Frenzied Fiction

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XII. This Strenuous Age

Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world
in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being
"speeded up." There is "efficiency" in the air. Offices
open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president
has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy
in a glass of peptonized milk than in--something else,
I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel
out of it.

My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after
midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on
porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost
on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep
breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.

This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain,
just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and
humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind.
Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least,
is what it is called now. There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of
it breathed romance. That time is past.

The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low
that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain.
I don't defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if
taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer
coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric
tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.

This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain.
I don't dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere
punk. I know it. I've felt it doing it. They tell me--and
I believe it--that after even one glass of alcohol, or
shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's working
power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful
thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity
for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after
about six glasses the man's working power is reduced by
at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there--in
his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking
rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless
chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his
cigar.

Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is
going it is gone. Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a
winter evening, or a Tom Collins on a summer morning, or
a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein of beer
on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that
we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink
beer and whisky and gin as we used to. But these things,
it appears, interfere with work. They have got to go.

But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_
itself. In my time one hated it. It was viewed as the
natural enemy of man. Now the world has fallen in love
with it. My friends, I find, take their deep breathing
and their porch sleeping because it makes them work
better. They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not
for its own sake, but because they say they can work
better when they get back. I know a man who wears very
loose boots because he can work better in them: and
another who wears only soft shirts because he can work
better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who
would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work
more in it. I know another man who walks away out into
the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country
--he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but
he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear
as a bell for work on Monday.

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder
if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person
left who hates it?

Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that
the lunch I like best--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch,
not a party--is a beef steak about one foot square and
two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I can't, but I
can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to
ask, twenty-five years ago.

Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously
about the meagre lunch they eat. One tells me that he
finds a glass of milk and a prune is quite as much as he
cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit and a
glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One
lunches on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the
yolk. I have only two friends left who can eat a whole
egg at a time.

I understand that the fear of these men is that if they
eat more than an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy
after lunch. Why they object to feeling heavy, I do not
know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing better than
to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy
friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that
is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.

Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There
has spread abroad along with the so-called physical
efficiency a perfect passion for _information_. Somehow
if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell,
and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers
all though, instead of only reading the headings. He
clamours for articles filled with statistics about
illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.

I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the
new _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_
the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a
glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopaedia.
They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other
men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great)
and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents
since Washington (or was it Washington?).

Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a
cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go
to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive
sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But,
for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it.
I am left behind.

Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition,
and the female franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic
marriage, together with proportional representation, the
initiative and the referendum, and the duty of the citizen
to take an intelligent interest in politics--and I admit
that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.

But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that
down in Hayti things are very different. Bull fights,
cock fights, dog fights, are openly permitted. Business
never begins till eleven in the morning. Everybody sleeps
after lunch, and the bars remain open all night. Marriage
is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition
of morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it
has been anywhere since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.

XIII. The Old, Old Story of How Five Men Went Fishing

This is a plain account of a fishing party. It is not a
story. There is no plot. Nothing happens in it and nobody
is hurt. The only point of this narrative is its peculiar
truth. It not only tells what happened to us--the five
people concerned in it--but what has happened and is
happening to all the other fishing parties that at the
season of the year, from Halifax to Idaho, go gliding
out on the unruffled surface of our Canadian and American
lakes in the still cool of early summer morning.

We decided to go in the early morning because there is
a popular belief that the early morning is the right time
for bass fishing. The bass is said to bite in the early
morning. Perhaps it does. In fact the thing is almost
capable of scientific proof. The bass does _not_ bite
between eight and twelve. It does _not_ bite between
twelve and six in the afternoon. Nor does it bite between
six o'clock and midnight. All these things are known
facts. The inference is that the bass bites furiously at
about daybreak.

At any rate our party were unanimous about starting early.
"Better make an early start," said the Colonel, when the
idea of the party was suggested. "Oh, yes," said George
Popley, the bank manager, "we want to get right out on
the shoal while the fish are biting."

When he said this all our eyes glistened. Everybody's
do. There's a thrill in the words. To "get right out on
the shoal at daybreak when the fish are biting," is an
idea that goes to any man's brain.

If you listen to the men talking in a Pullman car, or an
hotel corridor, or, better still, at the little tables
in a first-class bar, you will not listen long before
you hear one say: "Well, we got out early, just after
sunrise, right on the shoal." And presently, even if you
can't hear him, you will see him reach out his two hands
and hold them about two feet apart for the other man to
admire. He is measuring the fish. No, not the fish they
caught; this was the big one that they lost. But they
had him right up to the top of the water. Oh, yes, he
was up to the top of the water all right. The number of
huge fish that have been heaved up to the top of the
water in our lakes is almost incredible. Or at least it
used to be when we still had bar rooms and little tables
for serving that vile stuff Scotch whisky and such foul
things as gin Rickeys and John Collinses. It makes one
sick to think of it, doesn't it? But there was good
fishing in the bars, all the winter.

But, as I say, we decided to go early in the morning.
Charlie Jones, the railroad man, said that he remembered
how when he was a boy, up in Wisconsin, they used to get
out at five in the morning--not get up at five but be on
the shoal at five. It appears that there is a shoal
somewhere in Wisconsin where the bass lie in thousands.
Kernin, the lawyer, said that when he was a boy--this
was on Lake Rosseau--they used to get out at four. It
seems there is a shoal in Lake Rosseau where you can haul
up the bass as fast as you can drop your line. The shoal
is hard to find--very hard. Kernin can find it, but it
is doubtful--so I gather--if any other living man can.
The Wisconsin shoal, too, is very difficult to find. Once
you find it, you are all right; but it's hard to find.
Charlie Jones can find it. If you were in Wisconsin right
now he'd take you straight to it, but probably no other
person now alive could reach that shoal. In the same way
Colonel Morse knows of a shoal in Lake Simcoe where he
used to fish years and years ago and which, I understand,
he can still find.

I have mentioned that Kernin is a lawyer, and Jones a
railroad man and Popley a banker. But I needn't have.
Any reader would take it for granted. In any fishing
party there is always a lawyer. You can tell him at sight.
He is the one of the party that has a landing net and a
steel rod in sections with a wheel that is used to wind
the fish to the top of the water.

And there is always a banker. You can tell him by his
good clothes. Popley, in the bank, wears his banking
suit. When he goes fishing he wears his fishing suit. It
is much the better of the two, because his banking suit
has ink marks on it, and his fishing suit has no fish
marks on it.

As for the railroad man--quite so, the reader knows it
as well as I do--you can tell him because he carries a
pole that he cut in the bush himself, with a ten-cent
line wrapped round the end of it. Jones says he can catch
as many fish with this kind of line as Kernin can with
his patent rod and wheel. So he can too. Just the same
number.

But Kernin says that with his patent apparatus if you
get a fish on you can _play_ him. Jones says to Hades
with _playing_ him: give him a fish on his line and he'll
haul him in all right. Kernin says he'd lose him. But
Jones says _he_ wouldn't. In fact he _guarantees_ to haul
the fish in. Kernin says that more than once--in Lake
Rosseau--he has played a fish for over half an hour. I
forget now why he stopped; I think the fish quit playing.

I have heard Kernin and Jones argue this question of
their two rods, as to which rod can best pull in the
fish, for half an hour. Others may have heard the same
question debated. I know no way by which it could be
settled.

Our arrangement to go fishing was made at the little golf
club of our summer town on the veranda where we sit in
the evening. Oh, it's just a little place, nothing
pretentious: the links are not much good for _golf_; in
fact we don't play much _golf_ there, so far as golf
goes, and of course, we don't serve meals at the club,
it's not like that--and no, we've nothing to drink there
because of prohibition. But we go and _sit_ there. It is
a good place to _sit_, and, after all, what else can you
do in the present state of the law?

So it was there that we arranged the party.

The thing somehow seemed to fall into the mood of each
of us. Jones said he had been hoping that some of the
boys would get up a fishing party. It was apparently the
one kind of pleasure that he really cared for. For myself
I was delighted to get in with a crowd of regular fishermen
like these four, especially as I hadn't been out fishing
for nearly ten years, though fishing is a thing I am
passionately fond of. I know no pleasure in life like
the sensation of getting a four-pound bass on the hook
and hauling him up to the top of the water, to weigh him.
But, as I say, I hadn't been out for ten years. Oh, yes,
I live right beside the water every summer, and yes,
certainly--I am saying so--I am passionately fond of
fishing, but still somehow I hadn't been _out_. Every
fisherman knows just how that happens. The years have a
way of slipping by. Yet I must say I was surprised to
find that so keen a sport as Jones hadn't been out--so
it presently appeared--for eight years. I had imagined
he practically lived on the water. And Colonel Morse and
Kernin, I was amazed to find, hadn't been out for twelve
years, not since the day--so it came out in conversation
--when they went out together in Lake Rosseau and Kernin
landed a perfect monster, a regular corker, five pounds
and a half, they said; or no, I don't think he _landed_
him. No, I remember, he didn't _land_ him. He caught
him--and he _could_ have landed him, he should have landed
him--but he _didn't_ land him. That was it. Yes, I
remember Kernin and Morse had a slight discussion about
it--oh, perfectly amicable--as to whether Morse had
fumbled with the net or whether Kernin--the whole argument
was perfectly friendly--had made an ass of himself by
not "striking" soon enough. Of course the whole thing
was so long ago that both of them could look back on it
without any bitterness or ill nature. In fact it amused
them. Kernin said it was the most laughable thing he ever
saw in his life to see poor old Jack--that's Morse's
name--shoving away with the landing net wrong side up.
And Morse said he'd never forget seeing poor old Kernin
yanking his line first this way and then that and not
knowing where to try to haul it. It made him laugh to
look back at it.

They might have gone on laughing for quite a time, but
Charlie Jones interrupted by saying that in his opinion
a landing net is a piece of darned foolishness. Here
Popley agrees with him. Kernin objects that if you don't
use a net you'll lose your fish at the side of the boat.
Jones says no: give him a hook well through the fish and
a stout line in his hand and that fish has _got_ to come
in. Popley says so too. He says let him have his hook
fast through the fish's head with a short stout line,
and put him (Popley) at the other end of that line and
that fish will come in. It's _got_ to. Otherwise Popley
will know why. That's the alternative. Either the fish
must come in or Popley must know why. There's no escape
from the logic of it.

But perhaps some of my readers have heard the thing
discussed before.

So, as I say, we decided to go the next morning and to
make an early start. All of the boys were at one about
that. When I say "boys," I use the word, as it is used
in fishing, to mean people from say forty-five to
sixty-five. There is something about fishing that keeps
men young. If a fellow gets out for a good morning's
fishing, forgetting all business worries, once in a
while--say, once in ten years--it keeps him fresh.

We agreed to go in a launch, a large launch--to be exact,
the largest in the town. We could have gone in row boats,
but a row boat is a poor thing to fish from. Kernin said
that in a row boat it is impossible properly to "_play_"
your fish. The side of the boat is so low that the fish
is apt to leap over the side into the boat when half
"played." Popley said that there is no comfort in a row
boat. In a launch a man can reach out his feet and take
it easy. Charlie Jones said that in a launch a man could
rest his back against something, and Morse said that in
a launch a man could rest his neck. Young inexperienced
boys, in the small sense of the word, never think of
these things. So they go out and after a few hours their
necks get tired; whereas a group of expert fishers in a
launch can rest their backs and necks and even fall asleep
during the pauses when the fish stop biting.

Anyway all the "boys" agreed that the great advantage of
a launch would be that we could get a _man_ to take us.
By that means the man could see to getting the worms,
and the man would be sure to have spare lines, and the
man could come along to our different places--we were
all beside the water--and pick us up. In fact the more
we thought about the advantage of having a "man" to take
us the better we liked it. As a boy gets old he likes to
have a man around to do the work.

Anyway Frank Rolls, the man we decided to get, not only
has the biggest launch in town but what is more Frank
_knows_ the lake. We called him up at his boat-house over
the phone and said we'd give him five dollars to take us
out first thing in the morning provided that he knew the
shoal. He said he knew it.

I don't know, to be quite candid about it, who mentioned
whisky first. In these days everybody has to be a little
careful. I imagine we had all been _thinking_ whisky for
some time before anybody said it. But there is a sort of
convention that when men go fishing they must have whisky.
Each man makes the pretence that one thing he needs at
six o'clock in the morning is cold raw whisky. It is
spoken of in terms of affection. One man says the first
thing you need if you're going fishing is a good "snort"
of whisky; another says that a good "snifter" is the very
thing; and the others agree that no man can fish properly
without "a horn," or a "bracer" or an "eye-opener." Each
man really decides that he himself won't take any. But
he feels that, in a collective sense, the "boys" need it.

So it was with us. The Colonel said he'd bring along "a
bottle of booze." Popley said, no, let _him_ bring it;
Kernin said let him; and Charlie Jones said no, he'd
bring it. It turned out that the Colonel had some very
good Scotch at his house that he'd like to bring; oddly
enough Popley had some good Scotch in _his_ house too;
and, queer though it is, each of the boys had Scotch in
his house. When the discussion closed we knew that each
of the five of us was intending to bring a bottle of
whisky. Each of the five of us expected the other to
drink one and a quarter bottles in the course of the
morning.

I suppose we must have talked on that veranda till long
after one in the morning. It was probably nearer two than
one when we broke up. But we agreed that that made no
difference. Popley said that for him three hours' sleep,
the right kind of sleep, was far more refreshing than
ten. Kernin said that a lawyer learns to snatch his sleep
when he can, and Jones said that in railroad work a man
pretty well cuts out sleep.

So we had no alarms whatever about not being ready by
five. Our plan was simplicity itself. Men like ourselves
in responsible positions learn to organize things easily.
In fact Popley says it is that faculty that has put us
where we are. So the plan simply was that Frank Rolls
should come along at five o'clock and blow his whistle
in front of our places, and at that signal each man would
come down to his wharf with his rod and kit and so we'd
be off to the shoal without a moment's delay.

The weather we ruled out. It was decided that even if it
rained that made no difference. Kernin said that fish
bite better in the rain. And everybody agreed that man
with a couple of snorts in him need have no fear of a
little rain water.

So we parted, all keen on the enterprise. Nor do I think
even now that there was anything faulty or imperfect in
that party as we planned it.

I heard Frank Rolls blowing his infernal whistle opposite
my summer cottage at some ghastly hour in the morning.
Even without getting out of bed, I could see from the
window that it was no day for fishing. No, not raining
exactly. I don't mean that, but one of those peculiar
days--I don't mean _wind_--there was no wind, but a sort
of feeling in the air that showed anybody who understands
bass fishing that it was a perfectly rotten day for going
out. The fish, I seemed to know it, wouldn't bite.

When I was still fretting over the annoyance of the
disappointment I heard Frank Rolls blowing his whistle
in front of the other cottages. I counted thirty whistles
altogether. Then I fell into a light doze--not exactly
sleep, but a sort of _doze_--I can find no other word
for it. It was clear to me that the other "boys" had
thrown the thing over. There was no use in my trying to
go out alone. I stayed where I was, my doze lasting till
ten o'clock.

When I walked up town later in the morning I couldn't
help being struck by the signs in the butcher's shops
and the restaurants, FISH, FRESH FISH, FRESH LAKE FISH.

Where in blazes do they get those fish anyway?

XIV. Back from the Land

I have just come back now with the closing in of autumn
--to the city. I have hung up my hoe in my study; my
spade is put away behind the piano. I have with me seven
pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody who wants
it may have it. I didn't like to bury it for fear of its
poisoning the ground. I didn't like to throw it away for
fear of its destroying cattle. I was afraid to leave it
in my summer place for fear that it might poison the
tramps who generally break in in November. I have it with
me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my
back upon it. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.

I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross
or to anything else, ten packets of radish seed (the
early curled variety, I think), fifteen packets of cucumber
seed (the long succulent variety, I believe it says),
and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers,
distinguished, I understand, for its edible flavour and
its nutritious properties). It is not likely that I shall
ever, on this side of the grave, plant onion seed again.
All these things I have with me. My vegetables are to
come after me by freight. They are booked from Simcoe
County to Montreal; at present they are, I believe,
passing through Schenectady. But they will arrive later
all right. They were seen going through Detroit last
week, moving west. It is the first time that I ever sent
anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before
the wonderful organization of the railroads. But they
tell me that there is a bad congestion of freight down
South this month. If my vegetables get tangled up in that
there is no telling when they will arrive.

In other words, I am one of the legion of men--quiet,
determined, resolute men--who went out last spring to
plant the land, and who are now back.

With me--and I am sure that I speak for all the others
as well--it was not a question of mere pleasure; it was
no love of gardening for its own sake that inspired us.
It was a plain national duty. What we said to ourselves
was: "This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches
thus far have failed to stop it. Now let _us_ try. The
whole thing," we argued, "is a plain matter of food
production."

"If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve.
Very good. Let us kill them."

I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set
of men went out from the cities than those who went out
last May, as I did, to conquer the food problem. I don't
mean to say that each and every one of us actually left
the city. But we all "went forth" in the metaphorical
sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others
took vacant lots; some went out into the suburbs; and
others, like myself, went right out into the country.

We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green,
his hoe and the rest of his radish seed.

The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement
of our experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed.
We have been beaten hack all along the line. Our potatoes
are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes
stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last
seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of
August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked
as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was
nine feet high with a tall feathery spike on top of that,
but no sign of anything eatable about it from top to
bottom.

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