Читать книгу Short Circuits - Stephen Leacock - Страница 19

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John Mutation Smith was one of the Smiths of Mutation, Massachusetts. His family had come over there about three hundred years ago from England. His grandfather had married Abigail Price, of Price's Corners; and so had his great-grandfather; in fact most of the Mutation Smiths had been marrying Abigail Prices for three hundred years.

All of which is immaterial to the present discussion, and is only mentioned by accident. The real point is that John Mutation Smith himself differs from those who preceded him, like any other typical citizen of our own time, and this is the account in brief of his life.

John Smith was born in Boston and in Philadelphia. He was never quite certain on the point, because he was born at about the time when his father and his second wife (he was her first husband; she had as yet never married when she married him) moved from an apartment in Boston to the same apartment in Philadelphia. Young Smith's memories often clung fondly to this house where he was born--or rather, would have done so except that they had torn it down a little later to put up a garage.

But at any rate Smith's parents didn't remain long in this dear old home. They lived for a while in Binghamton, N.Y., and in Oneonta, N.Y., and in Akron, O. Smith often used to look back with longing as he grew older to the dear old homestead in Oneonta where six months of recollections twined themselves around his heart.

The little playmates of those days endeared themselves to him forever--except for the fact that he ceased to remember which were in Oneonta and which in Binghamton and which in Akron. And he forgot their names. Also their faces. But their memory he never lost. As a matter of fact, he met one of them years after selling real estate out in Fargo, North Dakota--at least, it must have been one of his childhood's playmates because the man in question had lived in Oneonta (either Oneonta or Onondaga) at the very time when Mutation Smith was either in Oneonta or Akron. Things like that forge a link between grown men not easily broken,--except that Smith never saw this man again, because he was on his way to Vancouver, B.C.

Smith always remembered the little red school house where he first went to school, though he could never be certain where it was. He recalled too how the patriotic little fellows used to hoist the flag in front of the school on the great days of the year. Only he was never quite sure what flag it was, because for a while his father had worked up in Orangeville (Province of Quebec or Manitoba), and it may have been there. They used to have patriotic speeches and patriotic readings (directed either for or against the United States, Smith never could remember which) on Washington's birthday or Queen Victoria's.

As a matter of fact, it seems that Mutation Smith's father took out papers when he got his job in Canada that made him British, but when he lost his job he took back his papers and got new old ones again; and then it looked as if he would get a job in Mexico, and he took out Mexican ones. So young Smith grew up patriotic, if nothing else. He always said that he was all for his country. Just let him take one look at his papers, he said, to see which it was and he was all for it.

So much was he inclined that way at college and at his lodge meetings, later on, he used to be able to recite "Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled!" with tears in his eyes; and also "The Watch on the Rhine," and "Gunga Din," and "Rise, Japan!" and "Lie Down, China"--all, I say, with tears in his eyes.

But I am anticipating. Smith's father's work in Canada and in Mexico enabled him to get an American education. He went to Cornell University, which became for him for the rest of his life "his dear old Alma Mater." He felt, as most of the Cornell men feel, that his college days there marked an epoch in his life. He seemed, as it were, to go in a boy, and to come out a man. And yet he was not there very long; ten days in fact. There was something wrong with his credit in certain subjects that was not sufficient and the Dean had to remove him. But when they put him out he was a man. The college had done that to him, whether it liked it or not.

Smith always looked back fondly to dear old Cornell. He used to say that there was something in its wonderful situation, overlooking the waters of the Potomac, that appealed to every fiber in him.

After Cornell, Smith was at the University of Chicago for a term. This, too, he said, made another man of him. After that, he was for two terms at the University of Virginia, a place whose influence and whose beautiful natural site and buildings, laid out, as Smith himself loved to recall, by Stonewall Jefferson himself, made him for the rest of his life a different man; in other words, he came out different from what he would have been if he had stayed the same as he would have been if he had not got different.

Smith's credit in various subjects being insufficient at Virginia, as they had been at Cornell and Chicago, the Dean removed him. This led to his brief stay at Dartmouth, without which--so at least he himself thought--his development would not have been what it was.

Smith went from Dartmouth to the Massachusetts Tech at Boston, as he wanted to get a glimpse of practical mechanical science. He got it and moved to Johns Hopkins to get an inkling of the latest work in astrophysics. He got it and left in two weeks, taking it with him.

Mutation Smith thus became a typical college man of to-day. All through his maturer life, he used to love to talk, often through tears, of his Alma Maters--or rather of his Almas Mater, which is the proper plural. He said a college man should stick up for his Alma Maters, and whenever there was any call for funds for endowment or re-endowment of any of his colleges, Smith often subscribed as much as five dollars at a time.

Meantime Mutation Smith, now mature, rendered a different man five times from what he had been, passed from college into life itself. And now for the first time women came into his life. That is to say, up to now women had never come into it. They had merely moved through it like fish through the meshes of a net. Now they came and stayed.

Smith's experience with them was very different from the life story of his forbears in Massachusetts in this respect. Take the typical case of his grandfather, John Mayflower Smith. He never "met" Abigail Price, who became his wife, because he didn't need to "meet" her. When he was seven years old, he gave Abigail an oyster-shell. After that he made no sign for four years: but Abigail kept the shell.

When he was eleven years old, he gave her a "conversation lozenge," which had a motto written on it in red poison--"If you love me as I love you, no knife can cut our love in two." Abigail kept the lozenge all her life. When John Smith was eighteen, he went with Abigail to a "tea social," in the school-house--and took her home all alone in broad daylight, the whole four hundred yards to her house. After that, of course, he had to marry her.

They were engaged for two years, during which time Smith went to see Abigail every Sunday from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M., spending most of his time standing with her father looking at the pig-pen. They were both twenty when they were married. They had eight children, four boys called John and four girls called Abigail.

John was a good husband to Abigail. He took her once to the Falls and once to Boston. And one day, when she was crying over something, they say he walked right across the room and kissed her. After he died, Abigail never married, but spent the rest of her life talking about him.

But of course none of this kind of thing would apply to John Mutation Smith, the one under discussion. He belonged not to that age, but to this. I have said that women never came into John Mutation Smith's life until after his college days, never in any serious way. There was, of course, a certain element in his life, as in that of the young men of to-day, that suggested the possibility of love. There was, for example, little Janey Doodoo, whom he knew in his first year at college.

He used to take little Janey out in his Ford, and kiss her--a few dozen times at a time--and squeeze her up to about a pressure of eight pounds to the square inch. And Janey would wind herself around him and stroke his hair back and push his ears up and turn his collar crooked. But it was just a boy and girl affair. At least, that was all it seemed, to look at it--just a boy and a girl.

Then there were Nettie Nitty and Nina Nohow and Posie Possum--all girls at college. John took them out sometimes for the afternoon, sometimes for the evening--sometimes, even to the town soda-fountain. Smith used to love to look back later on to this first dawning awakening of affection with the first six girls that he ever loved. There is nothing so beautiful in life as love's young dream, and when it comes six abreast, it is overwhelming.

Still, after all, it amounted to but little. It cost next to nothing, involved no legal consequences, no action in the courts, no mental collapse, and no question of the penitentiary--in short, it was not love.

Reality only came to John Smith in this respect after he left college and went out into the world. It was here, right out in the world, that he married Abigail Price. It was the first time either of the young people had ever been married. They lived in a tiny apartment and sang and laughed and were happy all day long, for the whole ten days of their marriage.

They might have stayed married ever so long, only John's boss--he had gone into the flour and feed business--wanted him to move to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Abigail didn't like the name.

So they parted, still friends, while there was yet time. John Smith used to look back to those bright earlier days of the first marriage he ever made with a sigh of regret. Certain things, he used to say, seem only to come once in life; and a first marriage is one of them.

In Ypsilanti, John married Mrs. Thompson--Bessie Thompson. That was, as nearly as he could remember, her name; but it may have been Jessie. The marriage turned out to be an error, a fatal error, one of those life errors that we make in love. Within a month each realized that he, or she, didn't love her, or him. John found himself staring at the blank wall--it seems the only thing to do in that case--and realizing that his life was wrecked.

Mrs. Thompson stared at the other wall.

They parted. And for a long, long time, nearly a year, John Smith remained unmarried. His heart, he said, was numb. He drove out a little in a buggy with one of the local girls. But his heart was numb all the time they were out.

John's business in the flour and feed failed. So he moved away and opened a drug store in Montpelier, Vermont, and then closed the drug store and went into the wholesale and retail cigar business in Topeka, Kansas. And after that he was for a while up in Canada in real estate in Saskatoon, and after that he went into the school book business on Commission in Bangor, Maine, with a side line of patent ginger ale bottle tops.

John always said that he felt the full charm of business life--the joy that so many have felt in founding a business and seeing it grow and expand for perhaps three or four months, before it collapses.

During all these years of his business life, Mutation Smith was married--in fact, several times. But there were no children. The rules of the apartments where they lived never permitted it--except in Saskatoon, but then there were no apartments in Saskatoon.

In the end, John began to grow old. He would sit for hours in the chimney corner, or rather in the gas grate, musing on his past life, thinking of all his birthplaces, and all his playmates, and of each of his first loves, and of the dear old town, each of the dear old towns, where the old crowd, all the old crowds, could be pictured waiting to welcome him--if he could only sort them out in his mind.

And thinking thus, I imagine that John Mutation Smith, child and citizen of our time, often grew thoroughly sick of the time in which he lived.

Meantime in the merely worldly sense Smith had accumulated a very fair competence. He had done well out of his failures at Ypsilanti and two or three other places, he had had a disastrous fire in Topeka on which he had cleaned up a good deal, and he had incurred a total bankruptcy in Saskatoon that had put him on his feet.

But his heart was sad. He often asked himself what his life had amounted to anyway, and it didn't add up to much.

And now I hear, quite recently--or perhaps I have imagined--a strange thing about John Mutation Smith, namely, that he is about to make a new move in life.

It seems that he met again the other day Abigail Price--the same one of long ago. And Abigail, like all the Abigails, has waited and has never married again.

And they are going to be remarried and are going to go back and settle again in Mutation, Massachusetts, where nothing ever changes. They have bought a frame house with walnut trees in front of it. They are old people now, of course, nearly thirty-six both of them, but it's a large house, such a large house, and there are no rules against children within fifty miles. So perhaps you can't tell.