A House-Boat on the Styx Part 6

"Most poets prefer to rub out the right word," growled Confucius.

"Besides, I shall never consent to slates in this house-boat. The squeaking of the pencils would be worse than the poems themselves."

"That's true," said Ca.s.sius. "I never thought of that. If a dozen poets got to work on those slates at once, a fife corps wouldn't be a circ.u.mstance to them."

"Well, it all goes to prove what I have thought all along," said Doctor Johnson. "Homer's idea is a good one, and Samson was wise in backing it up. The poets need to be concentrated somewhere where they will not be a nuisance to other people, and where other people will not be a nuisance to them. Homer ought to have a place to compose in where the _vingt-et- un_ players will not interrupt his frenzies, and, on the other hand, the _vingt-et-un_ and other players should be protected from the wooers of the muse. I'll vote to have the Poets' Corner, and in it I move that Ca.s.sius's slate idea be carried out. It will be a great saving, and if the corner we select be far enough away from the other corners of the club, the squeaking of the slate-pencils need bother no one."

"I agree to that," said Blackstone. "Only I think it should be understood that, in granting the pet.i.tion of the poets, we do not bind ourselves to yield to doctors and lawyers and shoemakers and plumbers in case they should each want a corner to themselves."

"A very wise idea," said Sir Walter. Whereupon the resolution was suitably worded, and pa.s.sed unanimously.

Just where the Poets' Corner is to be located the members of the committee have not as yet decided, although Confucius is strongly in favor of having it placed in a dingy situated a quarter of a mile astern of the house-boat, and connected therewith by a slight cord, which can be easily cut in case the squeaking of the poets' slate-pencils becomes too much for the nervous system of the members who have no corner of their own.

CHAPTER VI: SOME THEORIES, DARWINIAN AND OTHERWISE

"I observe," said Doctor Darwin, looking up from a perusal of an asbestos copy of the _London Times_--"I observe that an American professor has discovered that monkeys talk. I consider that a very interesting fact."

"It undoubtedly is," observed Doctor Livingstone, "though hardly new. I never said anything about it over in the other world, but I discovered years ago in Africa that monkeys were quite as well able to hold a sustained conversation with each other as most men are."

"And I, too," put in Baron Munchausen, "have frequently conversed with monkeys. I made myself a master of their idioms during my brief sojourn in--ah--in--well, never mind where. I never could remember the names of places. The interesting point is that at one period of my life I was a master of the monkey language. I have even gone so far as to write a sonnet in Simian, which was quite as intelligible to the uneducated as nine-tenths of the sonnets written in English or American."

"Do you mean to say that you could acquire the monkey accent?" asked Doctor Darwin, immediately interested.

"In most instances," returned the Baron, suavely, "though of course not in all. I found the same difficulty in some cases that the German or the Chinaman finds when he tries to speak French. A Chinaman can no more say Trocadero, for instance, as the Frenchman says it, than he can fly. That peculiar throaty aspirate the Frenchman gives to the first syllable, as though it were spelled trhoque, is utterly beyond the Chinese--and beyond the American, too, whose idea of the tonsillar aspirate leads him to speak of the trochedeero, naturally falling back upon troches to help him out of his laryngeal difficulties."

"You ought to have been on the staff of _Punch_, Baron," said Thackeray, quietly. "That joke would have made you immortal."

"I _am_ immortal," said the Baron. "But to return to our discussion of the Simian tongue: as I was saying, there were some little points about the accent that I could never get, and, as in the case of the German and Chinaman with the French language, the trouble was purely physical. When you consider that in polite Simian society most of the talkers converse while swinging by their tails from the limb of a tree, with a sort of droning accent, which results from their swaying to and fro, you will see at once why it was that I, deprived by nature of the necessary apparatus with which to suspend myself in mid-air, was unable to quite catch the quality which gives its chief charm to monkey-talk."

"I should hardly think that a man of your fertile resources would have let so small a thing as that stand in his way," said Doctor Livingstone.

"When a man is able to make a reputation for himself like yours, in which material facts are never allowed to interfere with his doing what he sets out to do, he ought not to be daunted by the need of a tail. If you could make a cherry-tree grow out of a deer's head, I fail to see why you could not personally grow a tail, or anything else you might happen to need for the attainment of your ends."

"I was not so anxious to get the accent as all that," returned the Baron.

"I don't think it is necessary for a man to make a monkey of himself just for the pleasure of mastering a language. Reasoning similarly, a man to master the art of braying in a fas.h.i.+on comprehensible to the jacka.s.s of average intellect should make a jacka.s.s of himself, cultivate his ears, and learn to kick, so as properly to punctuate his sentences after the manner of most conversational beasts of that kind."

"Then you believe that jacka.s.ses talk, too, do you?" asked Doctor Darwin.

"Why not?" said the Baron. "If monkeys, why not donkeys? Certainly they do. All creatures have some means of communicating their thoughts to each other. Why man in his conceit should think otherwise I don't know, unless it be that the birds and beasts in their conceit probably think that they alone of all the creatures in the world can talk."

"I haven't a doubt," said Doctor Livingstone, "that monkeys listening to men and women talking think they are only jabbering."

"They're not far from wrong in most cases if they do," said Doctor Johnson, who up to this time had been merely an interested listener.

"I've thought that many a time myself."

"Which is perhaps, in a slight degree, a confirmation of my theory," put in Darwin. "If Doctor Johnson's mind runs in the same channels that the monkey's mind runs in, why may we not say that Doctor Johnson, being a man, has certain qualities of the monkey, and is therefore, in a sense, of the same strain?"

"You may say what you please," retorted Johnson, wrathfully, "but I'll make you prove what you say about me."

"I wouldn't if I were you," said Doctor Livingstone, in a peace-making spirit. "It would not be a pleasant task for you, compelling our friend to prove you descended from the ape. I should think you'd prefer to make him leave it unproved."

"Have monkeys Boswells?" queried Thackeray.

"I don't know anything about 'em," said Johnson, petulantly.

"No more do I," said Darwin, "and I didn't mean to be offensive, my dear Johnson. If I claim Simian ancestry for you, I claim it equally for myself."

"Well, I'm no sn.o.b," said Johnson, unmollified. "If you want to brag about your ancestors, do it. Leave mine alone. Stick to your own genealogical orchard."

"Well, I believe fully that we are all descended from the ape," said Munchausen. "There isn't any doubt in my mind that before the flood all men had tails. Noah had a tail. Shem, Ham, and j.a.pheth had tails. It's perfectly reasonable to believe it. The Ark in a sense proved it. It would have been almost impossible for Noah and his sons to construct the Ark in the time they did with the a.s.sistance of only two hands apiece.

Think, however, of how fast they could work with the a.s.sistance of that third arm. Noah could hammer a clapboard on to the Ark with two hands while grasping a saw and cutting a new board or planing it off with his tail. So with the others. We all know how much a third hand would help us at times."

"But how do you account for its disappearance?" put in Doctor Livingstone. "Is it likely they would dispense with such a useful adjunct?"

"No, it isn't; but there are various ways of accounting for its loss,"

said Munchausen. "They may have overworked it building the Ark; Shem, Ham, or j.a.pheth may have had his caught in the door of the Ark and cut off in the hurry of the departure; plenty of things may have happened to eliminate it. Men lose their hair and their teeth; why might not a man lose a tail? Scientists say that coming generations far in the future will be toothless and bald. Why may it not be that through causes unknown to us we are similarly deprived of something our forefathers had?"

"The only reason for man's losing his hair is that he wears a hat all the time," said Livingstone. "The Derby hat is the enemy of hair. It is hot, and dries up the scalp. You might as well try to raise watermelons in the Desert of Sahara as to try to raise hair under the modern hat. In fact, the modern hat is a furnace."

"Well, it's a mighty good furnace," observed Munchausen. "You don't have to put coal on the modern hat."

"Perhaps," interposed Thackeray, "the ancients wore their hats on their tails."

"Well, I have a totally different theory," said Johnson.

"You always did have," observed Munchausen.

"Very likely," said Johnson. "To be commonplace never was my ambition."

"What is your theory?" queried Livingstone.

"Well--I don't know," said Johnson, "if it be worth expressing."

"It may be worth sending by freight," interrupted Thackeray. "Let us have it."

"Well, I believe," said Johnson--"I believe that Adam was a monkey."

"He behaved like one," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Thackeray.

"I believe that the forbidden tree was a tender one, and therefore the only one upon which Adam was forbidden to swing by his tail," said Johnson.

"Clear enough--so far," said Munchausen.

"But that the possession of tails by Adam and Eve entailed a love of swinging thereby, and that they could not resist the temptation to swing from every limb in Eden, and that therefore, while Adam was off swinging on other trees, Eve took a swing on the forbidden tree; that Adam, returning, caught her in the act, and immediately gave way himself and swung," said Johnson.

"Then you eliminate the serpent?" queried Darwin.