Frenzied Fiction

S >> Stephen Leacock >> Frenzied Fiction

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I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early
days in April when we were all buying hoes, and talking
soil and waiting for the snow to be off the ground. The
street cars, as we went up and down to our offices, were
a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of farmer-like
geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers.
Every man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in
their offices, and kept looking out of windows to pretend
to themselves that they were afraid it might blow up
rain. "Got your tomatoes in?" one man would ask another
as they went up in the elevator. "Yes, I got mine in
yesterday," the other would answer, "But I'm just a little
afraid that this east wind may blow up a little frost.
What we need now is growing weather." And the two men
would drift off together from the elevator door along
the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.

I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul.
There is one who lives next door to me to whom I have
not spoken in five years. Yet when I saw him one day last
spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of old trousers
with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the
other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that
stock-brokers were mere sordid calculating machines. Now
that I have seen whole firms of them busy at the hoe,
wearing old trousers that reached to their armpits and
were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I
know that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts
beating behind those trousers.

Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come
from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had
them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of
ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of
pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him,
just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk
of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing
power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is
estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were
mobilized in Montreal in one week.

But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or
deliberate preparedness. It was rather an illustration
of the primitive instinct that is in all of us and that
will out in "war time." Any man worth the name would wear
old breeches all the time if the world would let him.
Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in
preference to wearing patent braces. The makers of the
ties know this. That is why they make the tie four feet
long. And in the same way if any manufacturer of hats
will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp rim
and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat
guaranteed to be six years old, well weathered, well
rained on, and certified to have been walked over by a
herd of cattle--that man will make and deserve a fortune.

These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where
are they now? The men that wore them have relapsed again
into tailor-made tweeds. They have put on hard new hats.
They are shining their boots again. They are shaving
again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They
are sinking back into civilization.

Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger
on them. Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery
of the morning. My neighbour on the right was always up
at five. My neighbour on the left was out and about by
four. With the earliest light of day, little columns of
smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where
our wives were making coffee for us before the servants
got up. By six o'clock the street was alive and busy with
friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer,
a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to appreciate the
early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live
through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going
to his nine o'clock office.

"How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?" I
asked of one of my neighbours during this glad period of
early spring before I left for the country. "Time!" he
exclaimed. "Why, my dear fellow, I don't have to be down
at the warehouse till eight-thirty."

Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked
with weeds. "Your garden," I said, "is in poor shape."
"Garden!" he said indignantly. "How on earth can I find
time for a garden? Do you realize that I have to be down
at the warehouse at eight-thirty?"

When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure
seems hard indeed to understand. It is only when I survey
the whole garden movement in melancholy retrospect that
I am able to see some of the reasons for it.

The principal one, I think, is the question of the season.
It appears that the right time to begin gardening is last
year. For many things it is well to begin the year before
last. For good results one must begin even sooner. Here,
for example, are the directions, as I interpret them,
for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece
of ground, preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen,
go out three years ago and plough or dig deeply. Remain
a year inactive, thinking. Two years ago pulverize the
soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last year comes
set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing
nothing. The asparagus will then be ready to work at
_this_ year.

This is the rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were
men of sufficient means to spend several years in quiet
thought waiting to begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems,
the only way to begin. Asparagus demands a preparation
of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries requires
three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans,
and lettuce the instructions inevitably read, "plough
the soil deeply in the preceeding autumn." This sets up
a dilemma. _Which_ is the preceeding autumn? If a man
begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last
autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he
begins in the autumn he is again too late; he has missed
this summer's crop. It is, therefore, ridiculous to begin
in the autumn and impossible to begin in the spring.

This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from
the question of the soil itself. All the books and
instructions insist that the selection of the soil is
the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is.
But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before
he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books
lay stress on the need of "a deep, friable loam full of
nitrogen." This I have never seen. My own plot of land
I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I
could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence
of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting
now in all humility of mind that I don't know what loam
is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and I all talked
freely of the desirability of "a loam." My own opinion
is that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than
I had. Speaking from experience, I should say that the
only soils are earth, mud and dirt. There are no others.

But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly
forced to disregard it. Perhaps a more fruitful source
of failure even than the lack of loam was the attempt to
apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus, if
one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how
many cabbages will grow in ten square feet of ground?
Ten? Not at all. The answer is _one_. You will find as
a matter of practical experience that however many cabbages
you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ that
will really grow. This you will presently come to speak
of as _the _cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the
caterpillars finally finish their existence) will look
but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage will be a source
of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact
it would ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage,
such as you buy for ten cents at any market, were it not
that you inevitably cut it and eat it when it is still
only half-grown.

This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent
size, and to the one tomato that shows signs of turning
red (it is really a feeble green-pink), and to the only
melon that might have lived to ripen. They get eaten. No
one but a practised professional gardener can live and
sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage
two-thirds grown without going out and tearing it off
the stem.

Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while
you can. The most peculiar thing about gardening is that
all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes
change over night from delicate young shoots not large
enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet
high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take
your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not
ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed
into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only
really green for about two hours. Before that they are
young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are
the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate
little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to
old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.

If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of
the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain
day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go
out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they
could grow no more.

But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I
knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young
engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of
the city as the scene of their summer operations. They
took their coats off and applied college methods. They
ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it
lateral spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took
side angles with a theodolite so as to get the edges of
each of the separate plots of their land absolutely
correct. I saw them working at it all through one Saturday
afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the
peculiar ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He
never--so they agreed--uses his head. He never--I think
I have their phrase correct--stops to think. In laying
out his ground for use, it never occurs to him to try to
get the maximum result from a given space. If a farmer
would only realize that the contents of a circle represent
the maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter,
and that a circle is merely a function of its own radius,
what a lot of time he would save.

These young men that I speak of laid out their field
engineer-fashion with little white posts at even distances.
They made a blueprint of the whole thing as they planted
it. Every corner of it was charted out. The yield was
calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact
that some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing
what they called "a coefficient of error." By means of
this and by reducing the variation of autumn prices to
a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already in
the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within
half a bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of
half a bushel per fifty acres), but they knew beforehand
within a few cents the market value that they would
receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply
amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could
produce so much. Yet there were the plain facts in front
of one, calculated out. The thing amounted practically
to a revolution in farming. At least it ought to have.
And it would have if those young men had come again to
hoe their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately,
that they were busy. To their great regret they were too
busy to come. They had been working under a free-and-easy
arrangement. Each man was to give what time he could
every Saturday. It was left to every man's honour to do
what he could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted
the others to be there. In fact the thing was not only
an experiment in food production, it was also a new
departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that
those young men worked there were, so I have been told,
seventy-five of them driving in white stakes and running
lines. The next Saturday there were fifteen of them
planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week after
that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence
fell upon the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of
the chick-a-dee and the choo-choo feeding on the waving
heads of the thistles.

But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of
failing at food production. There are ever so many more.
What amazes me, in returning to the city, is to find the
enormous quantities of produce of all sorts offered for
sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring,
by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of
this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic
man would simply take a large basket and go to the market
every day and buy all that he could carry away there need
be no further fear of a food famine.

And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They
are in a soap box with bars across the top, coming by
freight. They weigh forty-six pounds, including the box.
They represent the result of four months' arduous toil
in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that
I shall be able to feed with them some poor family of
refugees during the rigour of the winter. Either that or
give them to the hens. I certainly won't eat the rotten
things myself.

XV. The Perplexity Column as Done by the Jaded Journalist

INSTANTANEOUS ANSWERS TO ALL QUESTIONS

(All questions written out legibly with the name and
address of the sender and accompanied by one dollar,
answered immediately and without charge.)

Harvard Student asks:

Can you tell me the date at which, or on which, Oliver
Cromwell's father died?

Answer: No, I can't.

Student of Mathematics asks:

Will you kindly settle a matter involving a wager between
myself and a friend? A. bet B. that a pedestrian in
walking downhill over a given space and alternately
stepping with either foot, covers more ground than a man
coasting over the same road on a bicycle. Which of us
wins?

Answer: I don't understand the question, and I don't know
which of you is A.

Chess-player asks:

Is the Knight's gambit recognized now as a permissible
opening in chess?

Answer: I don't play chess.

Reuben Boob asks:

For some time past I have been calling upon a young lady
friend at her house evenings and going out with her to
friends' nights. I should like to know if it would be
all right to ask to take her alone with me to the theatre?

Answer: Certainly not. This column is very strict about
these things. Not alone. Not for a moment. It is better
taste to bring your father with you.

Auction asks:

In playing bridge please tell me whether the third or
the second player ought to discard from weakness on a
long suit when trumps have been twice round and the lead
is with dummy.

Answer: Certainly.

Lady of Society asks:

Can you tell me whether the widow of a marquis is entitled
to go in to dinner before the eldest daughter of an earl?

Answer: Ha! ha! This is a thing we know--something that
we _do_ know. You put your foot in it when you asked us
that. We have _lived_ this sort of thing too long ever
to make any error. The widow of a marquis, whom you should
by rights call a marchioness dowager (but we overlook
it--you meant no harm) is entitled (in any hotel that we
know or frequent) to go in to dinner whenever, and as
often, as she likes. On a dining-car the rule is the
other way.

Vassar Girl asks:

What is the date of the birth of Caracalla?

Answer: I couldn't say.

Lexicographer asks:

Can you tell me the proper way to spell "dog"?

Answer: Certainly. "Dog" should be spelt, properly and
precisely, "dog." When it is used in the sense to mean
not "_a_ dog" or "_one_ dog" but two or more dogs--in
other words what we grammarians are accustomed to call
the plural--it is proper to add to it the diphthong, _s_,
pronounced with a hiss like _z_ in soup.

But for all these questions of spelling your best plan
is to buy a copy of Our Standard Dictionary, published
in ten volumes, by this newspaper, at forty dollars.

Ignoramus asks:

Can you tell me how to spell "cat"?

Answer: Didn't you hear what we just said about how to
spell "dog"? Buy the Dictionary.

Careworn Mother asks:

I am most anxious to find out the relation of the earth's
diameter to its circumference. Can you, or any of your
readers, assist me in it?

Answer: The earth's circumference is estimated to be
three decimal one four one five nine of its diameter, a
fixed relation indicated by the Greek letter _pi_. If
you like we will tell you what _pi_ is. Shall we?

"Brink of Suicide" writes:

Can you, will you, tell me what is the Sanjak of
Novi Bazar?

Answer. The Sanjak of Novi Bazar is bounded on the north
by its northern frontier, cold and cheerless, and covered
during the winter with deep snow. The east of the Sanjak
occupies a more easterly position. Here the sun rises--at
first slowly, but gathering speed as it goes. After having
traversed the entire width of the whole Sanjak, the
magnificent orb, slowly and regretfully, sinks into the
west. On the south, where the soil is more fertile and
where the land begins to be worth occupying, the Sanjak
is, or will be, bounded by the British Empire.

XVI. Simple Stories of Success, or How to Succeed in Life

Let me begin with a sort of parable. Many years ago when
I was on the staff of a great public school, we engaged
a new swimming master.

He was the most successful man in that capacity that we
had had for years.

Then one day it was discovered that he couldn't swim.

He was standing at the edge of the swimming tank explaining
the breast stroke to the boys in the water.

He lost his balance and fell in. He was drowned.

Or no, he wasn't drowned, I remember,--he was rescued by
some of the pupils whom he had taught to swim.

After he was resuscitated by the boys--it was one of the
things he had taught them--the school dismissed him.

Then some of the boys who were sorry for him taught him
how to swim, and he got a new job as a swimming master
in another place.

But this time he was an utter failure. He swam well, but
they said he couldn't _teach_.

So his friends looked about to get him a new job. This
was just at the time when the bicycle craze came in. They
soon found the man a position as an instructor in bicycle
riding. As he had never been on a bicycle in his life,
he made an admirable teacher. He stood fast on the ground
and said, "Now then, all you need is confidence."

Then one day he got afraid that he might be found out.
So he went out to a quiet place and got on a bicycle, at
the top of a slope, to learn to ride it. The bicycle ran
away with him. But for the skill and daring of one of
his pupils, who saw him and rode after him, he would have
been killed.

This story, as the reader sees, is endless. Suffice it
to say that the man I speak of is now in an aviation
school teaching people to fly. They say he is one of the
best aviators that ever walked.

According to all the legends and story books, the principal
factor in success is perseverance. Personally, I think
there is nothing in it. If anything, the truth lies the
other way.

There is an old motto that runs, "If at first you don't
succeed, try, try again." This is nonsense. It ought to
read, "If at first you don't succeed, quit, quit, at
once."

If you can't do a thing, more or less, the first time
you try, you will never do it. Try something else while
there is yet time.

Let me illustrate this with a story.

I remember, long years ago, at a little school that I
attended in the country, we had a schoolmaster, who used
perpetually to write on the blackboard, in a copperplate
hand, the motto that I have just quoted:

"If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try, again."

He wore plain clothes and had a hard, determined face.
He was studying for some sort of preliminary medical
examination, and was saving money for a medical course.
Every now and then he went away to the city and tried
the examination: and he always failed. Each time he came
back, he would write up on the blackboard:

"Try, try again."

And always he looked grimmer and more determined than
before. The strange thing was that, with all his industry
and determination, he would break out every now and then
into drunkenness, and lie round the tavern at the
crossroads, and the school would be shut for two days.
Then he came back, more fiercely resolute than ever. Even
children could see that the man's life was a fight. It
was like the battle between Good and Evil in Milton's
epics.

Well, after he had tried it four times, the schoolmaster
at last passed the examination; and he went away to the
city in a suit of store clothes, with eight hundred
dollars that he had saved up, to study medicine. Now it
happened that he had a brother who was not a bit like
himself, but was a sort of ne'er-do-well, always hard-up
and sponging on other people, and never working.

And when the schoolmaster came to the city and his brother
knew that he had eight hundred dollars, he came to him
and got him drinking and persuaded him to hand over the
eight hundred dollars and to let him put it into the
Louisiana State lottery. In those days the Louisiana
Lottery had not yet been forbidden the use of the mails,
and you could buy a ticket for anything from one dollar
up. The Grand Prize was two hundred thousand dollars,
and the Seconds were a hundred thousand each.

So the brother persuaded the schoolmaster to put the
money in. He said he had a system for buying only the
tickets with prime numbers, that won't divide by anything,
and that it must win. He said it was a mathematical
certainty, and he figured it out with the schoolmaster
in the back room of a saloon, with a box of dominoes on
the table to show the plan of it. He told the schoolmaster
that he himself would only take ten per cent of what they
made, as a commission for showing the system, and the
schoolmaster could have the rest.

So, in a mad moment, the schoolmaster handed over his
roll of money, and that was the last he ever saw of it.

The next morning when he was up he was fierce with rage
and remorse for what he had done. He could not go back
to the school, and he had no money to go forward. So he
stayed where he was in the little hotel where he had got
drunk, and went on drinking. He looked so fierce and
unkempt that in the hotel they were afraid of him, and
the bar-tenders watched him out of the corners of their
eyes wondering what he would do; because they knew that
there was only one end possible, and they waited for it
to come. And presently it came. One of the bar-tenders
went up to the schoolmaster's room to bring up a letter,
and he found him lying on the bed with his face grey as
ashes, and his eyes looking up at the ceiling. He was
stone dead. Life had beaten him.

And the strange thing was that the letter that the
bartender carried up that morning was from the management
of the Louisiana Lottery. It contained a draft on New
York, signed by the treasurer of the State of Louisiana,
for two hundred thousand dollars. The schoolmaster had
won the Grand Prize.

The above story, I am afraid, is a little gloomy. I put
it down merely for the moral it contained, and I became
so absorbed in telling it that I almost forgot what the
moral was that it was meant to convey. But I think the
idea is that if the schoolmaster had long before abandoned
the study of medicine, for which he was not fitted, and
gone in, let us say, for playing the banjo, he might have
become end-man in a minstrel show. Yes, that was it.

Let me pass on to other elements in success.

I suppose that anybody will admit that the peculiar
quality that is called initiative--the ability to act
promptly on one's own judgement--is a factor of the
highest importance.

I have seen this illustrated two or three times in a very
striking fashion.

I knew, in Toronto--it is long years ago--a singularly
bright young man whose name was Robinson. He had had some
training in the iron and steel business, and when I knew
him was on the look out for an opening.

I met him one day in a great hurry, with a valise in his
hand.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Over to England," he said. "There is a firm in Liverpool
that have advertised that they want an agent here, and
I'm going over to apply for the job."

"Can't you do it by letter?" I asked.

"That's just it," said Robinson, with a chuckle, "all
the other men will apply by letter. I'll go right over
myself and get there as soon or sooner than the letters.
I'll be the man on the spot, and I'll get the job."

He was quite right. He went over to Liverpool, and was
back in a fortnight with English clothes and a big salary.

But I cannot recommend his story to my friends. In fact,
it should not be told too freely. It is apt to be dangerous.

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