys
loaded them up and hiked off across the ocean."
"And where did he go to?"
"Africa. And he and the other guys had a great stand in
with the natives and he'd have sold his invention all
right but one old dame got him alone in a hut and poisoned
him and took it off him."
That, I think, is about the way the film would run. When
it is finished I must get President Shurman, or whoever
it was, to come and see it.
4.--Politics from Within
To avoid all error as to the point of view, let me say
in commencing that I am a Liberal Conservative, or, if
you will, a Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of
sympathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour,
and a believer in Progressive Radicalism. I do not desire
office but would take a seat in the Canadian Senate at
five minutes notice.
I believe there are ever so many people of exactly this
way of thinking.
Let me say further than in writing of "politics" I am
only dealing with the lights and shadows that flicker
over the surface, and am not trying to discuss, still
less to decry, the deep and vital issues that lie below.
Yet I will say that vital though the issues may be below
the surface, there is more clap-trap, insincerity and
humbug on the surface of politics than over any equal
area on the face of any institution.
The candidate, as such, is a humbug. The voters, as
voters--not as fathers, brothers or sons--are humbugs.
The committees are humbugs. And the speeches to the extent
of about ninety per cent are pure buncombe. But, oddly
enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accompanies
popular government, we get, after all, pretty good
government--infinitely better than the government of an
autocratic king. Between democracy and despotic kingship
lies all the difference between genial humbug and black
sin.
For the candidate for popular office I have nothing but
sympathy and sorrow. It has been my fortune to walk round
at the heels of half a dozen of them in different little
Canadian towns, watching the candidate try in vain to
brighten up his face at the glad sight of a party voter.
One, in particular, I remember. Nature had meant him to
be a sour man, a hard man, a man with but little joy in
the company of his fellows. Fate had made him a candidate
for the House of Commons. So he was doing his best to
belie his nature.
"Hullo, William!" he would call out as a man passed
driving a horse and buggy, "got the little sorrel out
for a spin, eh?"
Then he would turn to me and say in a low rasping voice--
"There goes about the biggest skunk in this whole
constituency."
A few minutes later he would wave his hand over a little
hedge in friendly salutation to a man working in a garden.
"Hullo, Jasper! That's a fine lot of corn you've got
there."
Jasper replied in a growl. And when we were well past
the house the candidate would say between his teeth--
"That's about the meanest whelp in the riding."
Our conversation all down the street was of that pattern.
"Good morning, Edward! Giving the potatoes a dose of
Paris green, eh?"
And in an undertone--
"I wish to Heaven he'd take a dose of it himself."
And so on from house to house.
I counted up, from one end of the street to the other,
that there were living in it seven skunks, fourteen low
whelps, eight mean hounds and two dirty skinflints. And
all of these merely among the Conservative voters. It
made me wish to be a Liberal. Especially as the Liberal
voters, by the law of the perversity of human affairs,
always seemed to be the finer lot. As they were NOT voting
for our candidate, they were able to meet him in a fair
and friendly way, whereas William and Jasper and Edward
and our "bunch" were always surly and hardly deigned to
give more than a growl in answer to the candidate's
greeting, without even looking up at him.
But a Liberal voter would stop him in the street and
shake hands and say in a frank, cordial way.
"Mr. Grouch, I'm sorry indeed that I can't vote for you,
and I'd like to be able to wish you success, but of course
you know I'm on the other side and always have been and
can't change now."
Whereupon the Candidate would say. "That's all right,
John, I don't expect you to. I can respect a man's
convictions all right, I guess."
So they would part excellent friends, the Candidate saying
as we moved off:
"That man, John Winter, is one of the straightest men in
this whole county."
Then he would add--
"Now we'll just go into this house for a minute. There's
a dirty pup in here that's one of our supporters."
My opinion of our own supporters went lower every day,
and my opinion of the Liberal voters higher, till it so
happened that I went one day to an old friend of mine
who was working on the Liberal side. I asked him how he
liked it.
"Oh, well enough!" he said, "as a sort of game. But in
this constituency you've got all the decent voters; our
voters are the lowest bunch of skunks I ever struck."
Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked sourly at
my friend the Liberal worker.
"Hullo, John!" he called, with a manufactured hilarity,
"got the little mare out for a turn, eh?"
John grunted.
"There's one of them," said my friend, "the lowest pup
in this county, John Winter."
"Come along," said the Candidate to me one morning, "I
want you to meet my committee."
"You'll find them," he said confidingly, as we started
down the street towards the committee rooms, "an awful
bunch of mutts."
"Too bad," I said, "what's wrong with them?"
"Oh, I don't know--they're just a pack of simps. They
don't seem to have any PUNCH in them. The one you'll meet
first is the chairman--he's about the worst dub of the
lot; I never saw a man with so little force in my life.
He's got no magnetism, that's what's wrong with him--no
magnetism."
A few minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to
a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men
in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look.
They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from
smoking free cigars.
"Now I want to introduce you first," said the Candidate,
"to our chairman, Mr. Frog. Mr. Frog is our old battle
horse in this constituency. And this is our campaign
secretary Mr. Bughouse, and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et
cetera."
Those may not have been their names.
It is merely what the names sounded like when one was
looking into their faces.
The Candidate introduced them all as battle horses, battle
axes, battle leaders, standard bearers, flag-holders,
and so forth. If he had introduced them as hat-racks or
cigar holders, it would have been nearer the mark.
Presently the Candidate went out and I was left with the
battle-axes.
"What do you think of our chances?" I asked.
The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious looks.
"Pretty raw deal," said the Chairman, "the Convention
wishing HIM on us." He pointed with his thumb over his
shoulder to indicate the departed Candidate.
"What's wrong with him?" I asked.
Mr. Frog shook his head again.
"No PUNCH," he said.
"None at all," agreed all the battle horses.
"I'll tell you," said the Campaign secretary, Mr. Bughouse,
a voluble man, with wandering eyes--"the trouble is he
has no magnetism, no personal magnetism."
"I see," I said.
"Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the Liberals have
got hold of," continued Mr. Bughouse, "he's full of
MAGNETISM. He appeals."
All the other Committee men nodded.
"That's so," they murmured, "magnetism, Our man hasn't
a darned ounce of it."
"I met Shortis the other night in the street," went on
Mr. Bughouse, "and he said, 'Come on up to my room in
the hotel.' 'Oh,' I said, 'I can't very well.' 'Nonsense,'
he said, 'You're on the other side but what does that
matter?' Well, we went up to his room, and there he had
whiskey, and gin, and lager,--everything. 'Now,' he says,
'name your drink--what is it?' There he was, right in
his room, breaking the law without caring a darn about
it. Well, you know the voters like that kind of thing.
It appeals to them."
"Well," said another of the Committee men,--I think it
was the one called Mr. Dope, "I wouldn't mind that so
much. But the chief trouble about our man, to my mind,
is that he can't speak."
"He can't?" I exclaimed.
All the Committee shook their heads.
"Not for sour apples!" asserted Mr. Dope positively.
"Now, in this riding that won't do. Our people here are
used to first class speaking, they expect it. I suppose
there has been better speaking in this Constituency than
anywhere else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps;
not in the last few elections. But I can remember, and
so can some of the boys here, the election when Sir John
A. spoke here, when the old Mackenzie government went
out."
He looked around at the circle. Several nodded.
"Remember it as well," assented Mr. Mudd, "as if it were
yesterday."
"Well, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "I'll never forget Sir
John A. speaking here in the Odd Fellows' Hall, eh?"
The Committee men nodded and gurgled in corroboration.
"My! but he was PLASTERED. We had him over at Pete
Robinson's hotel all afternoon, and I tell you he was
plastered for fair. We ALL were. I remember I was so
pickled myself I could hardly help Sir John up the steps
of the platform. So were you, Mudd, do you remember?"
"I certainly was!" said Mr. Mudd proudly. Committee men
who would scorn to drink lager beer in 1919, take a great
pride, I have observed, in having been pickled in 1878.
"Yes, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "you certainly were
pickled. I remember just as well as anything, when they
opened the doors and let the crowd in: all the boys had
been bowling up and were pretty well soused. You never
saw such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you remember
the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was pretty well
spifflocated. Well, sir, Sir John A. got up in that hall
and he made the finest, most moving speech I ever listened
to. Do you remember when he called old Trelawney an
ash-barrel? And when he made that appeal for a union of
hearts and said that the sight of McGuire (the Liberal
candidate) made him sick? I tell you those were great
days. You don't get speaking like that now; and you don't
get audiences like that now either. Not the same calibre."
All the Committee shook their heads.
"Well, anyway, boys," said the Chairman, as he lighted
a fresh cigar, "to-morrow will decide, one way or the
other. We've certainly worked hard enough,"--here he
passed the box of cigars round to the others--"I haven't
been in bed before two any night since the work started."
"Neither have I," said another of the workers. "I was
just saying to the wife when I got up this morning that
I begin to feel as if I never wanted to see the sight of
a card again."
"Well, I don't regret the work," said the Secretary, "so
long as we carry the riding. You see," he added in
explanation to me, "we're up against a pretty hard
proposition here. This riding really is Liberal: they've
got the majority of voters though we HAVE once or twice
swung it Conservative. But whether we can carry it with
a man like Grouch is hard to say. One thing is certain,
boys, if he DOES carry it, he doesn't owe it to himself."
All the battle horses agreed on this. A little after that
we dispersed.
And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken and to my
intense surprise the riding was carried by Grouch the
Conservative candidate.
I say, to MY surprise. But apparently not to anybody else.
For it appeared this (was in conversations after the
election) that Grouch was a man of extraordinary magnetism.
He had, so they said, "punch." Shortis, the Liberal, it
seemed, lacked punch absolutely. Even his own supporters
admitted that he had no personality whatever. Some wondered
how he had the nerve to run.
But my own theory of how the election was carried is
quite different.
I feel certain that all the Conservative voters despised
their candidate so much that they voted Liberal. And all
the Liberals voted Conservative.
That carried the riding.
Meantime Grouch left the constituency by the first train
next day for Ottawa. Except for paying taxes on his house,
he will not be back in the town till they dissolve
parliament again.
5.--The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims
In the club to which I belong, in a quiet corner where
the sunlight falls in sideways, there may be seen sitting
of an afternoon my good friend of thirty years' standing,
Mr. Edward Sims. Being somewhat afflicted with gout, he
generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a brass
table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims needs. But
they are few. Wealthy as he is, the needs of Mr. Sims
reach scarcely further than Martini cocktails and Egyptian
cigarettes. Such poor comforts as these, brought by a
deferential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper
at five o'clock, suffice for all his wants. Here sits
Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside,
when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls
him home.
And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his
college days when he was young. The last thirty years of
his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth
a surface that they have been without adventure. It is
the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend
as he sits looking from the window of the club at the
waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in
the winter.
I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen.
And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient
of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the
fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he
belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or
group that exists in his mind under the name of the "old
gang." The same association, or corporate body or whatever
it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the
"old crowd," or more simply and affectionately "the boys."
In the recollection of my good friend this "old gang"
were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work
they wouldn't. Sleep they despised. While indoors they
played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer
in jugs and mugs all round them. All night they were out
of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs
in chorus and jeering at the city police.
Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to
an outsider wearing to the intellect, the "old gang" as
recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that
eclipses everything previous or subsequent. McGregor of
the Class of '85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy
after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting
down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, the football
half-back, went straight from the football field after
a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a
bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in
Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the
college.
Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk of these
early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the
mere material sense, has used him all too kindly. At an
early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation,
Mr. Sims came into money,--not money in the large and
frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care
and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable
inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as
well-established as the Constitution of the United States.
In this brewery, even to-day, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends
a certain part, though no great part, of his time. He is
carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the
sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day
he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and
the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.
There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city
a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts
Mr. Sims's leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in
isolated luxury.
But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the
current of Mr. Sims's life move of themselves.
Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded
in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.
Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now to marry:
but this through no lack of veneration or respect for
the sex. It arises, apparently, from the fact that when
Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty
and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was
such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions
of what might have been. There was, as there always is,
one girl in particular. I have not heard my friend speak
much of her. But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind
of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort
of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims's college.
She was not only beautiful. All the girls remembered by
Mr. Sims were that. But she was in addition "a good head"
and "a good sport," two of the highest qualities that, in
Mr. Sims's view, can crown the female sex. She had, he
said, no "nonsense" about her, by which term Mr. Sims
indicated religion. She drank lager beer, played tennis as
well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a
whole generation in advance of the age.
Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came
within a measurable distance of doing so. A man so prone,
as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration
of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind. Miss
Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect
and a regret.
But the chief peculiarities of the old gang--as they
exist in the mind of Mr. Sims--is the awful fate that
has overwhelmed them. It is not merely that they are
scattered to the four corners of the continent. That
might have been expected. But, apparently, the most awful
moral ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the
abiding belief of Mr. Sims.
"Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?" I ask him
sometimes.
"No," he says, shaking his head quietly. "I understand
he went all to the devil."
"How was that?"
"Booze," says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet finality about
the word that ends all discussion.
"Poor old Curly!" says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another
of his classmates. "I guess he's pretty well down and
out these days."
"What's the trouble?" I say.
Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. It is easier
than moving his head.
"Booze," he says.
Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims's
friends.
"I see," I said one day, "that they have just made Arthur
Stewart a Chief Justice out west."
"Poor old Artie," murmured Mr. Sims. "He'll have a hard
time holding it down. I imagine he's pretty well tanked
up all the time these days."
When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his associates for
a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they
are down and out. It is a form of writing them off. There
is a melancholy satisfaction in it. As the years go by
Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as
the lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest,
brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be "boozed,"
"tanked," "burnt out," "bust-up," and otherwise consumed.
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