Half-Hours with the Idiot Part 3

"No," said the Idiot; "p.a.w.n tickets, interest on which is always paid in advance."

V

A PSYCHIC VENTURE

"I beg your pardon, Doctor," said the Idiot, as he laid aside his morning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon the breakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-cla.s.s home for single gentlemen. "I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissful intercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in the Waffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karat psychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I need one in my business."

"Sike whats?" queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting a sizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.

"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, a medium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business, who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again."

"H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor.

"Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot in double harness?"

"Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said the Doctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found those I know wholly reliable."

"You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a chance?" said the Idiot.

"That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A man may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet when he goes off, er--when he goes off--"

"Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good t.i.tle for a story that--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?"

"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as psychlists."

"That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I can be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."

"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance."

"What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?"

asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers now pa.s.sed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?"

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider their utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else.

I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of ear-tabs and a fur overcoat."

"And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniac scornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-day Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his countrymen?"

"I've only seen one message from Jefferson," said the Idiot, "and it seemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up in Schenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz--whizz--whizz, buzz--buzz--buzz, whizz--whizz--whizz!' Lots of people considered it drivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance."

"Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can," said the Bibliomaniac. "The idea that the greatest political thinker of the ages could stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous."

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "You have not the understanding mind.

Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapidity with which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as he realized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political belief were putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple old Democrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit of entomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums of his native land."

"Pouf!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You are a reactionary, Sir."

"Ubetcha," said the Idiot. "First principles first, say I. But to come back to clairvoyants. I am very anxious to get hold of a medium, Doctor, and the sooner the better. I'm going to give up Wall Street. I can't afford to stay there any longer unless I move out of this restful paradise of food and thought and take up my abode in a Mills Hotel, or charter a bench in the park from the city. The only business we had in our office last week was a game of poker between the firm and its employes, and the firm tided itself over the emergency by winning my salary for the next six weeks. Another week of such activity would prostrate me financially, and I am going to open a literary bureau to deal in posthumous literature."

"Posthumous literature is the curse of letters," said the Bibliomaniac.

"It generally means the publication of the rejected, or personally discarded, ma.n.u.scripts of a dead author, which results in the serious impairment of the quality of his laurels. It ought to be made a misdemeanor to print the stuff."

"I agree with you entirely as to that, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "This business of emptying the pigeonholes of deceased scribes, and printing every last sc.r.a.p of scribbling to be found there, whether they intended it to be printed or not, is reprehensible, and I for one would gladly advocate a law requiring executors of a literary estate to burn all unpublished ma.n.u.scripts found among the decedent's papers merely as a matter of protection to a great name. But it isn't that kind of posthumous production that I am going in for. It's the production posthumously produced that I am after, and I need a first-cla.s.s medium as a side partner to get hold of the stuff for me."

"Preposterous!" sniffed the Bibliomaniac.

"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's a lady over in England has recently published a book of short stories by the late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted to the world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, I don't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, and others, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get up a posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity."

"I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor.

"Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall do will be to send the lady after Charles d.i.c.kens and good old Thackeray, and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences, and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself with just taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply them with subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definite policy.

"Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could do with little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results would come from turning d.i.c.kens loose on the underworld, and setting Thackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! If there ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another 'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I can hardly sleep nights for thinking about it."

"I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quite perfect as it is."

"No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. For example, think of a scene described by d.i.c.kens in which f.a.gin, now become a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takes little Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunman out of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of an electric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly moving platform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes so expert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they pa.s.s, missing the twentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man f.a.gin wants to scare and not kill.

"Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle and expose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisite dullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man on the outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with the sounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he is writing about! Great heavens--the idea makes my mouth water!"

"That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how are you going to get the facts over to d.i.c.kens and Thackeray?"

"I shall not need to," said the Idiot. "All they'll have to do will be to project themselves in spirit over here into the very midst of the scenes to be described. As spirits they will have the entree into any old kind of society they wish to investigate, and in that respect they will have the advantage over us poor mortals who can't go anywhere without having to take our confounded old bodies along with us. Then after I had arranged matters with d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, I'd send my psychic representative after Alexander Dumas, and get him to write a sequel to 'The Three Musketeers', and 'Twenty Years After', which I should call 'Two Hundred and Ninety Years After, a Romance of 1916', in which D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should return to modern times and try their hands on trench work, introducing the aeroplane, the submarine, and all the other appurtenances of war, from the militant brick to the dynamite bomb. Why, a good, rip-staving old Dumas tale of adventure of to-day, with those old heroes of his mixed up with the Militant Suffragettes and the Crown Prince of Germany, would be what old Doctor Johnson would have called a cracker-jack, if he had had the slightest conception of the possibilities of the English language."

"Wouldn't interest me in the least," said the Bibliomaniac coldly, "If there is anything under the canopy that I despise it is so-called romance. Now, if you could get hold of some of the solider things, such, for instance, as Macaulay might write, or"--

"Ah!" said the Idiot, triumphantly, "it is there that my scheme would work out most beneficently. My special articles on historic events by personal partic.i.p.ators would thrill the world.

"From Adam I would secure the first and only authentic account of the Fall, with possibly an expression of his opinion as to the validity of the Darwinian theory. From Noah, aided and abetted by Shem, Ham, and j.a.phet, would come a series of sea stories narrating in thrilling style the story of The Flood, or How We Landed the Zoo on Ararat. A line or two from Balaam's a.s.s on the subject of modern Socialism would fill the reading world with wonder. A series of papers specially prepared for a woman's magazine by Henry VIII. on 'Wild Wives I Have Wedded', edited, possibly, with copious footnotes by Brigham Young, would bring fortune to the pockets of the publishers.

"And then the poets--ah, Mr. Bib, what treasures of poesy would this plan of mine not bring within our reach! Dante could write a new 'Inferno' introducing a new torture in the form of Satan compelling a Member of Congress to explain the Tariff bill. Homer could sing the sufferings and triumphs of arctic exploration in a new epic ent.i.tled 'The Chilliad', or possibly expend his genius upon the story of the rise and fall of Bryan in immortal periods under the t.i.tle of 'The Billiad'"--

"Or describe your progressive idiocy under the t.i.tle of 'The Silliad!'"

put in the Bibliomaniac.

"Ubetcha!" cried the Idiot. "Or tell the sad tale of your life under the t.i.tle of 'The Seniliad.' And in addition to these wonders, who can estimate to what extent we should all profit were our more serious reviews to secure articles from Was.h.i.+ngton, Hamilton, Jefferson, and old Ben Franklin on the present state of the nation! Why, an article dictated off-hand by the shade of Lincoln on the thousands who are now flattering themselves that they occupy his shoes, ill.u.s.trated with those apt anecdotes of which he was a master, and pointed with his gloriously dry humor, under the t.i.tle of 'Later Links', would alone make the venture worth while, even if nothing else came of it."

"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, rising, "perhaps there is something in the idea after all, and I wish you success, Mr. Idiot--and, by the way, if the scheme works out as you expect it to, and you happen to come across old aesculapius, ask him for me for an authoritative statement of the origin and proper treatment of idiocy, will you?"

"Sure," said the Idiot, turning to his breakfast, "but it really isn't necessary to do that, Mr. Bib. Our good old friend, the Doctor here, is quite capable of curing you at any time you consent to put yourself unreservedly in his hands."