Part 2

“Why—er—that is the idea, Admiral. Do you believe it is possible to conduct a navy efficiently on prohibition principles?”

“Prohibition? Never heard the word before. And now that I have heard it I don’t like the sound of it. What are you jibbing and windjamming in this way for? Come right out and run up your true colors. Do you mean to tell me that anybody is seriously proposing to do away with grog in the American Navy? I’d hang the dastardly rascal from the yard-arm. Walking the plank would be too good for him.”

“Well, Admiral, you might as well know the whole truth. Grog has not only been abolished in the Navy (and that took place some years ago), grog has been abolished throughout the country. Liquor can neither be manufactured nor sold anywhere in the United States.”

Perhaps I should have broken the startling news to the old fellow more gently. But instead of the expected outburst of anger he sat stunned, still as a statue, or a speak-easy in Harlem.

For two minutes or more he kept silent. Then he spoke. “Say it again,” he muttered in a weak tone, “and say it slow.”

I complied.

“No grog for them as fights the battles, no whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum, nothin’ but milk and water. What kind o’ putty-faced swabs—But I needn’t ask. I see it now. You’ve been conquered by them Turks and water-drinking Mohammedans. But who’d have thought it?” And he shook his grizzled head disconsolately. “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum,” he went on muttering to himself as in a daze, over and over again, until I thought it might be advisable to recall him to himself.

“America thinks a great deal of you, Admiral,” I interrupted his melancholy monologue. “The nation cherishes the memory of your thrilling exploits. It will never forget your heroic deeds.”

The old Admiral brightened up a bit at this, but quickly relapsed into his melancholy mood. “No whiskey, no brandy—” he began again, when I tried the effect of another diversion.

“The nation is still safe, Admiral, and it has the largest number of ships and sailors in its history. The recent great war produced its heroes, too. We do not lack for defenders, you will be glad to know, if ever America is assailed again.”

“Yes, I’ve heard something about it,” he grumblingly admitted. “There’s a new-fangled cowardly sort of craft that goes under water and stabs in the back, a regular assassin, I call it. Farragut and Perry and some of the boys went down to perform at a seance in Philadelphia the other night, and they heard a lot of talk about your new naval heroes that have made us back numbers. There was Sims, and Daniels, and Benson, and—and—Admiral What’s-his-name? I can’t just think of it. Gray? No, that’s not it exactly. Admiral—Admiral—”

“Not Grayson?”

“Yes, that’s it, Rear Admiral Grayson. His flagship was the _George Washington_, I believe. And Admiral Denby, what did he do? I just can’t recollect on the moment.”

“Mr. Denby is not an Admiral; he’s the Secretary of the Navy. He’s not supposed to go to sea. He sits at a desk, instead of standing on a deck.”

“Oh, I see. But Rear Admiral Grayson? I wish you would describe some of his exploits to me.”

“Well-er—that’s a little difficult to explain, Admiral Jones, for you have been so long out of touch with our system. Admiral Grayson is really a doctor, and—”

“You mean the admirals say he is a doctor and the doctors say he is an admiral?”

“Oh, no, Admiral, not so bad as that. He is a medical admiral, not a fighting admiral. Rear Doctor—I mean Rear Admiral—Grayson was a naval surgeon, and he has been regularly promoted to the post of rear admiral. His job was looking after the President’s health, and all agree that he tendered good service.”

“Oh, a medical admiral, eh?” grumbled the old sea dog in a disappointed tone. “So that’s what he is. I can see him now, standing on the bridge of the good ship _Calomel_, stethoscope in hand, studying the symptoms of the approaching foe, writing the battle orders on prescription blanks and getting ready to fire a volley of quinine pills, three times a day before meals, at the hated enemy. I can see him taking the temperatures of the crew before going into action, and then, with a lancet in one hand and a scalpel in the other, preparing to repel boarders. I can see him charging the enemy (five dollars a visit, half price for office calls, consultations fifteen, operations, what you’ve got), I can hear the ringing words of command to candidates for vaccination: ‘Present arms.’ I can see him, with his trusty clinical thermometer and his rapid firing hypodermic, bravely—”

“You’ve got the wrong idea, entirely, Admiral Jones,” I hastened to interrupt. “It’s different from your day. None of our admirals do any hand-to-hand encounters. There are no more clashes at close quarters. Sometimes ships fight each other four or five miles apart.”

The grizzled veteran looked as if he scarcely understood what I was saying.

“No coming together with grappling irons, and fighting it out fair and square with pistols and cutlasses on the quarterdeck? A modern naval battle is just a long-distance artillery duel between Sunday School classes composed of total abstainers, as likely as not commanded by a specialist on whooping cough and measles? I guess it’s a good thing I shuffled off when I did. In my time a sea fight was more a matter of men than of machinery. I wouldn’t know how to go about it today. Everything is changed. I’m sure I’d forget to order a double round of hot lemonade for all the crew, instead of a stiff glass of grog, before going into an engagement. I must tell Farragut about it. I suppose they wouldn’t let him say anything stronger than ‘_Darn_ the torpedoes,’ or ‘Oh, fudge,’ if he were down on the job today. And Commodore Perry: ‘We have met the enemy and made ’em all sign the pledge.’ That’s the sort of message he’d be expected to send nowadays. I suppose with all these new-fangled inventions you’ve been telling me about, wireless, and range-finders, and searchlights, and turbines, and seaplanes and torpedoes and all the rest of ’em, a fellow has to stay sober to work ’em. In my day we always considered that a man fought better when he was about three sheets in the wind. I don’t say our ways were perfect, but I’m sure I wouldn’t feel at home on one of your big floating machine shops. I’d forget myself sometimes and want to get close enough to the enemy to see him without a telescope—or a stethoscope.

“Well, you’ll have to excuse me now, my lad. I have a date with Lord Nelson for three o’clock, to join in the historic and comforting ceremony known as splicing the main brace. I’ll break the news to him about what you’ve just been telling me. He’ll need a bracer after he hears it.”

And as the old hero hobbled away I could hear him muttering to himself: “No whiskey, no brandy, no shandy-gaff, no Jamaikey rum; water, water everywhere, but not a drop o’ drink.”

IV

JOSHUA ADVISES DAYLIGHT SAVING

“How about an interview with one of the shades on daylight saving?” I suggested timidly, as the city editor was racking what he calls his brain in search of a suitable assignment.

“Right! Get hold of one of the old astronomers, Galileo, or Ike Newton, or—or—”

“How would Joshua do?”

“Joshua? You don’t mean Josh Whitcomb? He wasn’t a real character. He was only—”

“No, I mean the Biblical Joshua—fellow who made the sun stand still. That’s what our modern clock-fixers are trying to do. And as the pioneer, the original inventor of the scheme, a few views on his twentieth century imitators ought to be interesting.”

“Go to it. He can’t make the situation any more confusing than it is already.”

I found the ancient prophet reclining under his own vine and fig tree, studying a brightly colored seed catalogue. With alacrity he accepted my invitation to talk for publication.

“Daylight saving, eh?” he mused. “It’s odd how you moderns never seem to get any ideas of your own. Always the same old thing over again. There’s nothing new under the sun. And now you’re trying to beat old Tempus Fidgets with what you imagine is a brand new scheme, but really is older than Solomon’s mother-in-law. What do you expect to get out of it, anyway?”

I started to explain how getting up an hour earlier in the morning through putting the clocks ahead gave us an additional hour of daylight at the other end of the day, when the old prophet cut in: “Just fooling yourselves, eh, a great, big game of make-believe by grown-ups in order to have a little more time for play? You move the clock forward and pretend it’s an hour later, by general agreement? Well, why don’t you extend the idea while you’re about it and apply it to other things besides clocks and time?”

“What, for instance, Mr. Joshua?”

“Well, take the thermometer, an instrument that’s been invented since my time. When I lived on earth we never suffered much from either heat or cold, because we hadn’t any thermometers to tell us that we were uncomfortable. If it were one hundred and ten in the mighty scarce shade out on the desert, we didn’t know it. Eighty-five or a hundred and fifteen—it was all the same to us. We never had any hot waves. There were no daily lists of heat victims. The thermometer liar was unknown. Nobody was initiated into the Ananias Club for boasting that the thermometer on his back porch hadn’t in fifteen years varied a degree from the official weatherman’s. We may have felt a little warmer under the mantle some days than others, but we couldn’t tell in degrees how uncomfortable we were, and so we were spared a lot of suffering. It’s the thermometer that makes you moderns take such a morbid interest in the weather. If you hadn’t any means of measuring the heat and the cold, why, you wouldn’t care anything about them. I was a prophet, but I never went so far as to dare to prophesy the weather. I knew my limitations. But your government guessers, backed up by their thermometers, seem willing to take any chances. Now, I suppose it’s too much to expect you to abolish your worrisome thermometers entirely, but why not take a hint from your daylight saving business and tinkering with the clock twice a year, and do a little fixing of your thermometers?

“For example? Well, for a beginning you would have to adopt a new kind of thermometer with changeable or removable figures. On April first of each year let everybody mark his thermometer down ten degrees. That is to say, the present figure ninety would be replaced by eighty, and eighty by seventy, and so on. The first hot spell would prove the practicability of the device. The scheme is purely psychological, of course, but so is daylight saving. Under the old pessimistic thermometer, which has done so much to encourage the Society for the Promotion of Justifiable Profanity, the temperature, we will say, would be eighty-five degrees in the shade, provided you could find any. But according to the marked-down thermometer it would be only seventy-five, just warm enough to sit comfortably on the front porch and smoke your pipe and read the paper while your wife was washing the dishes in the kitchen. Then in mid-July along comes what, under the old arrangement, would have been a regular scorcher, with the mercury registering ninety-two and all the meteorological Munchausens in town down at the corner drugstore boasting that their pet instruments were registering one hundred and two plus, in the shade. But the optimistic thermometer, operating under the universal heat-saving law, would record only eighty-two degrees. And everybody would be comparatively cool and comfortable. In fact, you would practically never have it ninety degrees in your climate.

“Think what that would mean to perspiring humanity! For we all know how the thermometer affects our feelings. And the optimistic thermometer would work just as well in winter as in summer. It would only be necessary to mark it up ten extra degrees in October. Then you would have mighty few zero days. The saving in coal would be tremendous, for we all regulate the heating apparatus by the thermometer instead of the feelings. The optimistic thermometer in winter would register seventy degrees in the living room when the old-fashioned instrument would have made it only sixty. Isn’t that as sensible as daylight saving?”

“It is certainly a novel idea, Mr. Joshua,” I replied in a non-committal tone. “You seem to be carrying out to the logical extreme the Scriptural theory that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Do you know of any other practical application of the principle?”

“It is capable of indefinite extension,” responded the ancient prophet. “Take the matter of people’s ages. Lots of folks are so sensitive on the subject that it makes them unhappy and others are discriminated against in business or the professions because they happen to be a year or two past an arbitrary age limit and have a bit of gray in their hair. Now, why not by common agreement let everybody over the age of forty mark down his or her age ten years? We are all as old, not as we look or feel, but as we think we are. If we can say it is only five o’clock when it’s six, then we can assume we are only fifty years old when, according to the strict, literal calculation, we are really sixty. Let’s give psychology a chance.”

“Fine idea, Mr. Joshua. Make believe that it’s an hour later or earlier than it is, that it is ten degrees hotter or colder than it is, and that we are all ten years younger than the record says. We live largely in a world of self-delusion anyway. That is what makes living endurable. You would only carry the principle a little farther, if I understand you. But there’s one little device for human happiness I wish you would add to the others.”

“And that is?”

“A barometer that will always predict fair weather when I want to play golf Sunday morning and rain if my wife wants me to go to church.”

But from the look the prophet gave me I saw that Joshua couldn’t be joshed with impunity, and leaping into my astral airplane I glided back to good old terra firma.

V

KING SOLOMON’S FAMILY VACATION TRIP

“My wife has just told me where we are going to spend my summer vacation,” remarked the city editor. “It’s been said that nothing is absolutely certain in this world, but it’s as sure as anything can be that I’m going to spend my three weeks just where the missus tells me. We never have any discussion on the subject at our house—none of that mountains or seashore business George Ade wrote about, ending in a compromise on the wife’s favorite mountains. But it’s always a relief when the suspense is over and the annual announcement by friend wife is made.

“And that reminds me; how about an interview with one of the shades on the modern vacation, summer resorts and all that sort of thing? Got anybody in mind for it? Noah? No, that trip of his was no summer vacation picnic. Suppose you ask Solomon how he managed the annual vacation business with all those wives of his. They tell me he was the wisest man that ever lived, and I’ll say he needed to be?”

I was gratified to find the shade of the former monarch and much-married man not at all averse to talking for publication. “You see,” he observed with an apologetic smile, “I don’t often get the opportunity to talk without being interrupted. It’s quite refreshing to have an appreciative, interested listener. Fortunately you have come on the very day when the Wives and Daughters of Solomon Association is holding its annual convention, and the mothers-in-law also are attending in their capacity of honorary members. They haven’t the privilege of voting—only of speaking from the floor—but that’s quite satisfactory. They don’t care where they speak from so long as they speak.

“And so, as I have said, we can have a cozy little chat. What did you want me to talk about? Summer vacations? My boy, I could tell you things about the trips I have taken in my capacity as a multiple husband that would dissuade you from matrimony ever after. But I do not wish to relate all the harrowing details. I’ll just give you a hint.

“Well, to start at the beginning, during the first few years of my married life the summer vacation germ spared our happy home. But as I gradually added more wives to my collection, an agitation was begun to get me to take them away somewhere for the summer. The wives began to find fault with the Jerusalem climate.

“They started to criticise what they called the stuffy little rooms of the royal palace. They suggested that other families were closing their houses, or renting them furnished for the summer, and going to the shore of the Mediterranean, where resorts had sprung up that advertised paradoxically cool breezes and a hot old time. They made life so miserable for me that finally one day, after a committee of wives had presented the subject and threatened that they would all go away to Mediterranean City on their own hook if I didn’t consent, I yielded.

“And then ensued such a season of preparation as I hope I shall never have to go through again. Four hundred new trunks bought, four hundred new summer outfits ordered. The palace as if by magic became filled with seamstresses and fitters and millinery architects and all sorts of strange women I had never seen before. You couldn’t walk down the front stairs without stumbling over a seamstress or two.

“The parlor, the living room, the library, all seemed full of sewing societies. Perfect strangers thronged the halls, their mouths full of pins, and tape measures hung around their necks.

“And then, the night before we were to depart, a special committee of wives called on me to exhibit the standardized bathing suit they had decided upon and get my official O. K. At first I was inclined to criticise—and then I reflected what a very, an exceedingly small thing it was to quarrel about—and graciously gave my consent.

“The next day we left Jerusalem for Mediterranean City. And we created some sensation. I headed the procession, followed by the Mesdames Solomon mounted on the four hundred camels. Then came a detachment of mothers-in-law on army mules (they were invited to come in relays during the summer) and the first instalment of the baggage train brought up the rear.

“The second instalment was to come next day with the things the wives had forgotten and sent back for. And other baggage trains were to follow from time to time during the summer, as needed.

“We were several days upon the journey. Before leaving I had not felt that I needed a vacation, but before we finally arrived at Mediterranean City I was ready for the rest cure.

“You see, traveling in those days was not like what it is now. A camel with shock absorbers and air-cushion springs might be a comfortable vehicle, I should imagine, but in his primitive state a camel’s motion is quite different from that of a limousine or a parlor car. Rubber heels had not been invented or I would surely have had our camels equipped with them.

“We had to camp out along the roadside several nights, and none of the wives were used to that. And they did not hesitate to express their feelings. We had started out with a goat among our numerous menagerie, but at an early stage of the proceedings he escaped into the desert—doubtless in search of peace and quiet.

“However, he was not missed. I took his place. It was a rôle to which, in spite of my royal rank, I was accustomed. Everything that went wrong—and that meant practically everything that happened from start to finish—was blamed on me. I was even accused of having planned and perpetrated the excursion, when I had never had the slightest notion of leaving Jerusalem until they suggested it. Finally my patience was exhausted, and I up and told them if they didn’t like it they could go to Jericho. Then, as now, Jericho was far from being an ideal place of summer residence, and their complaints gradually ceased.

“Well, we finally arrived at Mediterranean City, and then our sorrows began in earnest. I don’t know whether you have ever had any practical experience with the Mediterranean mosquito. I have never been quite able to forgive Noah for bringing ’em into the ark. A reception committee of these pests met us at the city gate and escorted us to the Hotel Paymore—so we were stung twice—when we arrived and when we paid the bill on our departure.

“The first hitch came when the clerk started assigning the rooms. It seems there were only some two hundred with an ocean view—and four hundred wives demanding a room apiece. The clerk threw up his hands and appealed to me. He had heard of some puzzling problems I had solved in my capacity as the world’s champion wise man—I threw up my hands and appealed to the proprietor. And he joined in the pleasing indoor pastime, known as passing the buck, by sending in a riot call for the police. But they didn’t come. They were men of long experience, and they knew better than to come between man and wives.

“The upshot was that we drew lots for the first night, the arrangement after that being to take turns occupying rooms with the ocean view. As for myself, with my usual benign disposition, I took a six-by-nine chamber—a room commanding a splendid prospect of the great desert. But I had learned not to be too particular.

“I cannot say that I enjoyed my first and only family summer vacation. Think of four hundred wives wanting to be taken out rowing every day! Think of being required to affix wriggling angle-worms to four hundred separate and distinct fish-hooks! I need not enter into details. These samples are sufficient.

“It is enough to say that after the regular vacation period was over I was compelled, on the advice of my chief physician, to enter the Jerusalem Sanitarium and Rest Cure in order to recuperate. It was ‘never again’ for me.

“I hear there is some complaining today among married men over having to take their wives to the seashore or the mountains. But they should pause to consider that their experience, at worst, can be only one four-hundredth as strenuous and wearing as was mine. I remember the day we got back home to the palace in Jerusalem. Every last one of those wives was so glad to be back that she went up to her room and had what she called ‘a good cry.’”

“And what did you do, Your Majesty?”

“Oh, I went down cellar and took a smile.”

And, notwithstanding my citizenship in the dryest nation on earth, I felt that Solomon had richly earned that spirituous solace.

VI

BRIGHAM YOUNG ENDORSES WOMAN SUFFRAGE