The Idiot at Home

"Yes," said Tommy; "and all you'll have to do will be to force food on me."

And they soon passed into the land of dreams.

XII

SOME DOMESTIC INVENTIONS

"I think I'll give up the business of broking and go into inventing," said the Idiot one Sunday morning, as he and Mrs. Idiot and their friends sat down at breakfast. "There's not much money in stocks, but the successful inventor of a patent clothes-pin makes a fortune."

"I'd think twice about that before acting," observed Mr. Brief. "There may not be much money in stocks, but you can work eight hours a day, and get good pay in a broker's office, while the inventor has to wait upon inspiration."

"True enough," said the Idiot; "but waiting on inspiration isn't a bad business in itself. You can play golf or read a rattling good novel, or go to a yacht-race while you wait."

"But where does the money come in?" asked Mr. Pedagog, his usual caution coming to the fore.

"Inspiration brings it with her," said the Idiot, "and by the barrel, too. What's the use of toiling eight hours a day for fifty weeks in a year for three thousand dollars when by waiting on inspiration in a pleasant way you make a million all of a sudden?"

"Well," said Mr. Pedagog, indulgently, "if you have the inspiration lassoed, as you might say, your argument is all right; but if you are merely going to sit down and wait for it to ring you up on the telephone, and ask you when and where you wish your barrels of gold delivered, I think it will be your creditors, and not fortune, who will be found knocking at your door. How are you going about this business, provided you do retire from Wall Street?"

"Choose my field and work it," replied the Idiot. "For the present I should choose the home. That is the field I am most interested in just now. I should study its necessities, and endeavor to meet whatever these might demand with an adequate supply. Any man who stays around home all day will find lots of room for the employment of his talents along inventive lines."

"You've tried it, have you?" asked Mr. Brief.

"Certainly I have," said the Idiot, "though I haven't invented anything yet. Why, only last week I stayed home on Monday – wash-day – and a thousand things that might be invented suggested themselves to me."

"As, for instance?" asked Mrs. Idiot, who was anxious to know of any possible thing that could mitigate the horrors of wash-day.

"Well, it wouldn't help you much, my dear," said the Idiot, "but the wash-lady would hail with unmixed delight a substitute for her mouth to hold clothes-pins in while she is hanging out the clothes. I watched Ellen in the yard for ten minutes that day, and it was pathetic. There she was, standing on her tiptoes, hanging innumerable garments on the line, her mouth full of clothes-pins, and Jimpsonberry's hired man leaning over the fence trying to shout sweet nothings in her ear. If she had had a nice little basket-hat on her head to hold the pins in she could have answered back without stopping her work every other minute to take them out of her mouth in order to retort to his honeyed sentiments."

Mrs. Idiot laughed. "Ellen finds time enough to talk and do the washing, too," she said. "I sometimes think she does more talking than washing."

"No doubt of it; she's only human, like the rest of us," said the Idiot. "But she might save time to do something else for us if she could do the washing and the talking at the same time. She may give up the washing, but she'll never give up the talking. Therefore, why not make the talking easier?"

"What you need most, I think," put in Mr. Brief, "is an instrument to keep hired men from leaning over the fence and distracting the attention of the laundress from her work. That would be a great boon."

"Not unless idleness is a great boon," retorted the Idiot. "Half the hired men I know would be utterly out of employment if they couldn't lean over a fence and talk to somebody. Leaning over a fence and talking to somebody forms seventy-five per cent. of the hired man's daily labor. He seems to think that is what he is paid for. Still, any one who objects could very easily remedy the conversational detail in so far as it goes on over the fence."

"By the use of barbed wire, I presume," suggested Mr. Pedagog.

"By something far more subtle and delicately suggestive," rejoined the Idiot. "Hired men do not mind barbed-wire fences. They rather like them when they annoy other people. When they annoy themselves they know how to treat them. My own man Mike, for instance, minds them not at all. Indeed, he has taken my pruning-shears and clipped all the barbs off the small stretch of it we had at the rear end of our lot to keep him from climbing over for a short cut home."

"With what result?" asked Mr. Brief.

"With the result that I had to buy a new pair of pruning-shears," said the Idiot. "My Anti-Over-the-Fence-Gabber," he continued, "would involve certain complex details, but it would work. I should have an electric battery connected with the upper cable of the fence, and an operator stationed inside of the house, close to a key which would send some six hundred or seven hundred volts through the cable whenever needed. Then if I felt that Jimpsonberry's man was interfering with my laundress, as soon as he leaned over the fence I'd have the operator send him an electric notice to quit."

"A message?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"No, a plain shock. Two hundred volts as a starter, three hundred as a reminder, and the full seven hundred if necessary to make the hint plainer."

"That would be cruel," observed Mrs. Pedagog.

"Not wholly," said the Idiot. "It would be an advantage to the man himself in one way. Hired men have too little electricity in their systems, Mrs. Pedagog. If Jimpsonberry's man, for instance, would take all the electricity I'd give him and apply it to his work, Jimpsonberry's unpulled dandelions would not be such a constant menace to my lawn. I compel Mike to weed out my lawn every spring and autumn, but Jimpsonberry doesn't attend to his at all. He doesn't sleep on it, and so doesn't bother about it. Consequently, when his dandelions go to seed the seed is blown over into my grass, and every year I get an uninvited crop, which at a dollar a thousand would make me a millionaire."

"Why don't you apply your inventive genius to the discovery of a seedless dandelion?" asked the Lawyer. "It seems to me that would be the best solution of the dandelion problem."

"Because Jimpsonberry wouldn't have 'em if I discovered 'em," said the Idiot. "I judge from the millions he raises every year that he is satisfied with dandelions as they are. He's got enough for himself, and never makes any charge for those he gives to his neighbors."

"I think a furnace-feeder would be a good thing, too," the Idiot continued, in a moment. "My furnace is a chronic sufferer from indigestion because on some days it is gorged with coal and on others with ashes. Seems to me if I could get a month's time in which to concentrate my attention upon a furnace-feeder, I could devise some kind of a contraption that would invoke the enthusiastic love of the suburban resident in Arctic latitudes the world over."

"I have often thought of that possibility myself," observed Mr. Pedagog, his eyes fondly resting upon a steaming plate of griddle-cakes that had just been brought in. "But coal is a rebellious quantity. A furnace-feeder would need to be delicately adjusted, and coal cannot be handled with delicacy. It requires a chute rather than a tube. It must be manipulated with the shovel, not the sugar-tongs."

"Correct," said the Idiot. "Therefore, you would experiment on a chute or a shovel, abandoning all idea of refining the coal. I, on the other hand, would experiment with the coal itself, Mr. Pedagog. Why not liquefy it, and let it drop automatically into the furnace through a self-acting spigot?"

"Liquefy coal?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"Certainly," replied the Idiot. "We liquefy pretty nearly everything else. If liquid air, why not liquid coal? Everything we have in nature in these days apparently can be liquefied, and while I am not familiar with the process, I see no reason why a ton of coal should not be reduced to such a shape that it can be bottled. Once bottled and provided with an automatic dropper, it could easily be adjusted so as to flow in proper quantities into the furnace at proper intervals."

"It would be very expensive. Do you know what a pint of liquid air costs?" demanded the Doctor.

"No," said the Idiot. "I neither breathe nor drink it. The plain old stuff is good enough for me, and cheap if you don't have to go to the mountains or the sea-shore to get your supply."

"Granting coal could be liquefied," the Doctor assented, "I venture to say that a ton of it would cost as much as five hundred dollars."

"I've no doubt it would," said the Idiot; "but I could afford a ton of coal at five hundred dollars if my scheme worked. A successful invention would make bread seem cheap at ten dollars a loaf. There's another thing I should put my mind on, and that is a method of cooking a cauliflower so that everybody in the house, as well as the neighbors, should not know that you are doing so," he continued. "I am particularly fond of cauliflower, but it is undeniable that in the process of cooking it becomes obtrusive, almost to the point of ostentation. I've spoken about it many times. Mike, the gardener, to whom I've spoken on the subject, thinks the cauliflower itself, if sprinkled with eau de Cologne while growing, would cease to be obnoxious in the cooking; but that is too expensive a process. It would take a dozen cases of eau de Cologne to bring a single cauliflower to maturity. My son, Tommy, has stated that he thinks it might be boiled in Florida-water instead of in the simple variety that comes from the pipes. A good suggestion for a small boy, but also expensive. Hired men and small boys do not think of the exchequer of the principal in their plans. They don't have to. Their allowance and wages are usually all velvet – an elegant vulgarism for surplus – and for my own part I have constantly to veto their little schemes for the betterment of my condition in order to have any condition at all left. But as far as the arrangement of an odorless cauliflower-cooker is concerned, it is as simple as A B C, barring one or two complications."

"I wish you'd hurry up and invent it," cried Mrs. Idiot, with enthusiasm. "What are the main features of this simple contrivance?"

"I'd have a boiler, in the first place, in which to boil the animal," said the Idiot. "When the water was ready I'd clap the creature into it, and before it had time to remonstrate I'd fasten a hermetically sealed cover over the top."

"But when you took it off the results would still be overpowering," said Mr. Pedagog.

"No, my dear sir," said the Idiot, "for the simple reason that I should affix a cold-air box and a flue to the hermetically sealed boiler. Through the cold-air box fresh air would constantly flow into the boiler. Through the flue all the aromatic drawbacks of the cauliflower would be carried off through the chimney into the upper air. Anybody who wished to know whether we were going to have cauliflower for dinner or not would have to climb up to the roof and sniff at the chimney-top to find out."

"It is simple, isn't it, Mrs. Idiot?" Mrs. Pedagog said.

"Very," replied Mrs. Idiot. "Indeed, it seems so extremely simple that I should like to know where the complications lie."

"Where all the complications in cooking lie, my dear," said the Idiot, "in the cook. The chief complication would lie in getting a cook who could, or if she could, would, use the thing intelligently."

"I don't see," said Mr. Brief, dryly – "I don't see but that what you ought to devote your time to, my dear Idiot, is the invention of an intelligent cook."

"Humph!" laughed the Idiot. "I may be an idiot, Mr. Brief, but I'm not an ass. There are some things that man may reasonably hope to accomplish – such as setting fire to the Hudson River, or growing butternuts on the summit of Mont Blanc – but as for trying to invent an intelligent cook who would stay in the country for more than two weeks for less than ten thousand dollars a year, that, sir, is beyond all the conceptions of the human mind."

"Ain't Bridget intelligent, pa?" asked Tommy.

Here was a complication, for Tommy liked to retail to Bridget the gossip of the day, and especially what "pa said."

"H'm – ah – oh yes, indeed, she is, Tommy," the Idiot replied, with some embarrassment. "Very; she's been with us three months."