The Project Gutenberg EBook of Frenzied Fiction, by Stephen Leacock This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Frenzied Fiction Author: Stephen Leacock Release Date: July 28, 2009 [EBook #8457] Last Updated: October 26, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRENZIED FICTION *** Produced by Gardner Buchanan, and David Widger
This increasing feeling culminated in the resolve which becomes the subject of this narrative. The thought came to me suddenly one night. I woke from my sleep with a plan fully matured in my mind. It was this: I would, for one month, cast off all the travail and cares of civilized life and become again the wild man of the woods that Nature made me. M woods, somewhere in New England, divest myself of my clothes—except only my union suit—crawl into the woods, stay there a month and then crawl out again. To a trained woodsman and crawler like myself the thing was simplicity itself. For food I knew that I could rely on berries, roots, shoots, mosses, mushrooms, fungi, bungi—in fact the whole of Nature’s ample storehouse; for my drink, the running brook and the quiet pool; and for my companions the twittering chipmunk, the chickadee, the chocktaw, the choo-choo, the chow-chow, and the hundred and one inhabitants of the forgotten glade and the tangled thicket.Fortunately for me, my resolve came to me upon the last day in August. The month of September was my vacation. My time was my own. I was free to go. On my rising in the morning my preparations were soon made; or, rather, there were practically no preparations to make. I had but to supply myself with a camera, my one necessity in the woods, and to say good-bye to my friends. Even this last ordeal I wished to make as brief as possible. I had no wish to arouse their anxiety over the dangerous, perhaps foolhardy, project that I had in mind. I wished, as far as possible, to say good-bye in such a way as to allay the very natural fears which my undertaking would excite in the minds of my friends. From myself, although trained in the craft of the woods, I could not conceal the danger that I incurred. Yet the danger was almost forgotten in the extraordinary and novel interest that attached to the experiment. Would it prove possible for a man, unaided by our civilized arts and industries, to maintain himself naked—except for his union suit—in the heart of the woods? Could he do it, or could he not? And if he couldn’t what then? But this last thought I put from me. Time alone could answer the question. As in duty bound, I went first to the place of business where I am employed, to shake hands and say good-bye to my employer. “I am going,” I said, “to spend a month naked alone in the woods.” He looked up from his desk with genial kindliness. “That’s right,” he said, “get a good rest.” “My plan is,” I added, “to live on berries and funguses.” “Fine,” he answered. “Well, have a good time, old man—good-bye.” Then I dropped in casually upon one of my friends. “Well,” I said, “I’m off to New England to spend a month naked.” “Nantucket,” he said, “or Newport?” “No,” I answered, speaking as lightly as I could. “I’m going into the woods and stay there naked for a month.” “Oh, yes,” he said. “I see. Well, good-bye, old chap—see you when you get back.” After that I called upon two or three other men to say a brief word of farewell. I could not help feeling slightly nettled, I must confess, at the very casual way in which they seemed to take my announcement. “Oh, yes,” they said, “naked in the woods, eh? Well, ta-ta till you get back.” Here was a man about to risk his life—for there was no denying the fact—in a great sociological experiment, yet they received the announcement with absolute unconcern. It offered one more assurance, had I needed it, of the degenerate state of the civilization upon which I was turning my back. On my way to the train I happened to run into a newspaper reporter with whom I have some acquaintance. “I’m just off,” I said, “to New England to spend a month naked—at least naked all but my union suit—in the woods; no doubt you’ll like a few details about it for your paper.” “Thanks, old man,” he said, “we’ve pretty well given up running that nature stuff. We couldn’t do anything with it—unless, of course, anything happens to you. Then we’d be glad to give you some space.” Several of my friends had at least the decency to see me off on the train. One, and one alone accompanied me on the long night-ride to New England in order that he might bring back my clothes, my watch, and other possessions from the point where I should enter the woods, together with such few messages of farewell as I might scribble at the last moment. It was early morning when we arrived at the wayside station where we were to alight. From here we walked to the edge of the woods. Arrived at this point we halted. I took off my clothes, with the exception of my union suit. Then, taking a pot of brown stain from my valise, I proceeded to dye my face and hands and my union suit itself a deep butternut brown. “What’s that for?” asked my friend. “For protection,” I answered. “Don’t you know that all animals are protected by their peculiar markings that render them invisible? The caterpillar looks like the leaf it eats from; the scales of the fish counterfeit the glistening water of the brook; the bear and the ‘possum are coloured like the tree-trunks on which they climb. There!” I added, as I concluded my task. “I am now invisible.” “Gee!” said my friend. I handed him back the valise and the empty paint-pot, dropped to my hands and knees—my camera slung about my neck—and proceeded to crawl into the bush. My friend stood watching me. “Why don’t you stand up and walk?” I heard him call. I turned half round and growled at him. Then I plunged deeper into the bush, growling as I went. After ten minutes’ active crawling I found myself in the heart of the forest. It reached all about me on every side for hundreds of miles. All around me was the unbroken stillness of the woods. Not a sound reached my ear save the twittering of a squirrel, or squirl, in the branches high above my head or the far-distant call of a loon hovering over some woodland lake. I judged that I had reached a spot suitable for my habitation. My first care was to make a fire. Difficult though it might appear to the degenerate dweller of the city to do this, to the trained woodsman, such as I had now become, it is nothing. I selected a dry stick, rubbed it vigorously against my hind leg, and in a few moments it broke into a generous blaze. Half an hour later I was sitting beside a glowing fire of twigs discussing with great gusto an appetizing mess of boiled grass and fungi cooked in a hollow stone. I ate my fill, not pausing till I was full, careless, as the natural man ever is, of the morrow. Then, stretched out upon the pine-needles at the foot of a great tree, I lay in drowsy contentment listening to the song of the birds, the hum of the myriad insects and the strident note of the squirrel high above me. At times I would give utterance to the soft answering call, known to every woodsman, that is part of the freemasonry of animal speech. As I lay thus, I would not have exchanged places with the pale dweller in the city for all the wealth in the world. Here I lay remote from the world, happy, full of grass, listening to the crooning of the birds. But the mood of inaction and reflection cannot last, even with the lover of Nature. It was time to be up and doing. Much lay before me to be done before the setting of the sun should bring with it, as I fully expected it would, darkness. Before night fell I must build a house, make myself a suit of clothes, lay in a store of nuts, and in short prepare myself for the oncoming of winter, which, in the bush, may come on at any time in the summer. I rose briskly from the ground to my hands and knees and set myself to the building of my house. The method that I intended to follow here was merely that which Nature has long since taught to the beaver and which, moreover, is known and practised by the gauchos of the pampas, by the googoos of Rhodesia and by many other tribes. I had but to select a suitable growth of trees and gnaw them down with my teeth, taking care so to gnaw them that each should fall into the place appointed for it in the building. The sides, once erected in this fashion, another row of trees, properly situated, is gnawed down to fall crosswise as the roof. I set myself briskly to work and in half an hour had already the satisfaction of seeing my habitation rising into shape. I was still gnawing with unabated energy when I was interrupted by a low growling in the underbrush. With animal caution I shrank behind a tree, growling in return. I could see something moving in the bushes, evidently an animal of large size. From its snarl I judged it to be a bear. I could hear it moving nearer to me. It was about to attack me. A savage joy thrilled through me at the thought, while my union suit bristled with rage from head to foot as I emitted growl after growl of defiance. I bared my teeth to the gums, snarling, and lashed my flank with my hind foot. Eagerly I watched for the onrush of the bear. In savage combat who strikes first wins. It was my idea, as soon as the bear should appear, to bite off its front legs one after the other. This initial advantage once gained, I had no doubt of ultimate victory. The brushes parted. I caught a glimpse of a long brown body and a hairy head. Then the creature reared up, breasting itself against a log, full in front of me. Great heavens! It was not a bear at all. It was a man. He was dressed, as I was, in a union suit, and his face and hands, like mine, were stained a butternut brown. His hair was long and matted and two weeks’ stubble of beard was on his face. For a minute we both glared at one another, still growling. Then the man rose up to a standing position with a muttered exclamation of disgust. “Ah, cut it out,” he said. “Let’s talk English.” He walked over towards me and sat down upon a log in an attitude that seemed to convey the same disgust as the expression of his features. Then he looked round about him. “What are you doing?” he said. “Building a house,” I answered. “I know,” he said with a nod. “What are you here for?” “Why,” I explained, “my plan is this: I want to see whether a man can come out here in the woods, naked, with no aid but that of his own hands and his own ingenuity and—” “Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted the disconsolate man. “Earn himself a livelihood in the wilderness, live as the cave-man lived, carefree and far from the curse of civilization!” “That’s it. That was my idea,” I said, my enthusiasm rekindling as I spoke. “That’s what I’m doing; my food is to be the rude grass and the roots that Nature furnishes for her children, and for my drink—” “Yes, yes,” he interrupted again with impatience, “for your drink the running rill, for your bed the sweet couch of hemlock, and for your canopy the open sky lit with the soft stars in the deep-purple vault of the dewy night. I know.” “Great heavens, man!” I exclaimed. “That’s my idea exactly. In fact, those are my very phrases. How could you have guessed it?” He made a gesture with his hand to indicate weariness and disillusionment. “Pshaw!” he said. “I know it because I’ve been doing it. I’ve been here a fortnight now on this open-air, life-in-the-woods game. Well, I’m sick of it! This last lets me out.” “What last?” I asked. “Why, meeting you. Do you realize that you are the nineteenth man that I’ve met in the last three days running about naked in the woods? They’re all doing it. The woods are full of them.” “You don’t say so!” I gasped. “Fact. Wherever you go in the bush you find naked men all working out this same blasted old experiment. Why, when you get a little farther in you’ll see signs up: NAKED MEN NOT ALLOWED IN THIS BUSH, and NAKED MEN KEEP OFF, and GENTLEMEN WHO ARE NAKED WILL KINDLY KEEP TO THE HIGH ROAD, and a lot of things like that. You must have come in at a wrong place or you’d have noticed the little shanties that they have now at the edge of the New England bush with signs up: UNION SUITS BOUGHT AND SOLD, CAMERAS FOR SALE OR TO RENT, HIGHEST PRICE FOR CAST-OFF CLOTHING, and all that sort of thing.” “No,” I said. “I saw nothing.” “Well, you look when you go back. As for me, I’m done with it. The thing’s worked out. I’m going back to the city to see whether I can’t, right there in the heart of the city, earn myself a livelihood with my unaided hands and brains. That’s the real problem; no more bumming on the animals for me. This bush business is too easy. Well, good-bye; I’m off.” “But stop a minute,” I said. “How is it that, if what you say is true, I haven’t seen or heard anybody in the bush, and I’ve been here since the middle of the morning?” “Nonsense,” the man answered. “They were probably all round you but you didn’t recognize them.” “No, no, it’s not possible. I lay here dreaming beneath a tree and there wasn’t a sound, except the twittering of a squirrel and, far away, the cry of a lake-loon, nothing else.” “Exactly, the twittering of a squirrel! That was some feller up the tree twittering to beat the band to let on that he was a squirrel, and no doubt some other feller calling out like a loon over near the lake. I suppose you gave them the answering cry?” “I did,” I said. “I gave that low guttural note which—” “Precisely—which is the universal greeting in the freemasonry of animal speech. I see you’ve got it all down pat. Well, good-bye again. I’m off. Oh, don’t bother to growl, please. I’m sick of that line of stuff.” “Good-bye,” I said. He slid through the bushes and disappeared. I sat where I was, musing, my work interrupted, a mood of bitter disillusionment heavy upon me. So I sat, it may have been for hours. In the far distance I could hear the faint cry of a bittern in some lonely marsh. “Now, who the deuce is making that noise?” I muttered. “Some silly fool, I suppose, trying to think he’s a waterfowl. Cut it out!” Long I lay, my dream of the woods shattered, wondering what to do. Then suddenly there came to my ear the loud sound of voices, human voices, strident and eager, with nothing of the animal growl in them. “He’s in there. I seen him!” I heard some one call. Rapidly I dived sideways into the underbrush, my animal instinct strong upon me again, growling as I went. Instinctively I knew that it was I that they were after. All the animal joy of being hunted came over me. My union suit stood up on end with mingled fear and rage. As fast as I could I retreated into the wood. Yet somehow, as I moved, the wood, instead of growing denser, seemed to thin out. I crouched low, still growling and endeavouring to bury myself in the thicket. I was filled with a wild sense of exhilaration such as any lover of the wild life would feel at the knowledge that he is being chased, that some one is after him, that some one is perhaps just a few feet behind him, waiting to stick a pitchfork into him as he runs. There is no ecstasy like this. Then I realized that my pursuers had closed in on me. I was surrounded on all sides. The woods had somehow grown thin. They were like the mere shrubbery of a park—it might be of Central Park itself. I could hear among the deeper tones of men the shrill voices of boys. “There he is,” one cried, “going through them bushes! Look at him humping himself!” “What is it, what’s the sport?” another called. “Some crazy guy loose in the park in his underclothes and the cops after him.” Then they closed in on me. I recognized the blue suits of the police force and their short clubs. In a few minutes I was dragged out of the shrubbery and stood in the open park in my pyjamas, wide awake, shivering in the chilly air of early morning. Fortunately for me, it was decided at the police-court that sleep-walking is not an offence against the law. I was dismissed with a caution. My vacation is still before me, and I still propose to spend it naked. But I shall do so at Atlantic City.
That is to say, with Any One of our Sixteen Greatest ActorsIt was within the privacy of his own library that we obtained—need we say with infinite difficulty—our interview with the Great Actor. He was sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a cabinet photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. We had time to note that a beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow, while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a string from the ceiling. It was only when we had seated ourself in a chair and taken out our notebook that the Great Actor looked up. “An interview?” he said, and we noted with pain the weariness in his tone. “Another interview!” We bowed. “Publicity!” he murmured rather to himself than to us. “Publicity! Why must one always be forced into publicity?” It was not our intention, we explained apologetically, to publish or to print a single word— “Eh, what?” exclaimed the Great Actor. “Not print it? Not publish it? Then what in—” Not, we explained, without his consent. “Ah,” he murmured wearily, “my consent. Yes, yes, I must give it. The world demands it. Print, publish anything you like. I am indifferent to praise, careless of fame. Posterity will judge me. But,” he added more briskly, “let me see a proof of it in time to make any changes I might care to.” We bowed our assent. “And now,” we began, “may we be permitted to ask a few questions about your art? And first, in which branch of the drama do you consider that your genius chiefly lies, in tragedy or in comedy?” “In both,” said the Great Actor. “You excel then,” we continued, “in neither the one nor the other?” “Not at all,” he answered, “I excel in each of them.” “Excuse us,” we said, “we haven’t made our meaning quite clear. What we meant to say is, stated very simply, that you do not consider yourself better in either of them than in the other?” “Not at all,” said the Actor, as he put out his arm with that splendid gesture that we have known and admired for years, at the same time throwing back his leonine head so that his leonine hair fell back from his leonine forehead. “Not at all. I do better in both of them. My genius demands both tragedy and comedy at the same time.” “Ah,” we said, as a light broke in upon us, “then that, we presume, is the reason why you are about to appear in Shakespeare?” The Great Actor frowned. “I would rather put it,” he said, “that Shakespeare is about to appear in me.” “Of course, of course,” we murmured, ashamed of our own stupidity. “I appear,” went on the Great Actor, “inHamlet. I expect to present, I may say, an entirely new Hamlet.” “A new Hamlet!” we exclaimed, fascinated. “A new Hamlet! Is such a thing possible?” “Entirely,” said the Great Actor, throwing his leonine head forward again. “I have devoted years of study to the part. The whole conception of the part of Hamlet has been wrong.” We sat stunned. “All actors hitherto,” continued the Great Actor, “or rather, I should say, all so-called actors—I mean all those who tried to act before me—have been entirely mistaken in their presentation. They have presented Hamlet as dressed in black velvet.” “Yes, yes,” we interjected, “in black velvet, yes!” “Very good. The thing is absurd,” continued the Great Actor, as he reached down two or three heavy volumes from the shelf beside him. “Have you ever studied the Elizabethan era?” “The which?” we asked modestly. “The Elizabethan era?” We were silent. “Or the pre-Shakespearean tragedy?” We hung our head. “If you had, you would know that a Hamlet in black velvet is perfectly ridiculous. In Shakespeare’s day—as I could prove in a moment if you had the intelligence to understand it—there was no such thing as black velvet. It didn’t exist.” “And how then,” we asked, intrigued, puzzled and yet delighted, “doyou present Hamlet?” “Inbrown velvet,” said the Great Actor. “Great Heavens,” we exclaimed, “this is a revolution.” “It is. But that is only one part of my conception. The main thing will be my presentation of what I may call the psychology of Hamlet.” “The psychology!” we said. “Yes,” resumed the Great Actor, “the psychology. To make Hamlet understood, I want to show him as a man bowed down by a great burden. He is overwhelmed with Weltschmerz. He carries in him the whole weight of the Zeitgeist; in fact, everlasting negation lies on him—” “You mean,” we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we could, “that things are a little bit too much for him.” “His will,” went on the Great Actor, disregarding our interruption, “is paralysed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hurled in another. One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds. His feet seek the ground, but find only the air—” “Wonderful,” we said, “but will you not need a good deal of machinery?” “Machinery!” exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine laugh. “The machinery of thought, the mechanism of power, of magnetism—” “Ah,” we said, “electricity.” “Not at all,” said the Great Actor. “You fail to understand. It is all done by my rendering. Take, for example, the famous soliloquy on death. You know it?” “‘To be or not to be,’” we began. “Stop,” said the Great Actor. “Now observe. It is a soliloquy. Precisely. That is the key to it. It is something that Hamlet says to himself. Not a word of it, in my interpretation, is actually spoken. All is done in absolute, unbroken silence.” “How on earth,” we began, “can you do that?” “Entirely and solely with my face.” Good heavens! Was it possible? We looked again, this time very closely, at the Great Actor’s face. We realized with a thrill that it might be done. “I come before the audience so,” he went on, “and soliloquize—thus—follow my face, please—” As the Great Actor spoke, he threw himself into a characteristic pose with folded arms, while gust after gust of emotion, of expression, of alternate hope, doubt and despair, swept—we might say chased themselves across his features. “Wonderful!” we gasped. “Shakespeare’s lines,” said the Great Actor, as his face subsided to its habitual calm, “are not necessary; not, at least, with my acting. The lines, indeed, are mere stage directions, nothing more. I leave them out. This happens again and again in the play. Take, for instance, the familiar scene where Hamlet holds the skull in his hand: Shakespeare here suggests the words ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well—‘” “Yes, yes!” we interrupted, in spite of ourself, “‘a fellow of infinite jest—‘” “Your intonation is awful,” said the Actor. “But listen. In my interpretation I use no words at all. I merely carry the skull quietly in my hand, very slowly, across the stage. There I lean against a pillar at the side, with the skull in the palm of my hand, and look at it in silence.” “Wonderful!” we said. “I then cross over to the right of the stage, very impressively, and seat myself on a plain wooden bench, and remain for some time, looking at the skull.” “Marvellous!” “I then pass to the back of the stage and lie down on my stomach, still holding the skull before my eyes. After holding this posture for some time, I crawl slowly forward, portraying by the movement of my legs and stomach the whole sad history of Yorick. Finally I turn my back on the audience, still holding the skull, and convey through the spasmodic movements of my back Hamlet’s passionate grief at the loss of his friend.” “Why!” we exclaimed, beside ourself with excitement, “this is not merely a revolution, it is a revelation.” “Call it both,” said the Great Actor. “The meaning of it is,” we went on, “that you practically don’t need Shakespeare at all.” “Exactly, I do not. I could do better without him. Shakespeare cramps me. What I really mean to convey is not Shakespeare, but something greater, larger—how shall I express it—bigger.” The Great Actor paused and we waited, our pencil poised in the air. Then he murmured, as his eyes lifted in an expression of something like rapture. “In fact—ME.” He remained thus, motionless, without moving. We slipped gently to our hands and knees and crawled quietly to the door, and so down the stairs, our notebook in our teeth.
“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. I remember once telling this story of Robinson to a young man called Tomlinson who was out of a job. Tomlinson had a head two sizes too big, and a face like a bun. He had lost three jobs in a bank and two in a broker’s office, but he knew his work, and on paper he looked a good man. I told him about Robinson, to encourage him, and the story made a great impression. “Say, that was a great scheme, eh?” he kept repeating. He had no command of words, and always said the same thing over and over. A few days later I met Tomlinson in the street with a valise in his hand. “Where are you going?” I asked. “I’m off to Mexico,” he answered. “They’re advertising for a Canadian teller for a bank in Tuscapulco. I’ve sent my credentials down, and I’m going to follow them right up in person. In a thing like this, the personal element is everything.” So Tomlinson went down to Mexico and he travelled by sea to Mexico City, and then with a mule train to Tuscapulco. But the mails, with his credentials, went by land and got there two days ahead of him. When Tomlinson got to Tuscapulco he went into the bank and he spoke to the junior manager and told him what he came for. “I’m awfully sorry,” the junior manager said, “I’m afraid that this post has just been filled.” Then he went into an inner room to talk with the manager. “The tellership that you wanted a Canadian for,” he asked, “didn’t you say that you have a man already?” “Yes,” said the manager, “a brilliant young fellow from Toronto; his name is Tomlinson, I have his credentials here—a first-class man. I’ve wired him to come right along, at our expense, and we’ll keep the job open for him ten days.” “There’s a young man outside,” said the junior, “who wants to apply for the job.” “Outside?” exclaimed the manager. “How did he get here?” “Came in on the mule train this morning: says he can do the work and wants the job.” “What’s he like?” asked the manager. The junior shook his head. “Pretty dusty looking customer,” he said. “Shifty looking.” “Same old story,” murmured the manager. “It’s odd how these fellows drift down here, isn’t it? Up to something crooked at home, I suppose. Understands the working of a bank, eh? I guess he understands it a little too well for my taste. No, no,” he continued, tapping the papers that lay on the table, “now that we’ve got a first-class man like Tomlinson, let’s hang on to him. We can easily wait ten days, and the cost of the journey is nothing to the bank as compared with getting a man of Tomlinson’s stamp. And, by the way, you might telephone to the Chief of Police and get him to see to it that this loafer gets out of town straight off.” So the Chief of Police shut up Tomlinson in the calaboose and then sent him down to Mexico City under a guard. By the time the police were done with him he was dead broke, and it took him four months to get back to Toronto; when he got there, the place in Mexico had been filled long ago. But I can imagine that some of my readers might suggest that I have hitherto been dealing only with success in a very limited way, and that more interest would lie in discussing how the really great fortunes are made. Everybody feels an instinctive interest in knowing how our great captains of industry, our financiers and railroad magnates made their money. Here the explanation is really a very simple one. There is, in fact, only one way to amass a huge fortune in business or railway management. One must begin at the bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest rung. But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand upon it with his foot well poised, his head erect, his arms braced and his eye directed upward, will inevitably mount to the top. But after all—I say this as a kind of afterthought in conclusion—why bother with success at all? I have observed that the successful people get very little real enjoyment out of life. In fact the contrary is true. If I had to choose—with an eye to having a really pleasant life—between success and ruin, I should prefer ruin every time. I have several friends who are completely ruined—some two or three times—in a large way of course; and I find that if I want to get a really good dinner, where the champagne is just as it ought to be, and where hospitality is unhindered by mean thoughts of expense, I can get it best at the house of a ruined man.
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