Elbow-Room Part 21

"How much gas did you make at the Blank works last quarter?"

"I dunno; about a million feet, I reckon."

"Well, you have charged me in my bill for burning half a million more than you made; I want you to correct it."

"Less see the bill. Hm--m--m! this is all right. It's taken off of the meter. That's what the meter says."

"S'pose'n it does; I _couldn't_ have burned more'n you made."

"Can't help that; the meter can't lie."

"Well, but how d'you account for the difference?"

"Dunno; 'tain't our business to go nosing and poking around after scientific truth. We depend on the meter. If that says you burned six million feet, why, you _must_ have burned it, even if we never made a foot of gas out at the works."

"To tell you the honest truth," said I, "the meter was frozen, and I stirred it up with a poker and set it whizzing around."

"Price just the same," said the clerk. "We charge for pokers just as we do for gas."

"You are not actually going to have the audacity to ask me to pay three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on account of that poker?"

"If it was seven hundred thousand dollars, I'd take it with a calmness that would surprise you. Pay up, or we'll turn off your gas."

"Turn it off and be hanged," I exclaimed as I emerged from the office, tearing the bill to fragments. Then I went home; and grasping that too lavish poker, I approached the meter. It had registered another million feet since the bill was made out; it was running up a score of a hundred feet a minute; in a month I would have owed the gas company more than the United States Government owes its creditors. So I beat the meter into a shapeless ma.s.s, tossed it into the street and turned off the gas inside the cellar.

Then I went down to the _Patriot_ office to persuade Major Slott to denounce the fraud practiced by the company. While I was in the editorial room two or three visitors came in. The first one behaved in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner. He saluted the major by throwing a chair at him. Then he seized the editor by the hair, b.u.mped his head against the table three or four times and kicked him. When this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very close to the major's nose and said, "You idiot and outcast, if you don't put that notice in to-morrow, I'll come round here and murder you! Do you hear me?" Then he cuffed the major's ears a couple of times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head, poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the table and went out. During all this time the major sat still with a sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word. When the man left, the major picked up the table, wiped the ink and sand from his face, and turning to me said,

"Harry will have his little fun, you see."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SHERIFF IS MAD]

"He is a somewhat exuberant humorist," I replied. "What was the object of the joke?"

"Well, he's going to sell his furniture at auction, and I promised to notice the fact in to-day's _Patriot_, but I forgot it, and he called to remind me of it."

"Do all of your friends refresh your memory in that vivid manner? If I'd been in your place, I'd have knocked him down."

"No, you wouldn't," said Slott--"no, you wouldn't. Harry is the sheriff, and he controls two thousand dollars' worth of official advertising. I'd sooner he'd kick me from here to Borneo and back again than to take that advertising away from the _Patriot_. What are a few b.u.mps and a sore shin or two compared with all that fatness? No, sir; he can have all the fun he wants out of me."

The next visitor was less demonstrative. He was tall and slender and clad in the habiliments of woe. He entered the office and took a chair. Removing his hat, he wiped the moisture from his eyes, rubbed his nose thoughtfully for a moment, put his handkerchief in his hat, his hat upon the floor, and said,

"You didn't know Mrs. Smith?"

"I hadn't that pleasure. Who was she?"

"She was my wife. She's been sick some time. But day before yesterday she was took worse, and she kep' on sinking until evening, when she gave a kinder sudden jump a couple of times, and then her spirit flickered. Dead, you know. Pa.s.sed away into another world."

"I'm very sorry."

"So am I. And I called around to see if I couldn't get some of you literary people to get out some kind of a poem describing her peculiarities, so that I can advertise her in the paper."

"I dunno; maybe we might."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. SMITH'S GRIEF]

"Oh, you didn't know her, you say? Well, she was a sing'lar kinder woman. Had strong characteristics. Her nose was the crookedest in the State--all bent around sideways. Old Captain Binder used to say that it looked like the jibsail of an oyster-sloop on the windward tack.

Only his fun, you know. But Helen never minded it. She said herself that it aimed so much around the corner that whenever she sneezed she blew down her back hair. There were rich depths of humor in that woman. Now, I don't mind if you work into the poem some picturesque allusion to the condition of her nose, so her friends will recognize her. And you might also spend a verse or two on her defective eye."

"What was the matter with her eye?"

"Gone, sir--gone! Knocked out with a chip while she was splitting kin'ling-wood when she was a child. She fixed it up somehow with a gla.s.s one, and it gave her the oddest expression you ever saw. The false one would stand perfectly still while the other one was rolling around, so that 'bout half the time you couldn't tell whether she was studying astronomy or watching the hired girl pare potatoes. And she lay there at night with the indisposed eye wide open glaring at me, while the other was tight shut, so that sometimes I'd get the horrors and kick her and shake her to make her get up and fix it. Once I got some mucilage and glued the lid down myself, but she didn't like it when she woke in the morning. Had to soak her eye in warm water, you know, to get it open.

"Now, I reckon you could run in some language about her eccentricities of vision, couldn't you? Don't care what it is, so that I have the main facts."

"Was she peculiar in other respects?"

"Well, yes. One leg was gone--run over by a wagon when she was little.

But she wore a patent leg that did her pretty well. Bothered her sometimes, but most generally gave her a good deal of comfort. She was fond of machinery. She was very grateful for her privileges. Although sometimes it worried her, too. The springs'd work wrong now and then, and maybe in church her leg'd give a spurt and begin to kick and hammer away at the board in front of the pew until it sounded like a boiler-factory. Then I'd carry her out, and most likely it'd kick at me all the way down the aisle and end up by dancing her around the vestibule, until the s.e.xton would rebuke her for waltzing in church.

Seems to me there's material for poetry in that, isn't there? She was a self-willed woman. Often, when she wanted to go to a sewing-bee or to gad about somewhere, maybe, I'd stuff that leg up the chimney or hide it in the wood-pile. And when I wouldn't tell her where it was, do you know what she'd do?"

"What?"

"Why, she'd lash an umbrella to her stump and drift off down the street 'sif that umbrella was born there. You couldn't get ahead of her. She was ingenious.

"So I thought I'd mention a few facts to you, and you can just throw them together and make them rhyme, and I'll call 'round and pay you for them. What day? Tuesday? Very well; I'll run in on Tuesday and see how you've fixed her up."

Then Mr. Smith smoothed up his hat with his handkerchief, wiped the acc.u.mulated sorrow from his eyes, placed his hat upon his head, and sailed serenely out and down the stairs toward his desolated hearthstone.

The last caller was an artist. He took a chair and said,

"My name is Brewer; I am the painter of the allegorical picture of 'The Triumph of Truth' on exhibition down at Yelverton's. I called, major, to make some complaint about the criticism of the work which appeared in your paper. Your critic seems to have misunderstood somewhat the drift of the picture. For instance, he says--Let me quote the paragraph:

"'In the background to the left stands St. Augustine with one foot on a wooden Indian which is lying upon the ground. Why the artist decorated St. Augustine with a high hat and put his trousers inside his boots, and why he filled the saint's belt with navy revolvers and tomahawks, has not been revealed. It strikes us as being ridiculous to the very last degree.'

"Now, this seems to me to be a little too harsh. That figure does _not_ represent St. Augustine. It is meant for an allegorical picture of Brute Force, and it has its foot upon Intellect--_Intellect_, mind you! and _not_ a cigar-store Indian. It is a likeness of Captain Kidd, and I set it back to represent the fact that Brute Force belonged to the Dark Ages. How on earth that man of yours ever got an idea that it was St. Augustine beats me."

"It is singular," said the major.

"And now let me direct your attention to another paragraph. He says,

"'We were astonished to notice that while Noah's ark goes sailing in the remote distance, there is close to it a cotton-factory, the chimney of which is pouring out white smoke that covers the whole of the sky in the picture, while the ark seems to be trying to sail down that chimney. Now, they didn't have cotton-factories in those days; the thing don't hang. The artist must have been drunk.'

"Now, this insinuation pains me. How would you like it if you painted a picture of the tower of Babel, and somebody should come along and insist that it was the chimney of a cotton-factory, and that the clouds with which the sky is covered were smoke? Cotton-factory! Your man certainly cannot be familiar with the Scriptures; and when he talks about the ark sailing down that chimney, he forgets that the reason why it is standing on one end is that the water is so rough as to make it pitch. You know the Bible says that arks did pitch 'without and within.' Now, don't it?"

"I think maybe it does," said the major.

"But that's not the worst. I can stand that; but what do you think of a man that goes to criticising a work of art, and says--Now just listen to this:

"'On the right is a boy who has his clothes off and has apparently been in swimming, and has been rescued by a big yellow dog just as he was about to drown. What this has to do with the Triumph of Truth we don't know, but we do know that the dog is twice as large as the boy, and that he has the boy's head in his mouth, while the boy's hands are tied behind his back. Now, for a boy to go in swimming with his hands tied, and for a dog to swallow his head so as to drag him out, appears to us the awfulest foolishness on earth.'