Part 1

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

ROBERT WEBSTER JONES

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

BY ROBERT WEBSTER JONES

[Illustration]

Publishers DORRANCE Philadelphia

COPYRIGHT 1922 DORRANCE & COMPANY, INC.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES 11

II QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED 20

III JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY 29

IV JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING 37

V KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP 43

VI BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE 50

VII HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS 56

VIII METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS 66

IX JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING 75

X SHAKESPEARE MENTIONS MOVIES 80

XI ADAM CONDEMNS PRESENT FASHIONS 88

XII CAPTAIN KIDD SPEAKS ON TAG DAYS 96

XIII ALFRED THE GREAT TRIES TO FIND PROSPEROUS KING 102

XIV OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION 111

XV KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES 116

XVI DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE “WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS” 123

XVII PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM 129

XVIII NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ 137

XIX LORD BACON MUSES ON CIPHERS 145

LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADES

I

BLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES

I drew this assignment to interview the shade of Bluebeard because our girl reporter backed out at the last minute,—said she had no objection to a nice, ladylike assignment such as getting Pharaoh’s daughter to talk about Annette Kellerman or having a chat with Joan of Ark, or whatever Mrs. Noah’s name was, but she balked at calling on a wife murderer who had never been introduced.

If I had not been warned in advance I should have thought this was surely an impostor—a barefaced one, too, for he wore no beard—to whose room I was ushered by a bellboy of the Olympus Hotel.

“Surprised at my appearance, eh?” he chuckled. “Everybody is. Expect to see a ferocious-looking monster with a long blue beard and a bowie knife sticking out of his belt. It’s about time the folks down below got the real facts, not only of my appearance but of my character. That’s why I’ve consented for the first time to talk for publication. I want to be set right in the eyes of those mistaken mortals. You are a young man and unmarried, I presume, from your happy, carefree countenance. Well, then, here is a thing I hope you’ll learn by heart: where singleness is bliss ’tis folly to have wives. I’ve tried it and I know. I, too, was once a happy, cheerful, careless bachelor, like Adam, you know. And like Adam I didn’t get my eyes opened until after marriage. By the way, speaking of Adam, did you ever pause to think that not until marriage came into the world did man have to dig for a living? Yet I digress. What I started out to say was that marriage is an excellent institution, but like all good things, it can be overdone. My mistake was in being too idealistic. I had resolved to find the ideal, the perfect wife, the kind you read about in poetry (a perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command). Well, my first wife laid too much emphasis on the ‘command.’ She took it literally. I found I had made a mistake and decided to bury it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Clementina was her name. She was not of a trustful nature. Invariably her first greeting on my returning home late at night took the sharply interrogatory form: ‘Where have you been?’ Frequently I would have been glad to tell her, only I could not remember. It has been said that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ but it did not seem to work out that way worth a cent at three o’clock in the morning. We had words, she seeking to obtain what she termed the ‘last’ one. But still there were always more to follow.

“I came in time to feel that I did not possess that treasure of treasures, a wife’s perfect confidence in her husband. One night, I remember, I started to get into bed with my overcoat on. It was merely a bit of harmless absent-mindedness. But Clementina continued to refer to the trifling incident daily, and nightly, for weeks afterwards. She even communicated the circumstance to friends and relatives, including her maternal parent, who naturally had no interest in the subject. When we were invited out to dinner she employed the incident as a conversational topic. I begged her to desist. She refused. I realized that it was high time to ‘try again.’ I need not go into details. But Clementina ceased to trouble and the weary was at rest. The coroner was a personal friend of mine. I had voted for him in three different precincts, and he kindly brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable uxoricide,’ or something of that sort, and everything was nice and comfortable.

“That was Clementina. Now let me see—let me see—who came next? Susannah? No, she was Number Three, I’m pretty sure. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but if I only had my old card index here I could tell you in two seconds. Sapphira? No, she came later. Oh, now I’ve got it: Maria. Yes, I had to get rid of Maria within a year. Nice, amiable girl she was, too, in most respects. Always had the meals on time, never hauled me out at night to call on the new neighbors, would rather darn socks for her husband than crochet a new sweater for herself, and had an impediment in her speech. I’d often heard there were such women, with impediments in their speech, but had never met one before. I thought it was a recommendation, but I was mistaken. It only made her take that much longer to say what she was going to say, anyway. When Maria and the impediment clashed it was always Maria that finally won out. But it took time. Verbally Maria required a long time to pass a given point, but she kept on until she passed it. Maria had one great fault. You’re not married, young man, and you may not grasp this defect in all its hideousness. But this was it: she always talked to me when I was trying to shave.

“At that time I wore a beard, but no side-whiskers, and I shaved every morning before breakfast. It was Maria’s invariable habit to stand at the bathroom door and engage in conversation—or rather monologue interspersed with questions. In consequence I got to spending more money for court-plaster than for shaving soap. A man stopped me on the street one day, gave a second look at my liberally-scarred countenance, and hailed me as a fellow graduate of Heidelberg. Finally, I decided that this business had gone on long enough. I gave Maria fair warning. The very next morning she stuck her head in at the door, just as I was trying to steer around a pimple below my right ear, and told me not to forget to bring home those lamb chops for dinner. I cut a gash an inch long and dropped the razor on the floor. That was Maria’s farewell appearance. There was no demand for an encore. The coroner kindly found that the impediment in her speech had stuck in her throat and she had choked to death. He was a good scout.

“And now we come to Susannah, Number Three, Series N. G. Susannah started out splendidly. She came highly recommended. I thought she was going to be one of the best wives I ever had. But, like all the others, she soon disclosed a fatal failing. I call it ‘fatal’ because it always turned out that way for all my wives. It may seem a trifle to you, young man, but that’s because you’ve never been married. The trouble was this, and it soon got on my sensitive nerves: the only time I could get Susannah’s absorbed, undivided attention was when I talked in my sleep. Then, I have reason to believe, she would sit up and listen by the hour. But at other times she might as well have been totally deaf, so far as paying attention to what I was trying to say was concerned. She always seemed to be thinking of something—I hope it wasn’t somebody—else. I’d start telling her about a business deal I’d just put through with some fellows up at Bagdad, or begin discussing the chances of the Damascus ball team for winning the pennant next year, and before I’d talked ten minutes I’d see as plain as day that she wasn’t hearing a word I said.

“She’d contracted the crocheting habit, too—I don’t know where she picked it up—and she’d work away, whispering to herself and nodding at me every now and then, until I thought I’d go wild. One night while I was right in the midst of telling her a funny story I’d heard at the Khayyam Country Club, she actually interrupted me to remark that she’d just found a new way of purling 14 by casting off 11 and dropping 34, or something of the sort, and I just up and—and— Well, there’s no need to harrow your feelings. Suffice it to say that I added one more to the Association of Former Mothers-in-Law of Bluebeard. Whenever one of my wives departed this life rather suddenly the ex-mothers-in-law always held a sort of indignation meeting. Sometimes they passed resolutions, too. But it didn’t seem to do any good. Just advertised the fact that I was a widower again. Didn’t seem to prejudice the girls against me. In fact, one leap-year I had to get a lot of rejection slips printed, like the magazine editors use, for replying to proposals. I read somewhere once that it always made a fellow popular to get a reputation as a lady-killer, and I seem to have proved it.

“And so it went. All the undertakers in town were trying to stand in with me. But I thought they went a little too far when they adopted a set of appreciative resolutions and invited me to address their annual convention. Some folks have no sense of propriety. The preachers showed more tact. It’s true that one offered to do all my marrying on the basis of a yearly contract, but that was a strictly private, business arrangement, the same as I had with the firm of caterers and liverymen which supplied both cakes and camels. I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off—Sapphira, who objected to my smoking in the front parlor; Anastasia, who believed the adjective ‘annual,’ as applied to house-cleanings, meant every week; Boadicea, who was strong for women’s rights, but refused to go downstairs first to tackle the burglar; Sheba, who took me along when she went shopping and parked me for two hours outside a department store; Delilah the Second, who wanted to cut my hair so as to save enough money to get herself a new winter hat, as if my overhead charges weren’t high enough already. These are just a few samples from my souvenir collection of matrimonial misfits that I happen to recall offhand. The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. If my experience helps other married men I shall be glad to have given this interview. I like to talk, because nowadays I feel I can do so without interrupting some wife or other. Just one word more, and then good night:

“There is no marrying in heaven. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

II

QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED

“Nothing would have induced me to talk for publication,” said Queen Elizabeth, as she negligently lit a cigarette and with a graceful gesture invited me to take a seat, “if you hadn’t printed that interview with that horrid old Bluebeard last week. They used to say that I was a heartless coquette, and that all the men were losing their heads over me. Well, if a young man had come to ask me, around the year 1588, why I had never married—as you have just done—he’d have lost his head in just about the time it would have taken the chief executioner to respond to a hurry call. But times have changed and we change with them. History has done many cruel wrongs to my memory, and I want to be set right. I didn’t stay single for lack of proposals, I can tell you. Why, before I was sixteen the front yard of our palace looked like a college campus, it was so full all the time of young men carrying flowers and boxes of candy and ringing the doorbell, wanting to know if Princess Elizabeth were in. I had every other girl in England jealous of me, if I do say it myself. But I saw too much of marriage at home. My father did enough marrying for the whole family.

“Life got to be just one stepmother after another. I began to lose count. I decided that one member of the family had given enough of a boost to the institution of matrimony, and it didn’t need any further endorsement from me. I soon appreciated the truth of the saying, ‘Man proposes.’ I got so many proposals I had my maids of honor knit a lot of mittens to hand to the fellows as a souvenir. Finally the men saw I was in earnest and let me alone; that is to say, most of them. A few foolish fellows continued to write poetry (that is what they called it) and send presents, but my mind was made up and I refused to change it. It was about this time that our court fool remarked that woman’s favorite occupations were changing her mind, her clothes and her name. And about five minutes afterward he changed his permanent address to the Tower of London. All the world’s a stage, as my friend Shakespeare used to say, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men consider themselves perfectly equipped for the rôle of comedian. But it’s possible to be too fatally funny.

“Now, about that interview with Brother Bluebeard last week. I suppose he thought _he_ was funny when he said about the only time a man gets his wife’s absorbed, undivided attention is when he talks in his sleep. But that’s about the only time a man says anything worth listening to. It just made my blood boil—that man Bluebeard calmly talking about the wives he’d killed. Not that I believe half of it. He was only boasting. And that reminds me: there used to be an organization called the Ananias Club. But who ever heard of a Sapphira Club? There wouldn’t be enough members to hold a meeting in a telephone booth. But ‘all men are liars,’ and married ones have more ready-made opportunities. It has been estimated that in a married lifetime of forty years the average man will be called upon to answer the perfectly reasonable inquiry, ‘Where have you been?’ 14,610 times. This calculation allows for 365 answers in each ordinary year and 366 in leap-years. And when her husband replies to her altogether proper interrogation, too often the wife realizes, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half has not been told her.

“From Ananias to Munchausen and down to the modern press agent, the experts at exaggeration have all been men. Fishermen’s tales and sailors’ yarns are proverbial. A woman trying to tell a lie feels like a fish out of water, and at the first opportunity flops back into the ocean of truth.

“There’s another slander on women I’d like to say a few words about, and that’s the charge of talkativeness. Men have always flocked to the talkative professions like ducks to water. Most lawyers and barbers are men. Are there any women auctioneers? There are few women preachers. There was a time when all the talking in the world was done by one man, but there was no conversation until the arrival of Eve. She did the listening. It is essential to conversation that there be a listener, and man’s happiness was not complete until there was somebody to hear him talk. The average husband loves to deliver home lectures on baseball in summer and politics in winter. Here we have the reason for the popularity of women’s clubs. No man being present, they have a chance to talk. Go into any church Sunday morning and what do you see? An audience composed principally of women listening to a man talking. The recording angel who tries to keep up with a man has to be an expert at taking lightning dictation. One of the newest works in three large volumes is entitled, ‘Last Words of Great Men.’ The edition makes no pretensions to being complete. That, of course, would be impossible when we have had so many great men, all of them talking steadily to the last. But it is worth noting that we have only meagre records of the last words of any great woman. Poor thing! With her husband, and a man doctor and a clergyman at her bedside, what chance would she have?

“I’ll admit that there have been a few of the so-called great men of history who have not been noted for their love of talk, but when such a man is discovered everybody calls attention to him as if he were a genuine curiosity of nature. He is usually given a nickname indicative of his peculiarity, such as William the Silent, and people travel miles to get a look at him. Practically every man is Speaker of the House, and in his case the title is no misnomer. For instance, it’s a question whether all the ancient martyrs put together ever said as much about their sufferings as one modern man with a boil on his neck. Man even goes ahead and invents new languages like Esperanto and baseball, and golf.

“Wives of great men most remind us that they talked all of the time, and departing left behind them words that were not worth a dime. Isn’t that what one of your own American poets said? Sounds something like it, anyway.

“But you wanted to know just why I never married. Well, it was because of these nasty flings at women by the men that I’ve just been speaking of. If they say such things before marriage, what won’t they say after? They’re always talking about women’s curiosity, starting with Eve and the apple. I suppose if there had been a _Saturday Eden Post_, Adam would have written alleged jokes about it or run a funny department called ‘Musings of a Married Man.’ I blame that Eve and her apple story for this eternal joshing about feminine curiosity. You needn’t look surprised, young man. I’m talking twentieth not sixteenth century language these days, and since yours is a family newspaper probably it’s just as well that I am. When I was queen you’d have thought the English language consisted principally of proper nouns and improper adjectives. We called a spade a spade, and then some. If a lady disliked a gentleman she didn’t say he was a mean old thing. She began by calling him a diabolical blackguard and horse thief, and then gradually grew abusive.

“Woman’s curiosity! All the census-takers and private detectives and professional Paul Pry’s who stick their noses into other people’s businesses are men. So are all the explorers, the individuals who are so curious to find out what’s going on at the other end of the earth that they can’t content themselves at home. If, in the history of the world, a woman has ever been seized by an overwhelming desire to see what the North Pole looks like, she has cleverly concealed the fact. While the men were organizing North Pole and South Pole expeditions, and relief expeditions, and expeditions to rescue the relief expeditions, the wives and mothers remained patiently on the job at home. And when the missing discoverers came back covered with hero medals, and suffering from chilblains, and writer’s cramp, and lecturer’s sore throat, and coupon-clipper’s thumb, the women never asked why heroine medals seem so scarce these days. Talk about curiosity! There’s a universal inquiry which is being put by some man to some woman in some part of the world at every second of every minute of the twenty-four hours, and it is this: ‘What did you do with that LAST money I gave you?’ There it is again, that insatiable curiosity of man which will not let him rest. Man is a perambulating question mark, the personification of the rising inflection, a chronic case of interrogationitis. And he has the nerve to talk about woman’s curiosity!”

“How about Sir Walter Raleigh?”

“Ah, young man, there are exceptions to every rule, and a woman is generally willing to take an exception. Walter was an awfully nice fellow, at first, but I was dreadfully disappointed in him. Do you know, that business of the velvet cloak and the mud puddle was only what you would call a grandstand play? I found out later. It was his last winter’s cloak, and he was just on his way to the Charing Cross rummage sale to give it away, when he happened to meet me. I know it’s so, because I got it straight at the meeting of the Westminster Sewing Society from the Countess of Leicester’s sister-in-law, who said she was told by the cousin of a woman who knew an intimate friend of a friend of Walter Raleigh’s aunt. And she said he actually laughed about it afterward!

“Do you wonder I stayed single? Perhaps I’ve said too much already, but one word more and I am finished. Do you know, young man, why women say marriage is a lottery? It is because they draw most of the blanks.”

Subdued, but with a sigh of relief, I withdrew hastily from the royal presence, feeling that “man’s inhumanity to man” wouldn’t be a marker to what would have happened to Queen Elizabeth’s husband.

III

JOHN PAUL JONES AND A GROGLESS NAVY

“Interview your great-uncle and find out what he thinks of our modern navy,” said the city editor.

“My great-uncle?” I asked.

“Admiral J. Paul Jones. Wasn’t he one of your distinguished relatives? You’ve got the same name.”

“Oh, Uncle John? I believe we are related, but he was one of the rough specimens—sort of a piece of bark on the family tree—other side of the family, you know.”

“Well, you may find his bark worse than his bite.”

“Which planet is his shade living on now, do you know?”

“Neptune, I presume.”

And that is where I found him. He gave me genial greeting.

“Shiver my timbers, but I’m glad to see you. Come alongside and cast anchor, my lad, and tell me what wind blew you here.”

I explained that the mighty world below was palpitating for a few timely remarks from its old fighting hero.

“Fire away, then,” he replied. “What’s the first question?”

“Do you believe, Admiral,” I asked, “that a navy can be run on water—that is to say, of course, the ships have to run on water ... but I mean the men. Do you think——” And then I got tangled up and came to a full stop, for the expression on the old sea dog’s face was a mixture of puzzlement and pugnacity.

“What do you mean?” he roared. “Not to give the men water in place of grog?”

His attitude was positively menacing. I began to grow nervous.