The Asbestos Society of Sinners / detailing the diversions of Dives and others on the playground of Pluto, with some broken threads of drop-stitch history, picked up by a newspaper man in Hades and woven into a Stygian nights' entertainment

“O THAT mine adversary had written a book!”

“The most miserable man in Hades is no longer Job but Methuselah,” whispered Anon. “Ever since Dr. Osler celebrated his departure for England by proposing a wholesale slaughter of the innocent aged, Methuselah has had to take a seat on the sinners’ bench. It was formerly considered an honor to be an old man, even in Hades, but now it is a disgrace not to have died young. The other day, Cain, who is the bad boy of the underworld, gave Methuselah as a birthday present a collection of thirty-six bottles of chloroform, one for each sixty years of his earthly age. Then the lad, who is Satan’s chief imp, put a placard on Methuselah’s back reading ‘Oslerized.’”

“There comes a time in every man’s life when he wishes for Herod’s power, that he might order all children killed—except his own!” muttered the old man. “But I had my revenge: I was Abel to raise Cain over a foot.”

hummed Longfellow.

“That is a prehistoric relic which leaked from the Ark when we grounded on Mt. Ararat,” volunteered Noah. “I sprung that ‘raising Cain’ joke on Mrs. Noah, but you know a woman has no sense of humor and she said she had her hands full without working the adoption degree.”

“‘O, that mine adversary had written a book!’” reiterated Methuselah.

“He has; your wish is fulfilled.”

It was a newcomer who spoke. All eyes were turned upon him as Methuselah asked:

“Who are you?”

“A. Hasbeen, M.D., late secretary of the Os-slurs Chloroforming Institute of Baltimore. To-day I became a back number—60—which entitled me to a painless passing, the anæsthetic being administered by Dr. Senile. But there was no need of the old men getting angry at what Dr. Osler said about them. He intended it only for advertising purposes. Having got himself talked into notoriety, his publishers have announced that a book by the doctor is in press.”

“Then am I revenged indeed! Æsthetic as he is, Dr. Osler will wish that he had taken an anæsthetic before the book reviewers get through with him. Oh, for the fatally facile pen of the bright and bitter Corelli!”

“Anthony Trollope says he said it first.”

“Oh, the idea is itself old enough to be chloroformed,” explained Dr. Hasbeen. “Osler has been trying to explain that it was all a jest, but the public refuses to take him in earnest: a comedian never can become a tragedian. It only goes to show that, although Barnum may be right in his opinion that the American people like to be fooled, they won’t swallow a joke that is thrust down their throats and smile over it, and they do not want their sense of the ludicrous drugged by an overdose of chloroform.”

“I may be a member of the silent majority,” went on Methuselah, “but this insult to age would put speech in the most chapfallen mummy, however it might be pressed for time. Notified to quit thinking at forty and to stop living at sixty! Why, in my day, a man hadn’t cut his wisdom tooth then! I’m inclined to think that Dr. Osler still has some teeth to cut. Man, like wine, improves with age. Before making that speech the doctor should have put on his old slippers; then nobody would have known where the shoe pinched him.”

“I wonder how long it took Osler to sober up after that intemperate speech? Nobody ever heard of him until he approached the danger line of encroaching years. What has he been doing in the past? Doubtless he is no different from the ordinary man, who remains a dormant factor until he comes to years of discretion, which is more likely to be sixty than sixteen. Before that time, he courts women and wine more assiduously than wisdom and common sense.”

“A man’s early life is too much taken up with breach-of-promise cases, divorces and the stock exchange to care whether or not the world owes him a living or to take the trouble to collect it. Though the financial acumen of Humpty Dumpty does not make Wall Street tremble, it tumbles to a good thing long before he takes a fall to himself. The bears come out of their pits and the bulls leave their greenbacks to seek other and greener goods to devour.”

“You know ‘there is no fool like an old fool,’” I ventured to quote.

“‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools’; they’ve been there themselves,” retorted Methuselah.

“It is easy to mould even stubborn facts by applying the sparks from the thought anvils of dead men’s minds, which the world accepts because the men are dead and not because the sparks burn with living truth.

“Proverbs, not men, should be sacrificed on the altar of antiquity.

“Thank you, Young,” said Methuselah, gratefully. “Your ‘Night Thoughts’ have shed light on a dark subject. Young is older in wisdom than his name implies, for a man does not get his mental equilibrium until the pendulum is swinging to the west, and he becomes too old to wallow in champagne or to eat lobster suppers with a peroxide blonde. A man’s legs may be in a forced retreat to the grave, but his brain remains more active in the world’s service than that of the youngster under forty, who develops the muscle in his arms at the expense of the gray matter in his brain. It is only the callow youth who suffers from softening of the brain. The man at sixty has more dollars in his cellar and more sense in his garret than the fool of thirty has cents in his pocket. Yet youth and age are not antagonistic; they are like the two parts of a pair of scissors in the work of the world: ‘useless each without the other.’”

“Don’t you think that Dr. Osler promulgated his theory of earthly eradication at the suggestion of a feminine relative?”

“That would not be surprising. Women are apt to see the defects of an aged man of talent and the merits of a young fool. It is possible that some woman in the Osler family is weary of being an old man’s darling and wants to squeeze him out, unless he can produce the elixir of Faust.”

“That’s the solution. The women are determined to have something to squeeze, even if they have to stifle their embraces in chloroform and let their affections go to ‘weeds.’ Woman is a poppy that exhales her perfume only in the shade. It may be that somebody else has said that after me, for Osler implies that the oldest inhabitant is only a reminiscence of what isn’t so. Who was the author, Bartlett?”

“That is not a ‘Familiar Quotation,’” answered Bartlett, after a hurried consultation with Dr. Johnson and Roget. “Therefore, it must belong to Anon; he claims everything to which other people cannot prove their title. It seems to me that you are getting so independent that you even rebel against your metaphors. You call woman a fragrant poppy in the shade, in apparent ignorance of the fact that in Hades, where all women have shady characters, there is no perfume. You poets can scent everything but the bloom of truth.”

“Oh, well, you’re not so fragrant,” said Anon, slangily. “You only gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, while I furnished the thread which bound them. But we have lost the thread of this discourse. It seems to me that if the lethal chamber were to become popular, a man would have to begin putting his affairs in order almost as soon as he had ceased to ask his mother-in-law if he might kiss his wife.”

“That’s one thing which has struck me as odd,” I said. “What particular place of torment has been reserved for the mothers-in-law? I haven’t seen one since I came to Hades.”

“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law, you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.”

I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his “Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested, and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by saying that he never could speak without notes.

“If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by the Oslerized process. Charon would have to charter all the world’s warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.”

“We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell upon it.’”

“You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.”

“Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”

“Like an emetic, one thing brings up another,” put in Methuselah, anxious to throw up his grievance. “Having told us it is one’s duty to dismiss himself from the world, this authority very kindly suggested that a particular anæsthetic would be the best means for one’s transfer out of time. The edict has gone forth: All out at sixty. When the census-taker makes his rounds, he will say: ‘Age, if you please? Sixty? Kindly step into the asphyxiation chamber or into the ambulance where you will find a bottle awaiting you. Good-night’. Night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, has come too early. When a babe, he smelleth the bottle afar off and lo! children cry for the soothing syrup which the man would fain put away. Before his eye is dimmed by the sunset glow, the light of his life is quenched in four ounces of chloroform.

“According to this medical expert,” continued Methuselah, “when a man proposes to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by emigrating beyond the Styx, he is to buy a ticket and pay for it with poison or pistol. He is then fit only for the doctor and the refuse heap. Has it come to this? No twentieth century painless surgery for me, thank you. Long life is no longer a thing to long for. I would prefer to be kissed not by the dews of night but by the salutation of the glorious morning.”

“‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,’” exclaimed Solomon, who still the wisest of men, had hitherto kept silent. He was addressing Methuselah. “One may no longer tarry until his beard is grown and his hair is dyed. No longer may he come to his grave in a full age like as a shock of corn cometh in his season, and though it may go against the grain, the Grim Reaper stalks through the field, stopping up the ears with Osler’s Death Drugs.”

“The doctor is an homeopathist,” observed Sherlock Holmes, in a tone so decided that it left no question for argument.

“I’m not Watson,” I responded, “but of course I know you want some one to ask you how you know. Just to be accommodating, allow me to inquire how you can tell that Dr. Osler is an homeopathist when you haven’t even the ashes of his cigar to analyze? Do you mean because of small doses?”

“No; like cures like. Old men being a drug on the market, it takes a drug to remove them. Had he consulted me I would have recommended cocaine instead of chloroform.”

“Do you think that Dr. Osler will take his own medicine when the frost is on the temples and the anæsthetic’s handy?”

“Doctors never do. That may be because of professional etiquette, but it is more likely that the physicians recognize the truth of the saying about self-preservation being the first law of nature. Some doctors are so conscientious that they would rather be murdered by another physician than commit suicide themselves. You may depend upon it that there is no chloroform in Dr. Osler’s family medicine chest; he keeps it only for his patients!”