The Idiot at Home

"I suppose he looks after the furnace and keeps the walks clear of snow in winter time?" suggested Mr. Pedagog, who was beginning to take an interest in this marvellously restful personage.

"Yes," said the Idiot; "and he attends to the windows as well. As a minder of the furnace he is invaluable. My house is as cool as a roof-garden all through the winter, and thanks to his unwillingness to over-exert himself shovelling coal into the furnace, I burn only about half as much as my neighbors, and my house is never overheated. This in itself is an indication of the virtue of Mike's method. One-half of the colds contracted by children nowadays are the result of overheated houses. Mike's method gives me a cool house at very moderate expense, owing to the great saving of coal, the children do not get colds because of overheating, and the expense of having a doctor every other day is averted. Then his snow-shovelling scheme goes back to the first principles of nature. Mike is not overawed by convention, and instead of following the steps of other men who shovel the snow entirely off, he shovels off a footpath to enable me to go to business, and then sits down and oversees the sun while it melts the balance. Sometimes, if the sun does not do the work promptly enough to suit him, he gets up little contests for the children. He divides up certain portions of the walk into equal parts, and starts the small boys on a race to see which one will get the portion assigned to him cleaned off first, the prize being something in the nature of an apple, which the cook orders from the market. I believe my son Thomas won ten apples last winter, although I am told that the Jimpsonberry boy, whose father's man is cross, and insists on doing all the work himself, is the champion snow-shoveller of the street."

"Yes, he is, pa," put in Tommy. "Mike owes him 'leven apples. I only won eight."

"Well, that is a very good record, Thomas," said the Idiot, "and I will see to it that next winter you have a brand-new snow-shovel with which to enter the contest."

"Mike lets us chop the kindling-wood, too," said Tommy, suddenly perceiving a chance to put in a good word for the genial Mike. "I think he's the nicest hired man as ever was."

"He'll stop anything he's doing to talk to me," ventured Mollie, not wishing to be backward in laying wreaths upon the brow of their friend.

"Yes, I have noticed that," said the Idiot. "Indeed, next to his extreme restfulness there is no quality that I know of in Mike that shines out so conspicuously as his intense love for children. He will neglect his own interests, as Mollie has suggested, to talk to the little ones, and I rather like him for it. No boy dares go near the Jimpsonberry man, who has exerted himself into a perpetual state of nervous exhaustion."

"Well, if he cleans your windows, that is something," observed Mrs. Pedagog, whose experience in keeping a boarding-house years before entitled her to speak as one having authority.

"Unless his system is the same in that work as in the other branches committed to his care," said Mr. Brief.

"It isn't quite," said the Idiot. "He really does exert himself in window-cleaning. I have frequently seen him spend a whole day on one window. His window-washing system is a very ingenious one, nevertheless."

"It is, indeed," said Mrs. Idiot, with a show of feeling.

"A new window-washing system?" grinned Mr. Pedagog.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "It is his own invention. He washes them on the outside in summer and on the inside in winter. The result is this opalescent glass which you see. You would hardly guess that these windows are of French plate. Still, we don't mind so much. I couldn't ask him to wash them on the outside in winter, it is so dreadfully cold, and in the summer, of course, they are always open, and no one, unless he were disagreeable enough to go snooping about after unpleasant details, would notice that they are not immaculate."

"And you pay this man forty dollars for this?" demanded Mr. Brief.

"Oh, for this and other things. I pay him two dollars a month for the work he does. I pay him ten dollars a month because he's good to the children. I pay him ten dollars more for his civility, which is unvarying – he always puts his hat on when he comes into the house, having noticed, perhaps, that only those who are my social equals are entitled to appear bareheaded in my presence."

"And the other eighteen?" persisted the lawyer, by nature a cross-examiner.

"Well, I don't grudge him that because – " a sort of a fond light lit up the Idiot's eyes as he gazed down upon Mike, still sitting on the tennis-court – "I don't grudge him that other eighteen dollars because it costs Mike twenty dollars a month to live; and he uses the rest of it to put his boy through college, so that when he grows up to be a man he will be something more than a hired man."

"Ah!" said Mr. Brief.

"Yes," said the Idiot; "I found that out from a third party some time ago, and I thought after all I'd keep him, for I know nobody else would have him, and then what would become of the boy in college?"

IX

ON SOCIAL ACCOUNTS

"It's rather strange, I think," observed Mrs. Idiot one evening, as she and the Idiot sat down to dine, "that the Dawkinses haven't been here for three or four months."

"I've noticed it myself," said the Idiot. "We used to see 'em every day about. What's up? You and Polly Dawkins had a fight?"

"Not that I know of," said Mrs. Idiot. "The last time we met she was very cordial, and asked most affectionately after you and the children. I presumed that possibly you and Dick had had some kind of a falling out."

"Not a bit of it. Dick and I couldn't quarrel any more than you and Polly could. Perhaps as we grow older our ideals differ. Polly's rather anthropological in her talks, isn't she?"

"A trifle," said Mrs. Idiot. "And musical and literary and scientific."

"While you?" queried the Idiot.

"Well, I'm fond of golf and – ah – well – "

"Golf again," laughed the Idiot. "I guess that's it, Bess. When a woman wants to talk about the origin of the species and has to hear about a splendid putt, and her observations upon the sonata are invariably interrupted by animadversions upon the morals of caddies, and her criticisms of Browning end in a discussion of the St. Andrew's Rules, she's apt to shy off into a more congenial atmosphere, don't you think?"

"I am sure," retorted Mrs. Idiot, "that while I admit I am more interested in golf than in anything else outside of you and the children, I can and do talk sometimes of other things than caddies, and beautiful drives, and stymies. You are very much mistaken if you think otherwise."

"That is very true, my dear," said the Idiot. "And nobody knows it better than I do. I've heard you talk charmingly about lots of things besides stymies, and foozles, and putts, and drives, but you don't know anything about the men of the Stone Age, and you couldn't tell the difference between a sonata and a fugue any more than I. Furthermore, you have no patience with Browning, so that when Polly Dawkins asks if you like Sordello, you are more likely than not to say that you never ate any, but on the whole for small fish prefer whitebait."

Mrs. Idiot laughed.

"No, indeed," she replied. "I'd fall back on golf if Polly mentioned Sordello to me. You may remember that you sent it to me when we were engaged, and I loved you so much – then – that I read it. If I hadn't loved you I couldn't have done it."

"Well," smiled the Idiot, "what did you think of it?"

"I think Browning had a good lie, but he foozled," said Mrs. Idiot, with her eyes atwinkle, and the Idiot subsided for at least ten seconds.

"I wish you'd say that to Polly some time," he observed. "It's so very true, and put with an originality which cannot but appeal to the most hardened of literary women."

"I will if I ever get the chance," said Mrs. Idiot.

"Suppose we make the chance?" suggested the Idiot. "Let's go down there and call to-night. I'll work the conversation up so that you can get that off as an impromptu."

"No," said Mrs. Idiot. "I don't think we'd better. In the first place, Mrs. Whalker told me yesterday that Polly is to read a paper on Balzac before the S. F. M. E. to-morrow evening, and on Friday morning she is to discuss the 'Influence of Mozart on De Koven' before the Musical Mothers' Meeting, and on Saturday afternoon she is going to have an anthropological tea at her house, which she is to open with some speculations as to whether in the Glacial Period dudes were addicted to the use of cigarettes."

"Great Scott!" said the Idiot. "This is her busy week."

"Tolerably so," said Mrs. Idiot. "She has probably reserved this evening to read up on Balzac for to-morrow's essay, so I think, my dear, we'd better not go."

"Right as usual," said the Idiot. And then he added, "Poor Dawkins, who is taking care of him now?"

"I think," said Mrs. Idiot, "that possibly Mrs. Dawkins has sublet the contract for looking after her husband and children to the United States Housekeeping Company Limited."

The Idiot gazed blankly at his wife, and awaited an explanation.

"An organization, my dear," she continued, "formed by a number of well-meaning and remorseful widows who, having lost their husbands, begin to appreciate their virtues, and who, finding themselves sympathetic when it is too late, are devoting themselves to the husbands of others who are neglected. A subscription of five hundred dollars will secure the supervision of all the domestic arrangements of a home – marketing, engagement and discharge of domestics, house-cleaning, buttons sewed on, darning done, care of flowers, wifely duties generally; for one thousand dollars they will bring up the children, and see that the baby is rocked to sleep every night, and suitably interested in elevating narratives and poems like Joseph's coat of many colors, and Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. This enables an advanced woman like Mrs. Dawkins to devote her mornings to the encyclopedias, her afternoons to the public libraries, and her evenings to the functions whereat she may read the papers which her devotion to the encyclopedias and the libraries has brought forth."

"Excuse me, my dear Bess," said the Idiot, rising. "I wish to telephone Dr. Simmons."

"For what – for whom?" demanded the lady.

"You, of course," returned the Idiot. "You are developing alarming symptoms. You give every indication of a bad attack of professional humor. Your 'International Widows Company for the Protection and Amelioration of Neglected Husbandry' proves that!"

Mrs. Idiot laughed again.

"Oh, I didn't say that there really is such an institution!" she cried. "I said that I supposed there was, for if there isn't, poor Dick Dawkins isn't taken care of at all."