The Enchanted Typewriter

IV. A CHAT WITH XANTHIPPE

The machine stopped its clicking the moment I spoke, and the words, “Hullo, old chap!” were no sooner uttered than my face grew red as a carnation pink. I felt as if I had committed some dreadful faux-pas, and instead of gazing steadfastly into the vacant chair, as I had been wont to do in my conversation with Boswell, my eyes fell, as though the invisible occupant of the chair were regarding me with a look of indignant scorn.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“I should think you might,” returned the types. “Hullo, old chap! is no way to address a woman you've never had the honor of meeting, even if she is of the most advanced sort. No amount of newness in a woman gives a man the right to be disrespectful to her.”

“I didn't know,” I explained. “Really, miss, I—”

“Madame,” interrupted the machine, “not miss. I am a married woman, sir, which makes of your rudeness an even more reprehensible act. It is well enough to affect a good-fellowship with young unmarried females, but when you attempt to be flippant with a married woman—”

“But I didn't know, I tell you,” I appealed. “How should I? I supposed it was Boswell I was talking to, and he and I have become very good friends.”

“Humph!” said the machine. “You're a chum of Boswell's, eh?”

“Well, not exactly a chum, but—” I began.

“But you go with him?” interrupted the lady.

“To an extent, yes,” I confessed.

“And does he GO with you?” was the query. “If he does, permit me to depart at once. I should not feel quite in my element in a house where the editor of a Sunday newspaper was an attractive guest. If you like that sort of thing, your tastes—”

“I do not, madame,” I replied, quickly. “I prefer the opium habit to the Sunday-newspaper habit, and if I thought Boswell was merely a purveyor of what is known as Sunday literature, which depends on the goodness of the day to offset its shortcomings, I should forbid him the house.”

A distinct sigh of relief emanated from the chair.

“Then I may remain,” was the remark rapidly clicked off on the machine.

“I am glad,” said I. “And may I ask whom I have the honor of addressing?”

“Certainly,” was the immediate response. “My name is Socrates, nee Xanthippe.”

I instinctively cowered. Candidly, I was afraid. Never in my life before had I met a woman whom I feared. Never in my life have I wavered in the presence of the sex which cheers, but I have always felt that while I could hold my own with Elizabeth, withstand the wiles of Cleopatra, and manage the recalcitrant Katherine even as did Petruchio, Xanthippe was another story altogether, and I wished I had gone to the club. My first impulse was to call up-stairs to my wife and have her come down. She knows how to handle the new woman far better than I do. She has never wanted to vote, and my collars are safe in her hands. She has frequently observed that while she had many things to be thankful for, her greatest blessing was that she was born a woman and not a man, and the new women of her native town never leave her presence without wondering in their own minds whether or not they are mere humorous contributions of the Almighty to a too serious world. I pulled myself together as best I could, and feeling that my better-half would perhaps decline the proffered invitation to meet with one of the most illustrious of her sex, I decided to fight my own battle. So I merely said:

“Really? How delightful! I have always felt that I should like to meet you, and here is one of my devoutest wishes gratified.”

I felt cheap after the remark, for Mrs. Socrates, nee Xanthippe, covered five sheets of paper with laughter, with an occasional bracketing of the word “derisively,” such as we find in the daily newspapers interspersed throughout the after-dinner speeches of a candidate of another party. Finally, to my relief, the oft-repeated “Ha-ha-ha!” ceased, and the line, “I never should have guessed it,” closed her immediate contribution to our interchange of ideas.

“May I ask why you laugh?” I observed, when she had at length finished.

“Certainly,” she replied. “Far be it from me to dispute the right of a man to ask any question he sees fit to ask. Is he not the lord of creation? Is not woman his abject slave? I not the whole difference between them purely economic? Is it not the law of supply and demand that rules them both, he by nature demanding and she supplying?”

Dear reader, did you ever encounter a machine, man-made, merely a mechanism of ivory, iron, and ink, that could sniff contemptuously? I never did before this encounter, but the infernal power of either this type-writer or this woman who manipulated its keys imparted to the atmosphere I was breathing a sniffing contemptuousness which I have never experienced anywhere outside of a London hotel, and then only when I ventured, as few Americans have dared, to complain of the ducal personage who presided over the dining-room, but who, I must confess, was conquered subsequently by a tip of ten shillings.

At any rate, there was a sniff of contempt imparted, as I have said, to the atmosphere I was breathing as Xanthippe answered my question, and the sniff saved me, just as it did in the London hotel, when I complained of the lordly lack of manners on the part of the head waiter. I asserted my independence.

“Don't trouble yourself,” I put in. “Of course I shall be interested in anything you may choose to say, but as a gentleman I do not care to put a woman to any inconvenience and I do not press the question.”

And then I tried to crush her by adding, “What a lovely day we have had,” as if any subject other than the most commonplace was not demanded by the situation.

“If you contemplate discussing the weather,” was the retort, “I wish you would kindly seek out some one else with whom to do it. I am not one of your latter-day sit-out-on-the-stairs-while-the-others-dance girls. I am, as I have always been, an ardent admirer of principles, of great problems. For small talk I have no use.”

“Very well, madame—” I began.

“You asked me a moment ago why I laughed,” clicked the machine.

“I know it,” said I. “But I withdraw the question. There is no great principle involved in a woman's laughter. I have known women who have laughed at a broken heart, as well as at jokes, which shows that there is no principle involved there; and as a problem, I have never cared enough about why women laugh to inquire deeply into it. If she'll just consent to laugh, I'm satisfied without inquiring into the causes thereof. Let us get down to an agreeable basis for yourself. What problem do you wish to discuss? Servants, baby-food, floor-polish, or the number of godets proper to the skirt of a well-dressed woman?”

I was regaining confidence in myself, and as I talked I ceased to fear her. Thought I to myself, “This attitude of supreme patronage is man's safest weapon against a woman. Keep cool, assume that there is no doubt of your superiority, and that she knows it. Appear to patronize her, and her own indignation will defeat her ends.” It is a good principle generally. Among mortal women I have never known it to fail, and when I find myself worsted in an argument with one of man's greatest blessings, I always fall back upon it and am saved the ignominy of defeat. But this time I counted without my antagonist.

“Will you repeat that list of problems?” she asked, coldly.

“Servants, baby-food, floor-polish, and godets,” I repeated, somewhat sheepishly, she took it so coolly.

“Very well,” said Xanthippe, with a note of amusement in her manipulation of the keys. “If those are your subjects, let us discuss them. I am surprised to find an able-bodied man like yourself bothering with such problems, but I'll help you out of your difficulties if I can. No needy man shall ever say that I ignored his cry for help. What do you want to know about baby-food?”

This turning of the tables nonplussed me, and I didn't really know what to say, and so wisely said nothing, and the machine grew sharp in its clicking.

“You men!” it cried. “You don't know how fearfully shallow you are. I can see through you in a minute.”

“Well,” I said, modestly, “I suppose you can.” Then calling my feeble wit to my rescue, I added, “It's only natural, since I've made a spectacle of myself.”

“Not you!” cried Xanthippe. “You haven't even made a monocle of yourself.”

And here we both laughed, and the ice was broken.

“What has become of Boswell?” I asked.

“He's been sent to the ovens for ten days for libelling Shakespeare and Adam and Noah and old Jonah,” replied Xanthippe. “He printed an article alleged to have been written by Baron Munchausen, in which those four gentlemen were held up to ridicule and libelled grossly.”

“And Munchausen?” I cried.

“Oh, the Baron got out of it by confessing that he wrote the article,” replied the lady. “And as he swore to his confession the jury were convinced he was telling another one of his lies and acquitted him, so Boswell was sent up alone. That's why I am here. There isn't a man in all Hades that dared take charge of Boswell's paper—they're all so deadly afraid of the government, so I stepped in, and while Boswell is baking I'm attending to his editorial duties.”

“But you spoke contemptuously of the Sunday newspapers awhile ago, Mrs. Socrates,” said I.

“I know that,” said Xanthippe, “but I've fixed that. I get out the Sunday edition on Saturdays.”

“Oh—I see. And you like it?” I queried.

“First rate,” she replied. “I'm in love with the work. I almost wish poor old Bos had been sentenced for ten years. I have enough of the woman in me to love minding other people's business, and, as far as I can find out, that's about all journalism amounts to. Sewing societies aren't to be mentioned in the same day with a newspaper for scandal and gossip, and, besides, I'm an ardent advocate of men's rights—have been for centuries—and I've got my first chance now to promulgate a few of my ideas. I'm really a man in all my views of life—that's the inevitable end of an advanced woman who persists in following her 'newness' to its logical conclusion. Her habits of thought gradually come to be those of a man. Even I have a great deal more sympathy with Socrates than I used to have. I used to think I was the one that should be emancipated, but I'm really reaching that stage in my manhood where I begin to believe that he needs emancipation.”

“Then you admit, do you,” I cried, with great glee, “that this new-woman business is all Tommy-rot?”

“Not by a great deal,” snapped the machine. “Far from it. It's the salvation of the happy life. It is perfectly logical to say that the more manny a woman becomes, the more she is likely to sympathize with the troubles and trials which beset men.”

I scratched my head and pulled the lobe of my ear in the hope of loosening an argument to confront her with, not that I disagreed with her entirely, but because I instinctively desired to oppose her as pleasantly disagreeably as I could. But the result was nil.

“I'm afraid you are right,” I said.

“You're a truthful man,” clicked the machine, laughingly. “You are afraid I'm right. And why are you afraid? Because you are one of those men who take a cynical view of woman. You want woman to be a mere lump of sugar, content to be left in a bowl until it pleases you in your high-and-mightiness to take her in the tongs and drop her into the coffee of your existence, to sweeten what would otherwise not please your taste—and like most men you prefer two or three lumps to one.”

I could only cough. The lady was more or less right. I am very fond of sugar, though one lump is my allowance, and I never exceed it, whatever the temptation. Xanthippe continued.

“You criticise her because she doesn't understand you and your needs, forgetting that out of twenty-four hours of your daily existence your wife enjoys personally about twelve hours of your society, during eight of which you are lying flat on your back, snoring as though your life depended on it; but when she asks to be allowed to share your responsibilities as well as what, in her poor little soul, she thinks are your joys, you flare up and call her 'new' and 'advanced,' as if advancement were a crime. You ride off on your wheel for forty miles on your days of rest, and she is glad to have you do it, but when she wants a bicycle to ride, you think it's all wrong, immoral, and conducive to a weak heart. Bah!”

“I—ah—” I began.

“Yes you do,” she interrupted. “You ah and you hem and you haw, but in the end you're a poor miserable social mugwump, conscious of your own magnificence and virtue, but nobody else ever can attain to your lofty plane. Now what I want to see among women is more good fellows. Suppose you regarded your wife as good a fellow as you think your friend Jones. Do you think you'd be running off to the club every night to play billiards with Jones, leaving your wife to enjoy her own society?”

“Perhaps not,” I replied, “but that's just the point. My wife isn't a good fellow.”

“Exactly, and for that reason you seek out Jones. You have a right to the companionship of the good fellow—that's what I'm going to advocate. I've advanced far enough to see that on the average in the present state of woman she is not a suitable companion for man—she has none of the qualities of a chum to which he is entitled. I'm not so blind but that I can see the faults of my own sex, particularly now that I have become so very masculine myself. Both sexes should have their rights, and that is the great policy I'm going to hammer at as long as I have Boswell's paper in charge. I wish you might see my editorial page for to-morrow; it is simply fine. I urge upon woman the necessity of joining in with her husband in all his pleasures whether she enjoys them or not. When he lights a cigar, let her do the same; when he calls for a cocktail, let her call for another. In time she will begin to understand him. He understands her pleasures, and often he joins in with them—opera, dances, lectures; she ought to do the same, and join in with him in his pleasures, and after a while they'll get upon a common basis, have their clubs together, and when that happy time comes, when either one goes out the other will also go, and their companionship will be perfect.”

“But you objected to my calling you old chap when we first met,” said I. “Is that quite consistent?”

“Of course,” retorted the lady. “We had never met before, and, besides, doctors do not always take their own medicine.”

“But that women ought to become good fellows is what you're going to advocate, eh?” said I.

“Yes,” replied Xanthippe. “It's excellent, don't you think?”

“Superb,” I answered, “for Hades. It's just my idea of how things ought to be in Hades. I think, however, that we mortals will stick to the old plan for a little while yet; most of us prefer to marry wives rather than old chaps.”

The remark seemed so to affect my visitor that I suddenly became conscious of a sense of loneliness.

“I don't wish to offend you,” I said, “but I rather like to keep the two separate. Aren't you man enough yet to see the value of variety?”

But there was no answer. The lady had gone. It was evident that she considered me unworthy of further attention.

V. THE EDITING OF XANTHIPPE

After my interview with Xanthippe, I hesitated to approach the type-writer for a week or two. It did a great deal of clicking after the midnight hour had struck, and I was consumed with curiosity to know what was going on, but I did not wish to meet Mrs. Socrates again, so I held aloof until Boswell should have served his sentence. I was no longer afraid of the woman, but I do fear the good fellow of the weaker sex, and I deemed it just as well to keep out of any and all disputes that might arise from a casual conversation with a creature of that sort. An agreement with a real good fellow, even when it ends in a row, is more or less diverting; but a disputation with a female good fellow places a man at a disadvantage. The argumentum ad hominem is not an easy thing with men, but with women it is impossible. Hence, I let the type-writer click and ring for a fortnight.

Finally, to my relief, I recognized Boswell's touch upon the keys and sauntered up to the side of the machine.

“Is this Boswell—Jim Boswell?” I inquired.

“All that's left of him,” was the answer. “How have you been?”

“Very well,” said I. And then it seemed to me that tact required that I should not seem to know that he had been in the superheated jail of the Stygian country. So I observed, “You've been off on a vacation, eh?”

“How do you know that?” was the immediate response.

“Well,” I put in, “you've been absent for a fortnight, and you look more or less—ah—burned.”

“Yes, I am,” replied the deceitful editor. “Very much burned, in fact. I've been—er—I've been playing golf with a friend down in Cimmeria.”

“I envy you,” I observed, with an inward chuckle.

“You wouldn't if you knew the links,” replied Boswell, sadly. “They're awfully hard. I don't know any harder course than the Cimmerian.”

And then I became conscious of a mistrustful gaze fastened upon me.

“See here,” clicked the machine. “I thought I was invisible to you? If so, how do you know I look burned?”

I was cornered, and there was only one way out of it, and that was by telling the truth. “Well, you are invisible, old chap,” I said. “The fact is, I've been told of your trouble, and I know what you have undergone.”

“And who told you?” queried Boswell.

“Your successor on the Gazette, Madame Socrates, nee Xanthippe,” I replied.

“Oh, that woman—that woman!” moaned Boswell, through the medium of the keys. “Has she been here, using this machine too? Why didn't you stop her before she ruined me completely?”

“Ruined you?” I cried.

“Well, next thing to it,” replied Boswell. “She's run my paper so far into the ground that it will take an almighty powerful grip to pull it out again. Why, my dear boy, when I went to—to the ovens, I had a circulation of a million, and when I came back that woman had brought it down to eight copies, seven of which have already been returned. All in ten days, too.”

“How do you account for it?” I asked.

“'Side Talks with Men' helped, and 'The Man's Corner' did a little, but the editorial page did the most of it. It was given over wholly to the advancement of certain Xanthippian ideas, which were very offensive to my women readers, and which found no favor among the men. She wants to change the whole social structure. She thinks men and women are the same kind of animal, and that both need to be educated on precisely the same lines—the girls to be taught business, the boys to go through a course of domestic training. She called for subscriptions for a cooking-school for boys, and demanded the endowment of a commercial college for girls, and wound up by insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell you, if you'd worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper the way I have, it would have broken your heart to see the suggested fashion-plates that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror. It was a combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers were to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted. Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes cropped up everywhere. Imagine it if you can—and everybody in all Hades was to be forced into garments of that sort!”

“I should enjoy seeing it,” I said.

“Possibly—but you wouldn't enjoy wearing it,” retorted the machine. “And then that woman's funny column—it was frightful. You never saw such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a covert attack upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that was a bit of verse called 'Fair Play for the Little Girls.' It went like this:

“That isn't at all bad,” said I, smiling in spite of poor Boswell's woe. “If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I don't see why the circulation fell off.”

“Well, she took liberties, that's all,” said Boswell. “For instance, in her 'Side Talks with Men' she had something like this: 'Napoleon—It is rather difficult to say just what you can do with your last season's cocked-hat. If you were to purchase five yards of one-inch blue ribbon, cut it into three strips of equal length, and fasten one end to each of the three corners of the hat, tying the other ends into a choux, it would make a very acceptable work-basket to send to your grandmother at Christmas.' Now Napoleon never asked that woman for advice on the subject. Then there was an answer to a purely fictitious inquiry from Solomon which read: 'It all depends on local custom. In Salt Lake City, and in London at the time of Henry the Eighth, it was not considered necessary to be off with the old love before being on with the new, but latterly the growth of monopolistic ideas tends towards the uniform rate of one at a time.' A purely gratuitous fling, that was, at one of my most eminent patrons, or rather two of them, for latterly both Solomon and Henry the Eighth have yielded to the tendency of the times and gone into business, which they have paid me well to advertise. Solomon has established an 'Information Bureau,' where advice can always be had from the 'Wise-man,' as he calls himself, on payment of a small fee; while Henry, taking advantage of his superior equipment over any English king that ever lived, has founded and liberally advertised his 'Chaperon Company (Limited).' It's a great thing even in Hades for young people to be chaperoned by an English queen, and Henry has been smart enough to see it, and having seven or eight queens, all in good standing, he has been doing a great business. Just look at it from a business point of view. There are seven nights in every week, and something going on somewhere all the time, and queens in demand. With a queen quoted so low as $100 a night, Henry can make nearly $5000 a week, or $260,000 a year, out of evening chaperonage alone; and when, in addition to this, yachting-parties up the Styx and slumming-parties throughout the country are being constantly given, the man's opportunity to make half a million a year is in plain sight. I'm told that he netted over $500,000 last year; and of course he had to advertise to get it, and this Xanthippe woman goes out of her way to get in a nasty little fling at one of my mainstays for his matrimonial propensities.”

“Failing utterly to see,” said I, “that, in marrying so many times, Henry really paid a compliment to her sex which is without parallel in royal circles.”

“Well, nearly so,” said Boswell. “There have been other kings who were quite as complimentary to the ladies, but Henry was the only man among them who insisted on marrying them all.”

“True,” said I. “Henry was eminently proper—but then he had to be.”

“Yes,” said Boswell, with a meditative tap on the letter Y. “Yes—he had to be. He was the head of the Church, you know.”

“I know it,” I put in. “I've always had a great deal of sympathy for Henry. He has been very much misjudged by posterity. He was the father of the really first new woman, Elizabeth, and his other daughter, Mary, was such a vindictive person.”

“You are a very fair man, for an American,” said Boswell. “Not only fair, but rare. You think about things.”

“I try to,” said I, modestly. “And I've really thought a great deal about Henry, and I've truly seen a valid reason for his continuous matrimonial performances. He set himself up against the Pope, and he had to be consistent in his antagonism.”

“He did, indeed,” said Boswell. “A religious discussion is a hard one.”

“And Henry was consistent in his opposition,” said I. “He didn't yield a jot on any point, and while a great many people criticise him on the score of his wives—particularly on their number—I feel that I have in very truth discovered his principle.”

“Which was?” queried Boswell.

“That the Pope was wrong in all things,” said I.

“So he said,” commented Boswell.

“And being wrong in all things, celibacy was wrong,” said I.

“Exactly,” ejaculated Boswell.

“Well, then,” said I, “if celibacy is wrong, the surest way to protest against it is to marry as many times as you can.”

“By Jove!” said Boswell, tapping the keys yearningly, as though he wished he might spare his hand to shake mine, “you are a man after my own heart.”

“Thanks, old chap,” said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—“thanks. I've studied these things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of the English Church. He wasn't willing to be married a second or a seventh time unless he was really a widower. He wasn't as long in taking notice again as some modern widowers that I have met, but I do not criticise him on that score. I merely attribute his record to his kingly nature, which involves necessarily a quickness of decision and a decided perception of the necessities which is sadly lacking in people who are born to a lesser station in life. England demanded a queen, and he invariably met the demand, which shows that he knew something of political economy as well as of matrimony; and as I see it, being an American, a man needs to know something of political economy to be a good ruler. So many of our statesmen have acquired a merely kindergarten knowledge of the science, that we have had many object-lessons of the disadvantages of a merely elementary knowledge of the subject. To come right down to it, I am a great admirer of Henry. At any rate, he had the courage of his heart-convictions.”

“You really surprise me,” tapped Boswell. “I never expected to find an American so thoroughly in sympathy with kings and their needs.”

“Oh, as for that,” said I, “in America we are all kings and we are not without our needs, matrimonial and otherwise, only our courts are not quite so expeditious as Henry's little axe. But what was Henry's attitude towards this extraordinary flight of Xanthippe's?”

“Wrath,” said Boswell. “He was very much enraged, and withdrew his advertisements, declined to give our society reporters the usual accounts of the functions his wives chaperoned, and, worst of all, has withdrawn himself and induced others to withdraw from the symposium I was preparing for my special Summer Girls' issue, which is to appear in August, on 'How Men Propose.' He and Brigham Young and Solomon and Bonaparte had agreed to dictate graphic accounts of how they had done it on various occasions, and Queen Elizabeth, who probably had more proposals to the square minute that any other woman on record, was to write the introduction. This little plan, which was really the idea of genius, is entirely shattered by Mrs. Socrates's infernal interference.”

“Nonsense,” said I. “Don't despair. Why don't you come out with a plain statement of the facts? Apologize.”

“You forget, my dear sir,” interposed Boswell, “that one of the fundamental principles of Hades as an institution is that excuses don't count. It isn't a place for repentance so much as for expiation, and I might apologize nine times a minute for forty years and would still have to suffer the penalty of the offence. No, there is nothing to be done but to begin my newspaper work again, build up again the institution that Xanthippe has destroyed, and bear my misfortunes like a true spirit.”

“Spoken like a philosopher!” I cried. “And if I can help you, my dear Boswell, count upon me. In anything you may do, whether you start a monthly magazine, a sporting weekly, or a purely American Sunday newspaper, you are welcome to anything I can do for you.”

“You are very kind,” returned Boswell, appreciatively, “and if I need your services I shall be glad to avail myself of them. Just at present, however, my plans are so fully prepared that I do not think I shall have to call upon you. With Sherlock Holmes engaged to write twelve new detective stories; Poe to look after my tales of horror; D'Artagnan dictating his personal memoirs; Lucretia Borgia running my Girls' Department; and others too numerous to mention, I have a sufficient supply of stuff to fill up; but if you feel like writing a few poems for me I may be able to use them as fillers, and they may help to make your name so well known in Hades that next year I shall be able to print a Worldly Letter from you every week with a good chance of its proving popular.”

And with this promise Boswell left me to get out the first number of The Cimmerian: a Sunday Magazine for all. Taking him at his word, I sent him the following poem a few days later:

I had intended this for one of our leading magazines, but it seemed so to lack the mystical quality, which is essential to a successful magazine poem in our sphere, that I deemed it best to try it on Boswell.

VI. THE BOSWELL TOURS: PERSONALLY CONDUCTED

It was and will no doubt be considered, even by those who are not too friendly towards myself, a daring idea, and it was all my own. One night, several weeks after the interview with Boswell just narrated, the idea came to me simultaneously with the first tapping of the keys for the evening upon the Enchanted Type-Writer. It was Boswell's touch that summoned me from my divan. My family were on the eve of departure for a month's rest from care and play in the mountains, and I was looking forward to a period of very great loneliness. But as Boswell materialized and began his work upon the machine, the great idea flashed across my mind, and I resolved to “play it” for all it was worth.

“Jim,” said I, as I approached the vacant chair in which he sat—for by this time the great biographer and I had got upon terms of familiarity—“Jim,” said I, “I've got a very gloomy prospect ahead of me.”

“Well, why not?” he tapped off. “Where do you expect to have your gloomy prospects? They can't very well be behind you.”

“Humph!” said I. “You are facetious this evening.”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I have been spending the day with my old-time boss, Samuel Johnson, and I am so saturated with purism that I hardly know where I am. From the Johnsonian point of view you have expressed yourself ill—”

“Well, I am ill,” I retorted. “I don't know how far you are acquainted with home life, but I do know that there is no greater homesickness in the world than that of the man who is sick of home.”

“I am not an imitator,” said Boswell, “but I must imitate you to the extent of saying humph! I quote you, and, doing so, I honor you. But really, I never thought you could be sick of home, as you put it—you who are so happy at home and who so wildly hate being away from home.”

“I'm not surprised at that, my dear Boswell,” said I. “But you are, of course, familiar with the phrase 'Stone walls do not a prison make?'”

“I've heard it,” said Boswell.

“Well, there's another equally valid phrase which I have not yet heard expressed by another, and it is this: 'Stone walls do not a home make.'”

“It isn't very musical, is it?” said he.

“Not very,” I answered, “but we don't all live magazine lives, do we? We have occasionally a sentiment, a feeling, out of which we do not try 'to make copy.' It is undoubtedly a truth which I have not yet seen voiced by any modern poet of my acquaintance, not even by the dead-baby poets, that home is not always preferable to some other things. At any rate, it is my feeling, and is shortly to represent my condition. My home, you know. It has its walls and its pictures, and its thousand and one comforts, and its associations, but when my wife and my children are away, and the four walls do not re-echo the voices of the children, and my library lacks the presence of madame, it ceases truly to be home, and if I've got to stay here during the month of August alone I must have diversion, else I shall find myself as badly off as the butterfly man, to whom a vaudeville exhibition is the greatest joy in life.”

“I think you are queer,” said Boswell.

“Well, I am not,” said I. “However low we may set the standard of man, Mr. B.”—and I called him Mr. B. instead of Jim, because I wished to be severe and yet retain the basis of familiarity—“however low we may set the standard of man, I think man as a rule prefers his home to the most seductive roof-garden life in existence.”

“Wherefore?” said he, coldly.

“Wherefore my home about to become unattractive through the absence of my boys and their mother, I shall need some extraordinary diversion to accomplish my happiness. Now if you can come here, why can't others? Suppose to-night you dash off on the machine a lot of invitations to the pleasantest people in Hades to come up here with you and have an evening on earth, which isn't all bad.”

“It's a scheme and a half,” said Boswell, with more enthusiasm than I had expected. “I'll do it, only instead of trying to get these people to make a pilgrimage to your shrine, which I think they would decline to do—Shakespeare, for instance, wouldn't give a tuppence to inspect your birthplace as you have inspected his—I'll institute a series of 'Boswell's Personally Conducted Pleasure Parties,' and make you my agent here. That, you see, will naturally make your home our headquarters, and I think the scheme would work a charm, because there are a great many well-known Stygians who are curious to revisit the scenes of their earlier state, but who are timid about coming on their own responsibility.”

“I see,” said I. “Immortals are but mortal after all, with all the timidity and weaknesses of mortality. But I agree to the proposition, and if you wish it I'll prepare to give them a rousing old time.”

“And be sure to show them something characteristic,” said Boswell.

“I will,” I replied; “I may even get up a trolley-party for them.”

“I don't know what a trolley-party is, but it sounds well,” said Boswell, “and I'll advertise the enterprise at once. 'Boswell's Personally Conducted Pleasure Parties. First Series, No. 1. Trolleying Through Hoboken. For the Round Trip, Four Dollars. Supper and All Expenses Included. No Tips. Extra Lady's Ticket, One Dollar.'”

“Hold on!” I cried. “That can't be. These affairs will really have to be stag-parties—with my wife away, you know.”

“Not if we secure a suitable chaperon,” said Boswell.

“Anyhow!” said I, with great positiveness. “You don't suppose that in the absence of my family I'm going to have my neighbors see me cavorting about the country on a trolley-car full of queens and duchesses and other females of all ages? Not a bit of it, my dear James. I'm not a strictly conventional person, but there are some points between which I draw lines. I've got to live on this earth for a little while yet, and until I leave it I must be guided more or less in what I do by what the world approves or disapproves.”

“Very well,” Boswell answered. “I suppose you are right, but in the autumn, when your family has returned—”

“We can discuss the matter again,” said I, resolved to put off the question for as long a time as I could, for I candidly confess that I had no wish to make myself responsible for the welfare of such Stygian ladies as might avail themselves of the opportunity to go off on one of Boswell's tours. “Show the value and beauties of your plan to the influential men of Hades first, my dear Boswell,” I added, “and then if they choose they can come again and bring their wives with them on their own responsibility.”

“I fancy that is the best plan, but we ought to have some variety in these tours,” he replied. “A trolley-party, however successful, would not make a great season for an entertainment bureau, would it?”

“No, indeed,” said I. “You are perfectly right about that. What you want is one function a week during the summer season. Open with the trolley-party as No. 1 of your first series. Follow this with 'An Evening of Vaudeville: The Grand Tour of the Roof Gardens.' After that have a 'Sunday at the Sea-side—Surf Bathing, Summer Girls and Sand.' That would make a mighty attractive line for your advertisement.”

“Magnificent. I don't see why you don't give up poetry and magazine work and get a position as poster-writer for a circus. You are only a mediocre magazinist, but in the poster business you'd be a genius.”

This was tapped off with such manifest sincerity that I could not take offence, so I thanked him and resumed.

“The grand finale of your first series might be 'A Tandem Scorch: A Century Run on a Bicycle Built for Two Hundred!'”

“Magnificent!” cried Boswell, with such enthusiasm that I feared he would smash the machine. “I'll devote a whole page of my Sunday issue to the prospectus—but, to return to the woman question, we ought really to have something to announce for them. Hades hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can't afford to scorn the sex. You needn't have anything to do with them if you don't want to—only tell me something I can announce, and I'll make Henry the Eighth solid again by putting that branch of the enterprise in his wives' hands. In that way I'll kill two birds with one stone.”

“That's all very well, Boswell, but I'm afraid I can't,” said I. “It's hard enough to know how to please a mortal woman without attempting to get up a series of picnics for the rather miscellaneous assortment of ladies who form your social structure below. All men are alike, and man's pleasures in all times have been generally the same, but every woman is unique. I never knew two who were alike, and if it's all the same to you I'd rather you left me out of your ladies' tours altogether. Of course I know that even the Queen of Sheba would enjoy a visit to a Monday sale at one of our big department stores, and I am quite as well aware that nine out of ten women in Hades or out of it would enjoy the millinery exhibition at the opera matinee—and if these two ideas impress you at all you are welcome to them—but beyond this I have nothing to suggest.”

“Well, I'm sure those two ideas are worth a great deal,” returned Boswell, making a note of them; “I shall announce four trips to Monday sales—”

“Call 'em 'To Bargaindale and Back: The Great Marked-down Tour,' and be sure you add, 'For Able-bodied Women Only. No Tickets Issued Except on Recommendation of your Family Physician.' This is especially important, for next to a war or a football match there's nothing that I know of that is quite so dangerous to the participants as a bargain day.”

“I'll bear what you say in mind,” quoth Boswell, and he made a note of my injunction. “And immediately upon my return to Hades I will request an audience with Henry's queens, and ask them to devise a number of other tours likely to prove profitable and popular.”

Shortly after my visitor departed and I retired. The next day my family deserted me and went to the mountains, and all my fears as to the inordinate sense of loneliness which was to be my lot were realized. Even Boswell neglected me apparently for a week. I went to my desk daily and returned at night hoping that my type-writer would bring forth something of an interesting nature, but naught other than disappointment awaited me. For a whole blessed week I was thrown back upon the society of my neighbors for diversion. The type-writer gave no sign of being.

Little did I guess that Boswell was busy working up my scheme in his Stygian home!

But it came to pass finally that I was roused up. Walking one morning to my desk to find a bit of memoranda I needed, I discovered a type-written slip marked, “No time for small talk. Boswell's tours grand success. Trolley-party to-night. Ten cars wanted. Jim.”

It was a large order for a town like mine, where forty thousand people have to get along with five cars—two open ones for winter and two closed for summer, and one, which we have never seen, which is kept for use in the repair-shop. I was in despair. Ten car-loads of immortals coming to my house for a trolley-party under such conditions! It was frightful! I did the best I could, however.

I ordered one trolley-car to be ready at eight, and a large variety of good things edible and drinkable, the latter to be held subject to the demand-notes of our guests.

As may be imagined, I did little real work that day, and when I returned home at night I was on tenter-hooks lest something should go wrong; but fortunately Boswell himself came early and relieved me of my worry—in fact, he was at the machine when I entered the house.

“Well,” he said, “have you the ten cars?”

“What do you take me for,” said I, “a trolley-car trust? Of course I haven't. There are only five cars in town, one of which is kept in the repair-shop for effect. I've hired one.”

“Humph!” he cried. “What will the kings do?”

“Kings!” I cried. “What kings?”

“I have nine kings and one car-load of common souls besides for this affair,” he explained. “Each king wants a special car.”

“Kings be jiggered!” said I. “A trolley-party, my much beloved James, is an essentially democratic institution, and private cars are not de rigueur. If your kings choose to come, let 'em hang on by the straps.”

“But I've charged 'em extra!” cried Boswell.

“That's all right,” said I, “they receive extra. They have the ride plus the straps, with the privilege of standing out on the platform and ringing the gong if they want to. The great thing about the trolley-party is that there's no private car business about it.”

“Well, I don't know,” Boswell murmured, reflectively. “If Charles the First and Louis Fourteenth don't kick about being crowded in with all the rest, I can stand anything that Frederick the Great or Nero might say; but those two fellows are great sticklers for the royal prerogative.”

“There isn't any such thing as royal prerogative on a trolley-car,” I retorted, “and if they don't like what they get they can sit down in the waiting-room and wait until we get back.”

But Boswell's fears were not realized. Charles and Louis were perfectly delighted with the trolley-party, and long before we reached home the former had rung up the fare-register to its full capacity, while the latter, a half-a-dozen times, delightedly occupied himself in mastering the intricacies of the overhead wire. The trolley-party was an undoubted success. The same remains to be said of the vaudeville expedition of the following week. The same guests and potentates attended this, to the number of twenty, and the Boswell tours were accounted a great enterprise, and bade fair to redeem the losses of the eminent journalist incurred during Xanthippe's administration of his affairs; but after the bicycle night I had to withdraw from the combination to save my reputation. The fact upon which I had not counted was that my neighbors began to think me insane. I had failed to remember that none of these visiting spirits was visible to us in this material world, and while my fellow-townsmen were disposed to lay up my hiring of a special trolley-car for my own private and particular use against the eccentricity of genius, they marvelled greatly that I should purchase twenty of the best seats at a vaudeville show seemingly for my own exclusive use. When, besides this, they saw me start off apparently alone on one tandem bicycle, followed by twenty-eight other empty wheels, which they could not know were manipulated by some of the most famous legs in the history of the world, from Noah's down to those of Henry Fielding the novelist, they began to regard me as something uncanny.

Nor can I blame them. It seems to me that if I saw one man scorching along a road alone on a tandem bicycle chatting to an empty front-seat, I should think him queer, but if following in his wake I perceived twenty-eight other wheels, scorching up hill and down dale without any visible motive power, I should regard him as one who was in league with the devil himself.

Nevertheless, I judge from what Boswell has told me that I am regarded in Hades as a great benefactor of the people there, for having established a series of excursions from that world into this, a service which has done much to convince the Stygians that after all, if only by contrast, the life below has its redeeming features.