The Hohenzollerns in America<br />With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and Other Impossibilities by Stephen Leacock (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📖
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- Author: Stephen Leacock
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"Oh, how do you do?" he said. "I say, I've just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn't it?"
In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How do these silly asses do it?
When Dressed Hogs are Dull
An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.
The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to my mind the head-line of the market reports in the newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull."
The other party to the conversation is a winsome and agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.
But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z—— would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine." A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With the picture was the rhyming legend,
There was a Lady in love with a swine, "Honey," said she, "will you be mine? I'll build you a silver sty And in it you shall lie." "Honk!" said He.There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing, and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the swine.
In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and monosyllabic "honk" from the hog.
Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his tessellated sty,—the tessellated sty being represented by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room. His face is just the same as the face of the pig in the picture-book. The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, is beside him.
"Oh, Mr. Grunt," she is saying, "how interesting it must be to be in your place and feel such tremendous power. Our hostess was just telling me that you own practically all the shoemaking machinery factories—it IS shoe-making machinery, isn't it?—east of Pennsylvania."
"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.
"Shoe-making machinery," goes on the willowy lady (she really knows nothing and cares less about it) "must be absolutely fascinating, is it not?"
"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.
"But still you must find it sometimes a dreadful strain, do you not? I mean, so much brain work, and that sort of thing."
"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt.
"I should love so much to see one of your factories. They must be so interesting."
"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. Then he turns and moves away sideways. Into his little piggy eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask him to subscribe to something, or wants a block of his common stock, or his name on a board of directors. So he leaves her. Yet if he had known it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and hasn't the faintest interest in his factories, and never intends to go near one. Only she is fit to move and converse in polite society and Mr. Grunt is not.
2.—Heroes and Heroines
"What are you reading?" I asked the other day of a blue-eyed boy of ten curled up among the sofa cushions.
He held out the book for me to see.
"Dauntless Ned among the Cannibals," he answered.
"Is it exciting?" I enquired.
"Not very," said the child in a matter-of-fact tone. "But it's not bad."
I took the book from him and read aloud at the opened page.
"In a compact mass the gigantic savages rushed upon our hero, shrieking with rage and brandishing their huge clubs. Ned stood his ground fearlessly, his back to a banana tree. With a sweep of his cutlass he severed the head of the leading savage from his body, while with a back stroke of his dirk he stabbed another to the heart. But resistance against such odds was vain. By sheer weight of numbers, Ned was borne to the ground. His arms were then pinioned with stout ropes made of the fibres of the boobooda tree. With shrieks of exultation the savages dragged our hero to an opening in the woods where a huge fire was burning, over which was suspended an enormous caldron of bubbling oil. 'Boil him, boil him,' yelled the savages, now wrought to the point of frenzy."
"That seems fairly exciting, isn't it?" I said.
"Oh, he won't get boiled," said the little boy. "He's the hero."
So I knew that the child has already taken his first steps in the disillusionment of fiction.
Of course he was quite right as to Ned. This wonderful youth, the hero with whom we all begin an acquaintance with books, passes unhurt through a thousand perils. Cannibals, Apache Indians, war, battles, shipwrecks, leave him quite unscathed. At the most Ned gets a flesh wound which is healed, in exactly one paragraph, by that wonderful drug called a "simple."
But the most amazing thing about this particular hero, the boy Ned, is the way in which he turns up in all the great battles and leading events of the world.
It was Ned, for example, who at the critical moment at Gettysburg turned in his saddle to General Meade and said quietly, "General, the day is ours." "If it is," answered Meade, as he folded his field glass, "you alone, Ned, have saved it."
In the same way Ned was present at the crossing of the Delaware with Washington. Thus:—
"'What do you see, Ned?' said Washington, as they peered from the leading boat into the driving snow.
"'Ice,' said Ned. 'My boy,' said the Great American General, and a tear froze upon his face as he spoke, 'you have saved us all.'"
Here is Ned at Runningmede when King John with his pen in hand was about to sign the Magna Carta.
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