Part 7

“And what did the judge do? Opening a fresh box of Havanas, he carefully selected a long, slender, chocolate-colored panatela, with a red and gold waistband, cut off the end with his gold-mounted clipper, fished a match out of his vest pocket, struck it on the ink-stand, applied the blaze to the end of the cigar, blew a fragrant cloud of incense to the ceiling in worship of the spirit of justice and perfect impartiality, gave a great big sigh of measureless content, and then proceeded to write an opinion on the subject that did my heart good to read. In dignified, judicial terms he affectionately advised the anti-tobacconists to go soak their venerable heads; he reminded them that the most admirable and wholly beneficial occupation of the human species is minding its own business; and intimated that so long as the court should continue to enjoy unimpaired intellectual vigor and be in full possession of all its faculties, it would never authorize a movement to regulate the personal conduct of rational adult beings by organized idiocy.

“It was an elegant set-back for the chronic busybodies, but I haven’t much hope it will be permanent. Mark my words, those fellows are only getting ready to break out in some new place. If they can’t prohibit tobacco they’ll attack chewing gum or ice cream soda. One of these days I expect to pick up the paper and read: ‘New Sundae Law Proposed. Association Opposed to Ice Cream Soda in Any Form Applies for Charter.’ I may have made a few mistakes that time when I was supposed to be a little off my balance, but I never made the same mistake twice. I tilted at those old windmills, as they turned out to be, but I didn’t respond to an encore. Some of your modern reformers are continually butting their heads against stone walls, and if their heads weren’t so thick they couldn’t get away with it.

“Folks laugh at that account of my exploits and adventures, but they don’t stop to notice that there are lots of fellows running around loose who are ten times funnier than Don Quixote ever was. For instance, I understand you have a good many Congressmen-at-large. There are societies already comprising some fifty-seven and one-half varieties of butters-in, advocating all kinds of reforms, including the prohibiting of flowers from growing on Sunday. The first thing we know they’ll be having each new Congress decide whether men shall wear their hair pompadour or brushed down (if they have any), rule on the question of visible suspenders in summer and settle the length of moustaches, coats, sermons, stockings, lawns, skirts, soft drinks and hatpins. And of course there’ll be a law compelling all persons to wear long faces.

“Now, I may have been a bit erratic at one time, but I never got up a Society for the Prevention of Public Enjoyment. The trouble with lots of your reformers is, that not satisfied with being ‘off’ themselves, they want to drive other folks crazy. They’re doing it. Take that proposed state anti-snoring law out in Oklahoma. It’s going to declare any person a public nuisance who keeps other folks awake at night with solos by his nasal organ. But nobody dreams of interfering with the scoundrel who dashes along the street in his automobile at two A. M. with his muffler cut-out. I see you’re surprised at my keeping tab on things down below. There’s a reason. It gratifies me to realize that if I were back on earth I should have no trouble procuring a certificate of perfect sanity after the way so many folks are behaving. I see one man was paid $300,000 for pounding another man who got $200,000 for letting him do it. And the very persons who contributed to that fund kick the loudest about the high cost of living. And yet they used to call me unsound! Puck said a mouthful when he remarked: ‘What fools these mortals be.’ The world is a place of perpetual change, and yet lots of women continue cheerfully to give up two dollars a curl for a ‘permanent’ Marcel wave. Foolish men are less concerned with how many miles they can get out of a gallon than with how many smiles they can get out of a quart.

“But what showed me more clearly than anything else whither you earth folks are drifting was a sign, on my last trip, outside a butcher’s: ‘Tongue, 48 cents a pound; brains, 33 cents.’ If tongue is getting to be worth so much more than brains, then I’m glad I shuffled off when I did.”

And as I volplaned back to earth I wondered also why our topsy-turvy world ever considered Don Quixote loco.

XVII

PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM

All the way to King Pharaoh’s house I kept wondering how I should enter the presence of decayed royalty. More modern monarchs, I knew from my reportorial experience, were frequently regular fellows whom it was perfectly safe to offer to shake hands with and perhaps, after a brief acquaintance, to slap on the back and ask for the loan of a cigarette or the “makin’s.” But the thought of conversing with a four-thousand-year-old personage who had retired from the king business, yet retained his former notions of dignity and grandeur, filled me with awe. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when in response to my ring at the front door it slowly opened about half an inch, as if someone were trying to peek out and size up the visitor, and then a moment later it was thrown back and a commanding figure, who I knew from his pictures was none other than Pharaoh himself, stood in the doorway with a smile of welcome.

“Come right in,” he exclaimed. “I was afraid at first you might be a walking delegate of the Dish-Breakers’ Union.” And there stood the erstwhile mighty monarch clad in a long blue-checked apron, the kind that pins up over the shoulders with a couple of thing-a-ma-jigs and comes ’way down below the belt. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and he had the general appearance of a cross between a chauffeur who had been digging in the garden and a butler who had taken an automobile apart and was now trying to put the pieces back again.

“Your Majesty,” I began, with a low obeisance, but that was as far as I got with my speech of introduction.

“Come right out in the kitchen,” he interrupted affably, “and we can have a chat while I’m doing up my dishes. I understand you want to interview me on the servant problem. You’ve come to the right shop. I can talk feelingly on the subject. In the course of forty-five centuries of experience I’ve hit all the high spots, from the time when I had fifteen hundred cooks and chambermaids in the house and six hundred charioteers in the royal garage down to the cruel present, when I’m reduced to doing my own work. The servant problem! I’ve solved it. I could send you out of here so chock full of information about it that you couldn’t walk straight. Have a smoke? Mrs. Pharaoh objects to my smoking a pipe and washing the china at the same time (she complained at dinner of a decided flavor of nicotine in the soup) but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t light up while I’m finishing the job. Then, after I manicure the knives and forks, massage the sink, and take a brief and exhilarating spin around the dining room with my new six-cylinder carpet sweeper, I’ll have nothing to do but fix the oatmeal for tomorrow morning, in the jackpot or whatever you call it, put it on to boil and I’ll be at your service.

“Yes, it may seem to you like considerable of a comedown,” said his former majesty when we were comfortably settled in armchairs in the library, “but during the last few days, since I let the sole remaining servant go, I’ve been experiencing the first real peace I’ve known in just four thousand five hundred and sixty-two years. Quite a long time when you come to think of it. You ask me to define the servant problem and then comment upon it. Let me tell you some of our recent troubles with ‘domestic assistants.’ That’s what they want to be called nowadays. Oh, yes, we have servants up here. This isn’t exactly heaven, you know. Somebody has said that voyaging on the sea of matrimony is all right until the cook wants to be captain. Well, our cooks have all wanted to be commanders-in-chief with the pay, pretty near, of active admirals. And among them they’ve mighty near wrecked the ship. The next to the last we got, No. 19, promised to be the light of our existence. The light went out one night and never came back. Her testimonials said she was a very good cook. They must have been referring exclusively to her moral character. Her successor was described as ‘a perfect treasure’, but, according to the proverb, ‘Riches take wings,’ and she was no exception. In her case, however, it was just as well. She claimed to have cooked ten years for John D. Rockefeller. And it did not occur to us until later that Mr. Rockefeller is a chronic sufferer from dyspepsia.

“This wasn’t home any more. It was getting to be a one-night lodging house for ‘domestic assistants.’ You mustn’t call ’em servants, you know, not since they’ve organized. And they certainly are sticklers for union rules, union hours, union wages. Why, our last laundress (excuse me, I should say ‘garment ablutionist’), refused to wash any except union underwear. Fact! And now I hear they’re agitating for the three-shift or platoon system, like the firemen, each set on duty eight hours. Well, the other day we reached a crisis when Cook 20 served notice that she’d quit unless we built an addition to the garage to accommodate her runabout, and threw in an extra allowance for gasoline. I decided to fire the whole bunch: the ‘upstairs girl’ (whom I’d often consigned to the lower regions), the waitress (who believed all things ought to come to her while waiting), and the cook (who was always getting everybody else into hot water, but wouldn’t put her own hands in). So I made a clean sweep (something we could never get any of the servants to do) and I’ve been walking delegate of the Husbands’ Labor Union, and ‘kitchen police’ myself, ever since. And it’s been as peaceful and quiet around here as the Sahara Desert. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much since the day the business agent of the Children of Israel Pyramid Builders’ Union fell off the top of Cheops and they had to dig him out of the sand with a derrick.

“There are various ways of solving the so-called servant problem. Speaking from an experience of roughly four thousand years, I should say the best way is to do your own work. It is a lot less work in the long run. But if you are determined to have servants, then you must adopt the modern viewpoint, treat ’em like the high-priced specialists that they are and fix up a regular schedule providing that the mistress shall have at least one evening out a week and the use of the parlor on the nights the maids aren’t entertaining. Our last cook had ‘Wednesday’ engraved on her visiting cards (it was her receiving day), and when her cousin was released from the penitentiary after serving six months for petty larceny (he stole a Ford), she gave him a coming-out party that kept the neighborhood awake until three o’clock in the morning. I read somewhere the other day that under the modern system employers and servants are to treat each other as equals—but I don’t believe the servants will do it. They’re getting too proud for that. We made the experiment of having the cook sit with us at the dining table, but it didn’t work out very well. We were kept so busy waiting on her that we didn’t get half enough to eat and she criticized the way in which I took my soup. A better plan would be to have all the family eat at the second table.

“But speaking of servant troubles back in Egypt a few thousand years ago—those were the happy days. Suppose one of the palace cooks threatened to quit because she could get two kopecks more a week and every Sunday out from a lady on the next street. We just told her to pack up without waiting to get dinner; there were about forty-nine more cooks in the kitchen. We had so many at one time that it took six to fry an egg. There was one disadvantage, we had the worst soup I ever tasted—too many cooks, you know—but there were lots of benefits from always having plenty of help. It’s true the kitchen on Saturday night looked like a convention of the Policemen’s Mutual Benefit Association, with all the cops calling on the girls, but it made us feel quite safe from burglars. The modern housewife is handicapped because she can’t exert her authority. If she has several servants she’s afraid to fire one because the rest might quit. And if she has only one she can’t fire her because she doesn’t know where she’d get another. Even administering a mild reprimand nowadays means that you’ll have to do your own washing. It’s rather different from the times when I was king and had a list of penalties hung up in the kitchen as a warning. Tough pie-crust meant three months in jail and the cook who burnt the toast was thrown to the crocodiles. I had three servants standing behind my chair at dinner—and nowadays servants won’t stand for anything. They trembled at my slightest frown—nowadays they give me the shake. Every time I passed they’d salaam and chant: ‘Preserve our gracious ruler.’ Today they’d be shouting: ‘Can the king!’

“And so I say times haven’t merely changed; they’re turned upside down. And the folk we used to call servants are on top. What are we to do? Why, if we want to be free and independent and rich and enjoy ourselves, we’ll beat ’em at their own game, we’ll join the Bread Molders’ Union or become kitchen chemists or garment ablutionists or general domestic aides-de-camp—the real successors of royalty. There are only two ways to solve the servant problem: do your own work or go out and do somebody’s else’s. I tell you—beg pardon, I smell something burning in the kitchen.”

Out we dashed, to find the helpless oatmeal suffering a martyr’s fate. Pharaoh contemplated the ruin for a moment and it inspired his parting word:

“Good-bye, young man, and perhaps if more people did their own work for a while they would learn, after all, to have some sympathy for servants. We can’t get along without ’em. The servant girl may be a perpetual conundrum, but civilization isn’t ready to give her up.”

XVIII

NERO DISCUSSES JAZZ

I shuddered as the city editor announced my assignment. True, I had tackled departed desperadoes and undesirable citizens whom I feared about as much in the spirit as in the flesh, but they were different. None of these could be such a formidable customer to interview as an ex-emperor who was notorious for his callous cruelties.

But duty is duty, and I donned my bullet-proof vest, put a revolver in my hip-pocket with a bottle of non-spirituous nerve tonic which a kind physician prescribed for me, and sallied forth to my waiting plane.

Five minutes later I was sitting calmly in the presence of the former imperial tyrant. The ordeal of introduction I had so much dreaded proved to be nothing. I had found the ex-emperor as approachable as a presidential candidate two months before the convention and as willing to talk for publication as a grand opera star who’s just lost another $10,000 necklace.

Could this be the old monster I had read about, I wondered, as overflowing with welcome he invited me to make myself thoroughly at home.

“What do you want me to talk about?” he asked. “Modern music and musicians? Delighted. Then you still regard me as an expert? I am gratified to hear it. I had feared that some slanderous stories that were circulated might have prejudiced you earth folk against me.

“Perhaps a few words of explanation might not be amiss. You have heard, no doubt, about the time when, as the popular phrase has it, I fiddled while Rome burned? The opposition made a good deal of that circumstance at the next election. They said I ought to have got out and hustled with the firemen, regardless of the fact that I did not belong to their union. Every man to his trade, I say. The firemen played on the flames and I played on the violin.

“Possibly, on looking back now that it is all over, I might have made a happier selection of the composition I performed on that occasion. It was entitled ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ a forerunner of a popular piece which I believe is not entirely unknown in your own country today. But that was a mere bit of thoughtlessness.

“The extent of that conflagration, also, has been much exaggerated. It was confined to a few old garages in the suburbs upon which, oddly enough, I had taken out insurance only a couple of days before. One of those remarkable coincidences which do occasionally occur in real life.

“My political enemies tried to make a good deal out of it, but I am glad to say they were unable to prove anything. My candidates for the Forum were elected by the largest majorities on record. And if that isn’t vindication, what is?”

“Very interesting, Mr. Nero. But how did you come to take up music as a study and attain such remarkable proficiency?”

“I took up music in the first place as a remedy for baldness. I was troubled considerably with falling hair and dandruff and I had observed that all professional musicians were endowed with flowing locks. I looked into the subject. I talked to the court barber and to several performers on the violin, clarionet and bass drum, with names ending in ‘off’ and ‘sky,’ who had lately come to Rome from other countries. One musician informed me that five years before he had been so bald that flies trying to skate over the shiny surface would fall and break their legs, but he was now wearing his hair in a Dutch pompadour. He was a skilled performer on the classic lyre.

“I cannot say that the study and performance of music had a similar effect in my case, no appreciable change being noted in the hirsute adornment of my dome of thought, though my wife’s mother did refer to my musical efforts as hair-raising—but there were other compensations. As a result of my daily practicing on the violin—or rather nightly, my hours being from about one to three A. M. as a rule—the price of real estate in the neighborhood dropped twenty-five per cent, and I was able to buy in some very desirable properties I had long had my eye on—for a song. (No pun intended.) It was about this time that some one originated the saying concerning making Rome howl.

“I also played at the Rome Asylum for the Insane every Saturday afternoon, and they were just crazy to hear me. One Friday night five of the inmates committed suicide and my political opponents, as usual, tried to make capital of the occurrence.

“But these little things did not interfere with my purpose to become a finished musician—even though unkind critics said they wished I had finished. And speaking of criticisms, there were some that hurt me to the quick though I suppose history does not regard me as an especially sensitive creature. One of my favorite compositions was entitled ‘Through All Eternity.’ I presume you are acquainted with it. It is still popular.

“I asked a young woman one day if she would like to hear me play ‘Through All Eternity,’ and she replied that that would be her idea of—well, I don’t like to say it, but you doubtless recall the classic definition of war as promulgated by one of your most conspicuous generals. It was a cruel saying.

“But you wished for my opinions on modern music and musicians. I don’t know that I am qualified to judge; not if what I heard the other night is music nowadays. A couple of the boys who were being materialized by a friend of Sir Oliver Lodge inveigled me into going along and attending what the advertisements said was a concert.

“As the first number on the programme, it was announced the orchestra would give an imitation of ‘jazz,’ whatever that is. There was a crash like a pantry shelf full of dishes coming down, followed by a noise that was a combination of a battle and a boiler shop. I thought the roof would fall in next, and I was just preparing to slide out when the man next to me remarked reassuringly: ‘The agony is over.’

“There wasn’t a musical note or a hint of harmony in the whole slam-bang from start to finish. A couple of kids with hammers and an old tin-pan could have achieved the same effect. People paid two dollars and a half a seat to hear that, when they could hire a small boy to run a stick along a picket fence for ten cents. They called that music, and yet the neighbors used to kick when I played ‘Way Down Upon the Tiber River’ and ‘There’s No Place Like Rome’ on my violin at three o’clock in the morning.

“Then a young woman with a low dress and high voice came out and screamed like a patient at a painless dentist’s. One of the papers next morning said she had a sweet voice, but ‘lacked execution.’ She wouldn’t have lacked it very long if she’d lived when I was Emperor. The final number on the programme was a performance on the ukelele by a pair of harmless looking youths whose appearance belied their real natures.

“I have read in my ‘Pocket Chesterfield’ that a gentleman is one who never inflicts needless pain or suffering on others. They were not gentlemen. In my day we occasionally used racks and thumb-screws and other instruments of necessary torture, but we knew nothing about ukeleles. They had not been invented. Has your country no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences? But it is unnecessary to ask.

“Yet you moderns have one advantage over us ancients when it comes to music, and I am willing to admit it: the phonograph. It is much more satisfactory than any human singer or player, because you can shut it off without hurting its feelings. It has a patent stop—something the tenor or soprano lacks. If you get up at a concert and request the soloist in the middle of a song kindly to cease as her effort is making you exceedingly nervous, you are simply reserving a seat for yourself in the patrol wagon.