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"I'll fix that in a second," said he, and he did, although he thought it odd that there were no signs of any inflammation. He was not aware that one of the most cherished and fascinating accomplishments of Miss Barbett during her childhood had been her ability to throw her wrist out of joint. She could throw any of her joints out of place, but she properly chose her wrist upon this occasion as being the better joint to intrust to a young physician. If Jack had known that until his coming her wrist had been all right, and that it had not become disjointed until he rang the front door bell of the Barbett house, he might not have been so pleased as he entered the item against Judge Barbett in his book, nor would he have wondered at the lack of inflammation.
So it went. The Hicks's cook was suddenly taken ill—Mollie Hicks gave her a dollar to do it—and Jack was summoned. The Tarletons' coachman was kept out on a wet night for two hours by Janette Tarleton, and very properly contracted a cold, for which the young woman made herself responsible, and Doctor Barkis was called in. Then the society itself discovered many a case among the worthy poor needing immediate medical treatment from Barkis, M.D., and, although Jack wished to make no charge, insisted that he should, and threatened to employ some one else if he didn't.
By degrees a practice resulted from this conspiracy of the S.F.M.E., and then a municipal election came along, and each candidate for the Mayoralty was given quietly to understand by parties representing the S.F.M.E., that unless Jack Barkis was made health officer of the city he'd better look out for himself, and while both candidates vowed they had made no pledges, each had sworn ten days before election-day by all that was holy that Barkis should have this eighteen-hundred-dollar office—and he got it! Young women may not vote, but they have influence in small cities.
At the end of the second year of the S.F.M.E.'s resolve that Barkis must be cared for he was in receipt of nearly twenty-eight hundred dollars a year, could afford a gig, and so command a practice; and having obtained his start, his own abilities took care of the rest.
And then what did Jack Barkis, M.D., do? When luxuries began to manifest themselves in his home—indeed, when he found himself able to rent a better one—whom did he ask to share its joys with him?
Miss Daisy Peters, who had dosed her dog that he might profit? No, indeed!
Miss Betsy Barbett, who disfigured her fair wrist in his behalf? Alas, no!
Miss Hicks, who had spent a dollar to bribe a cook that he might earn two? No, the ungrateful wretch!
Any member of the S.F.M.E.? I regret to say not.
He went and married a girl from Los Angeles, whom he met on one of the summer vacations the S.F.M.E. had put within his reach—a girl from whom no portion of his measure of prosperity had come.
Such was the ingratitude of Barkis. They have never told me so, but I think the S.F.M.E. feel it keenly. Barkis I believe to be unconscious of it—but then he is in love with Mrs. Barkis, which is proper; and as I have already indicated, when a man is in love there are a great many things he does not see—in fact, there is only one thing he does see, and that is Her Majesty, the Queen. I can't blame Barkis, and even though I was aware of the conspiracy to make him prosperous, I did not think of the ungrateful phase of it all until I spoke to Miss Peters about his fiancée, who had visited Dumfries Corners.
"She's charming," said I. "Don't you think so?"
"Oh yes," said Miss Peters, dubiously.
"But I don't see why Jack went to Los Angeles for a wife."
"Ah?" said I. "Maybe it was the only place where he could find one."
"Thank you!" snapped Miss Peters. "For my part, I think the Dumfries Corners girls are quite as attractive—ah—Betsy Barbett for instance—or any other girl in Jack's circle."
"Like yourself?" I smiled.
"My!" she cried. "How can you say such a thing?"
And really I was sorry I had said it. It seemed so like twitting a person on facts, when I came to think about it.
THE UTILITARIAN MR. CARRAWAY
The Christmas season was approaching, and Mr. Carraway, who had lately become something of a philosopher, began to think about gifts for his wife and children. The more he thought of them, the more firmly was he convinced that there was something radically wrong with the system of giving that had prevailed in past years. He conjured up visions of the useless things he had given and received on previous occasions, and an inventory of his personal receipts at the four celebrations leading up to the present disclosed the fact that he was long on match-boxes, cigar-cases, and smoking-jackets, the last every one of them too small, with an appalling supply of knitted and crocheted objects, the gifts of his children, in reserve. His boot-closet was a perfect revelation of the misdirected Christmas energies of the young, disclosing, as it always did upon occasions when he was in a great hurry, a half-dozen pairs of worsted slippers, which he had received at Yuletide, some of them adorned with stags of beads leaping over zephyr walls, and others made in the image of cats of extraordinary color, with yellow glass eyes set in directly over the toe whereon he kept his favorite corn. I am not sure that it was not the stepping of an awkward visitor upon one of these same glass eyes, while these slippers for the first time covered his feet, that set Mr. Carraway to cogitating upon the hollowness of "Christmas as She is Celebrated." Indeed, it is my impression that at the very moment when that bit of adornment was pressed down upon Mr. Carraway's corn he announced rather forcibly his disbelief in the utility of any such infernal Christmas present as that. And as time went on, and that offending, staring slipper slipped into his hand every time he searched the closet in the dark for a left patent-leather pump, or some other missing bit of foot-gear, the conviction grew upon him that of the great reforms of which the world stood in crying need, the reformation of the Christmas gift was possibly the most important.
The idea grew to be a mania with him, and he gradually developed into a utilitarian of the most pronounced type. Nothing in the world so suited him as an object, homely or otherwise, that could be used for something; the things that were used for nothing had no attractions for him. After this he developed further, and discovered new uses for old objects. Mrs. Carraway's parlor vases were turned into receptacles for matches, or papers, according to their size. The huge Satsuma vase became a more or less satisfactory bill-file; and the cloisonné jar, by virtue of its great durability, Mr. Carraway used as a receptacle for the family golf-balls, much to the trepidation of his good wife, who considered that the vase, like some women, had in its beauty a sufficient cause for existence, and who would have preferred going without golf forever to the destruction of her treasured bit of bric-à-brac.
Mrs. Carraway did her best to stay the steady advance in utilitarianism of her husband. She could bide with him in most matters. In fact, until it came to the use of the cloisonné jar for a golf-ball reservoir, she considered the idea at least harmless, and was forced to admit that it indeed held many good points.
"I think it is perfectly proper," she said, "to consider all things from the point of view of their utility. I do not believe in sending a ball-dress to a poor woman who is starving or suffering for want of coal, but I must say, John, that you carry your theory too far when you insist on using an object for some purpose for which it was manifestly never intended."
"But who is to say what a thing is manifestly made for?" demanded Carraway. "You don't know, or at least you can't say positively, what one of many possible uses the designer and maker of any object had in mind when he designed and made that especial object. This particular vase was fashioned by a heathen. It is beautiful and graceful, but beyond producing something beautiful and graceful, how can you say what other notion that heathen had as to its possible usefulness? He may have made it to hold flowers. He may have intended it for a water-jug. He may have considered it a suitable receptacle in which its future favored owner might keep his tobacco, or his opium, or any one of the thousand and one things that you can put in a vase with a hope of getting it out again."
"Well, we know he didn't intend it for golf-balls, anyhow," said Mrs. Carraway. "For the very simple reason that the heathen don't play golf."
"They may play some kind of a game which is a heathen variation of golf," observed Mr. Carraway, coldly.
"That couldn't be," persisted Mrs. Carraway. "judging from the effect of Sunday golf-playing on church attendance, I don't think anything more completely pagan than golf could be found. However—"
"But the fact remains, my dear," Carraway interrupted, "that while we may surmise properly enough that the original maker of an object did not intend it to be used for certain purposes, you cannot say positively, because you don't know that your surmise is absolutely correct."
"But I think you can," said Mrs. Carraway. "In fact, I will say positively that the man who made our new frying-pan made it to fry things in, and not to be used in connection with a tack-hammer as a dinner-gong. I know that the hardware people who manufactured our clothes-boiler, down in the laundry, did not design it as a toy bass-drum for the children to bang on on the morning of the Fourth of July. I would make a solemn affidavit to the fact that the maker of a baby-carriage never dreamed of its possible use as an impromptu toboggan for a couple of small boys to coast downhill on in midsummer. Yet these things have been used for these various purposes in our own household experience. A megaphone can be used as a beehive, and a hammock can be turned into a fly-net for a horse, but you never think of doing so; and, furthermore, you can say positively that while the things may be used for these purposes, the original maker never, never, never thought of it."
"Nonsense," said Carraway, wilting a little. "Nonsense. You argue just like a woman—"
"I think that was what I was designed for," laughed Mrs. Carraway. "Of course I do."
"Oh! but what I mean is that you take utterly ridiculous and extreme cases. The things never could happen. Who'd ever dream of making a beehive out of a megaphone?"
"Oh, I think it might occur to the same ingenious mind that discovered that a cloisonné vase would hold golf-balls," smiled Mrs. Carraway.
Carraway laughed. "There you go again," he said. "I wonder why women can't argue without becoming ridiculous? It would be mighty poor economy to pay $4 for a megaphone as a substitute for a $2 beehive."
"That is true," said Mrs. Carraway. "I never thought of that."
"Of course you didn't," retorted Carraway, triumphantly. "Of course you didn't; and that's what I mean when I say you argue like a woman. You get hold of what seems on the surface to be a regular solar-plexus retort, and fail to see how it becomes a boomerang before you can say Jack Robinson."
"I suppose if I hadn't been worried about the vase I would have thought of it," said Mrs. Carraway, meekly. "It worries me to see a $150 vase used for a purpose that a fifty-cent calico bag would serve quite as well."
Carraway glanced searchingly at his wife.
"Well—ah—hem!" he said. "Quite right, my dear, quite right. I think, on the whole, you would better get the calico bag."
For a few days after this little discussion Carraway was very reticent about his utilitarian ideas. The more he thought of his wife's retort the less secure he felt in his own position, and he was very sorry he had spoken about boomerangs and solar-plexus retorts. But with time he recovered his equanimity, and early in December returned to his old ways.
"I've just been up in the attic," he said to his wife one Sunday afternoon, when he appeared on the scene rather dusty of aspect. "There's a whole lot of useful stuff up there going to waste. I found four old beaver hats, any one of which would make a very good waste-basket for the spare bedroom if it was suitably trimmed; and I don't see why you don't take these straw hats of mine and make work-baskets of them."
Here he held out two relics of bygone fashions to his wife. Mrs. Carraway took them silently. She was so filled with suppressed laughter over her husband's suggestions that she hardly dared to speak lest she should give way to her mirth, and a man does not generally appreciate mirth at his own expense after he has been rummaging in an attic for an hour or more, filling his lungs and covering his clothes and hands with dust.
However, after a moment she managed to blurt out, "Perhaps I can make one of them dainty enough to send to your mother for her Christmas present."
"I was about to suggest that very same thing," said Carraway, brushing the dust from his sleeve. "Either you could send it or Mollie"—Mollie was Mr. Carraway's small daughter. "I think Mollie's grandmother would be more pleased with a gift of that kind than with one of the useless little fallals that children give their grandparents on Christmas Day. What did she give her last year?"
The question was opportune, for it gave Mrs. Carraway a chance to laugh outright with some other ostensible object than her husband. She availed herself of the chance, threw her head back, and shook convulsively.
"She sent her a ball of shaving-paper," Mrs. Carraway said.
A faint smile flitted over Carraway's face. "Well, it might have been worse," he said. "She can use it for curling-paper." He paused a moment. Then he said: "I want to say to you, my dear, that—ah—I want Christmas celebrated this year after my plan of selection. Instead of squandering our hard-earned dollars on things no sensible person wants and none can use, we will consider, first of all, practical utility."
"Very well," sighed Mrs. Carraway. "I quite agree as far as you and I are concerned—but how about the children? I don't think Tommie would feel very happy to wake up on Christmas morning and find a pair of suspenders and a new suit of clothes under the tree. He needs both, but he wants tin soldiers. And as for Mollie, she expects a doll."
"Well, I don't wish to be hard on the children," said Mr. Carraway, "but now is the time to begin training them. There may be a temporary disappointment, but in the end they will be happier for it. Of course I don't say to give them necessities of life for Christmas, but in selecting what we do give them, get something useful. Dolls and tin soldiers and toy balloons are well enough in their way, but they are absolutely useless. Therefore, I say, don't give them such things. Surely Mollie would be pleased to receive a nice little fur tippet or a muff, and I'll get Tommie a handsome snow-shovel, that he can use when he cleans off the paths. He won't mind; it will be a gift worth having, and by degrees he'll come to see that the plan of utility is a good one."
Mrs. Carraway discreetly held her tongue, although she was far from approving Carraway's course in so far as it affected the children. She tacitly agreed to the proposition, but there was the light of an idea in her eye.
The days intervening before Christmas passed rapidly away, and Christmas eve finally came. Tommie and Mollie were bubbling over with suppressed excitement, and frequently went off into spasms of giggles. There was something very funny in the wind evidently. After dinner the small family repaired to the library, where the children were in the habit of distributing their gifts for their parents on the night before Christmas. Mrs. Carraway was beaming, and so was Mr. Carraway. The children had been informed of what they were to expect, and after an hour or two of regret, they had put their little heads together, giggled a half-dozen times, and accepted the situation.
"Your mother has presented me with a ton of coal, children," said Carraway, smiling happily. "Now you may think that a funny sort of gift—"
"Yeth, papa," said Mollie.
"Awful funny," said Tommie, wiggling with glee.
"Well, it does seem so at first, but, now, how much better to give me that than to present me with something that I could look at for a few days and then would have no further use for!"
"That's so, pa," said Mollie.
"I guess you're right," said Tommie. "Wat cher got for ma?"
"I have given her a brand-new set of china for the dining-room," said Mr. Carraway.
"And it was just what I needed," said Mrs. Carraway, happily. "And now, children, go up-stairs, and bring down your presents for your father."
The children sped noisily out of the room and up the stairs.
"I hope you impressed it on their minds that I wanted nothing useless?" said Carraway.
"I did," said Mrs. Carraway. "I explained the whole thing to them, and told them what they might expect to receive. Then I gave them each ten dollars of the money they'd saved, and let them go shopping on their own account. I don't know what they bought you, but it's something huge."
Mrs. Carraway had hardly finished when the two giggling tots came into the room, carrying with difficulty a parcel, which, as Mrs. Carraway had said, was indeed huge. Mr. Carraway eyed it with curiosity as the string was unfastened and the package burst open.
"There," cried Tommie, breathlessly.
"It's all for you, pa, from Mollie and me."
The two children stood to one side. Mrs. Carraway appeared surprised in an amused fashion, while Carraway stood appalled at what lay before him, as well he might; for the package contained a great wax doll with deep staring blue eyes, a small doll's house with two floors in it and a front door that opened, china and chairs and table and bureaus in miniature to furnish the house—indeed, all the paraphernalia of a well-ordered residence for a French doll. Besides these were two boxes of tin soldiers, cannon, tents, swords, a fully equipped lead army, a mechanical fish, and a small zinc steamboat, suitable for a cruise in a bath-tub.
Carraway looked at the children, and the children looked at Carraway.
"Why," said he, as soon as he could recover his equanimity, "there must be some mistake."
"No," said Mollie. "We picked 'em out for you ourselves. We thought you'd need 'em."
Mrs. Carraway turned away to cough slightly.
"Need them?" demanded Carraway with a perplexed frown. "When?"
"Oh—to-morrow," said Tommie.
"What for?" demanded Carraway.
"Why, to give to us, of course" said the children in chorus.
"My dear," said Carraway, two hours later, after the children had retired, "I've been thinking this thing over."
"Yes?" said Mrs. Carraway.
"Yes," said Carraway; "and I've made up my mind that those children of ours are born geniuses. I don't believe, after all, they could have selected anything which would be more satisfactorily useful in the present emergency."
"Well," observed Mrs. Carraway, quietly, "I don't either. I thought so at the time when they asked my permission to do their shopping at the International Toy Bazar."
"It's a solar-plexus retort, just the same," said Carraway, as he shook his head and went to bed. "I think on the 1st of January, if you have no objections, Mrs. Carraway, I will forswear utilitarianism—and you may remove the golf-balls from the cloisonné vase as soon as you choose."
THE BOOK SALES OF MR. PETERS
Like many another town which frankly confesses itself to be a "city of the third class," Dumfries Corners is not only well provided but somewhat overburdened with impecunious institutions of a public and semi-public nature. The large generosity of persons who never give to, but are often identified with, churches, hospitals, associations of philanthropic intent of one kind and another, in Dumfries Corners as elsewhere, is frequently the cause of embarrassment to persons who do give without being lavish of the so-called influence of their names. There are quite a dozen individuals out of the forty thousand souls who live in that favored town who find it convenient to give away as much as five hundred dollars annually for the maintenance of milk dispensaries, hospitals, and other deserving enterprises of similar nature for the needy. Yet at the close of each fiscal year those who have given to this extent are invariably confronted by "reports," issued by officials of the various institutions, frankly confessing failure to make both ends meet, and everybody wonders why more interest has not been taken. "Surely, we have loaned our names!" they say. It never occurs to anybody that one successful charity is better than six failures. It has never entered into the minds of the managers of these enterprises that a man disposed to give away five hundred dollars could make his contributions to the public welfare more efficacious by giving the whole to one institution instead of dividing it among twenty.
However, human nature is the same everywhere, and until the crack of doom sounds mankind will be found undertaking more charity than it can carry through successfully, not only in Dumfries Corners, but everywhere else. It would be difficult to fix the responsibility for this state of affairs, although the large generosity of those who lend their names and blockade their pockets may consider itself a candidate for chief honors in this somewhat vital matter. It may be, too, that the large generosity of people who really are largely generous with their thousands has something to do with it. There is more than one ten-thousand-dollar town in existence which has accepted a hundred-thousand-dollar hospital from generously disposed citizens, and the other citizens thereof have properly hailed their benefactor's name with loud acclaim, but the hundred-thousand-dollar hospital, which might have been a fifty-thousand-dollar hospital, with an endowment of fifty thousand more to make it self-supporting, has a tendency to ruin other charities quite as worthy, because its maintenance pumps dry the pockets of those who have to give. It will require a drastic course of training, I fear, to open the eyes of the public to the fact that even generosity can be overdone, and I must disclaim any desire to superintend the process of securing their awakening, for it is an ungrateful task to criticise even a mistakenly generous person; and man being by nature prone to thoughtless judgments, the critic of a philanthropist who spends a million of dollars to provide tortoise-shell combs for bald beggars would shortly find himself in hot water. Therefore let us discuss not the causes, but some of the results of the system which has placed upon suburban shoulders such seemingly hopeless philanthropic burdens. At Dumfries Corners the book sales of Mr. Peters, one of the vestrymen, were one of these results.
There were two of these sales. The first, like all book sales for charity, consisted largely of the vending of ice-cream and cake. The second was different; but I shall not deal with that until I have described the first.
This had been given at Mr. Peters's house, with the cheerful consent of Mrs. Peters. The object was to raise seventy-five dollars, the sum needed to repair the roof of Mr. Peters's church. In ordinary times the congregation could have advanced the seventy-five dollars necessary to keep the rain from trickling through the roof and leaking in a steady stream upon the pew of Mrs. Bumpkin, a lady too useful in knitting sweaters for the heathen in South Africa to be ignored. But in that year of grace,
1897, there had been so many demands made upon everybody, from the Saint William's Hospital for Trolley Victims, from the Mistletoe Inn, a club for workingmen which was in its initial stages and most worthily appealed to the public purse, and for the University Extension Society, whose ten-cent lectures were attended by the swellest people in Dumfries Corners and their daughters—and so on—that the collections of Saint George's had necessarily fallen off to such an extent that plumbers' bills were almost as much of a burden to the rector as the needs of missionaries in Borneo for dress-suits and golf-clubs. In this emergency, Mr. Peters, whose account at his bank had been overdrawn by his check which had paid for painting the Sunday-school room pink in order that the young religious idea might be taught to shoot under more roseate circumstances than the blue walls would permit, and so could not well offer to have the roof repaired at his own expense, suggested a book sale.
"We can get a lot of books on sale from publishers," he said, "and I haven't any doubt that Mrs. Peters will be glad to have the affair at our house. We can surely raise seventy-five dollars in this way. Besides, it will draw the ladies in the congregation together."
The offer was accepted. Mrs. Peters acquiesced. Peters and his co-workers asked favors and got them from friends in the publishing world. The day came. The books arrived, and the net results to the Roofing Fund of Saint George's were gratifying. The vestry had asked for seventy-five dollars, and the sale actually cleared eighty-three! To be sure, Mr. Wiggins spent fifty dollars at the sale. And Mrs. Thompson spent forty-nine. And the cake-table took in thirty-eight. And the ice-cream was sold, thanks to the voracity of the children, for nineteen dollars. And some pictures which had been donated by Mrs. Bumpkin sold for thirty-one dollars, and the gambling cakes, with rings and gold dollars in them, cleared fifteen. Still, when it was all reckoned up, eighty-three dollars stood to the credit of the roof! In affairs of this kind, results, not expenses, are considered.
Surely the venture was a success. Although from the point of view of bringing the ladies of the congregation together—well, the less said about that the better. In any event, parts of Dumfries Corners were cooler the following summer than they had ever been before.
And then, in the natural sequence of events, the next year came. The hospital, and the inn, and the various other institutions of the city indorsed by prominent names, but void of resources, as usual, left the church so poor that something had to be done to repair the cellar of Saint George's by outside effort, water leaking in from the street. The matter was discussed, and the amount needed was settled upon. This time Saint George's needed ninety dollars. It didn't really need so much, but it was thought well to ask for more than was needed, "because then, you know, you're more likely to get it."
The book-cake-and-cream sale of the year before had been so successful that everybody said: "By all means let us have another literary afternoon at Mr. Peters's."
"All right!" said Peters, calmly, when the project was suggested. "Certainly! Of course! Have anything you please at my house. Not that I am running a casino, but that I really enjoy turning my house inside out in a good cause once in a while," he added, with a smile which those about him believed to be sincere. "Only," said he, "kindly make me master of ceremonies on this occasion."
"Certainly!" replied the vestry. "If this thing is to be in your house you ought to have everything to say about it."
"I ask for control," said Peters, "not because I am fond of power, but because experience has taught me that somebody should control affairs of this sort."
"Certainly," was the reply again, and Peters was made a committee of one, with power to run the sale in his own way, and the vestry settled down in that calm and contented frame of mind which goes with the consciousness of solvency.
Three months elapsed, and nothing was done. No cards were issued from the home of Peters announcing a sale of any kind, cake, cream, or books, and the literary afternoon seemed to have sunk into oblivion. The chairman of the Committee on Supplies, however, having gone into the cellar one morning to inspect the coal reserve, found himself obliged either to wade knee deep in water or to neglect his duty—and, of course, being a sensible man, he chose the latter course. He knew that in impecunious churches willing candidates for vestry honors were rare, and he, therefore, properly saved himself for future use. Wading in water might have brought on pneumonia, and he was aware that there really isn't any reason why a man should die for a cause if there is a reasonable excuse for his living in the same behalf. But he went home angry.
"That cellar isn't repaired yet," he said to his wife. "You'd think from the quantity of water there that ours was a Baptist church instead of the Church of England."
"It's a shame!" ejaculated his wife, who, having that morning finished embroidering a centre-piece for the dinner-table of the missionaries in Madagascar, was full of conscious rectitude. "A perfect shame; who's to blame, dear?"
"Peters," replied the chairman. "Same old story. He makes all sorts of promises, and never carries 'em out. He thinks that just because he pays a few bills we haven't anything to say. But he'll find out his mistake. I'll call him down. I'll write him a letter he won't forget in a hurry. If he wasn't willing to attend to the matter he had no business to accept the responsibility. I'll write and tell him so."
And then, the righteous wrath of the chairman of the Committee on Supplies having expended itself in this explosion at his own dinner-table, that good gentleman forgot all about it, did not write the letter, and in fact never thought of the matter again until the next meeting of the vestry, when he suavely and jokingly inquired if the Committee on Leaks and Book Sales had any report to make. To his surprise Mr. Peters responded at once.
"Yes, gentlemen," he said, taking a check out of his pocket and handing it to the treasurer. "The Committee on Leaks, Literature, and Lemonade reports that the leak is still in excellent condition and is progressing daily, while the Literature and Lemonade have produced the very gratifying sum of one hundred and thirty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents, a check for which I have just handed the treasurer."
