The Idiot at Home

"How much do you pay her, pa?" asked the boy.

"Well," said the Idiot, "not more than fifteen hundred dollars a month. Just take another griddle-cake, my son, and remember that there are some things little boys should not talk about."

"Like tumpany's bald heads?" lisped Mollie, complacently, her eye fixed upon Mr. Pedagog's shining dome.

"Precisely," observed Mr. Pedagog, appreciating the situation.

And while everybody else laughed the Idiot looked upon his children with a sternly affectionate face.

"My dear," said he to Mrs. Idiot, "I think it is time the babies got ready for Sunday-school."

XIII

A SUBURBAN COMPLICATION

"Well, old chap," said the Poet some weeks later, when he happened to be spending the night off in the suburbs with his old friend, "how goes the noble art of inventing? Has your horseless cauliflower bloomed as yet?"

"Horseless cauliflower is good, but tautological," said the Idiot. "The cauliflower is an automobile in itself, without the intervention of man. Who told you I was inventing instead of broking these days?"

"Mr. Pedagog said something about it the last time I met him," said the Poet. "He's a mighty good friend of yours. He says you are the most perfect Idiot he ever met."

"He's a bully good fellow," said the Idiot, affectionately. "You know I used to think Pedagog wasn't of any earthly use except to teach people things, but as I look back upon my experience with him he has never taught me anything that was worth forgetting. So he told you I was going into invention, did he?"

"Yes; and he said he thought you were going about it in the right way," rejoined the Poet. "You weren't spending ten thousand dollars to get a four-dollar invention on the market, he said, but were inventing things that you knew at the outset weren't worth risking your money on."

The Idiot smiled broadly.

"He said that, did he? Well, he doesn't know what he is talking about," he retorted. "I am spending money on my inventions. I have already invested fifty cents in my patent Clothes-Pin-Holding Laundry-Bonnet, and I have strung the wires along my fence to be used in my electric Hired-Man-Discourager; and when I have managed to save up a few dollars more I'm going to get a battery to attach to it, when woe betide that man of Jimpsonberry's if he tries to talk to Maria while she is at work! Furthermore, I have extended the operations of that same useful invention so that it will meet a long-felt want in all suburban communities as a discourager of promiscuous wooing. You never lived in the country, did you?"

"Not permanently," said the Poet.

"Then you are not aware of a singular habit the young country swain has of courting his best girl on some other fellow's stone wall after the sun goes down," said the Idiot. "Some balmy evening next spring, if you'll come up here I'll show you one of the features of suburban life that will give you an idea for a poem. That stone wall that runs along the front of my place has been the scene of more engagements than I can tell you of. Many a time when I have come home late at night I have counted as many as ten couples sitting on the cold coping of that wall telling each other how beautiful the world is, and holding each other on with loving arms."

"Rather an affecting scene, that," said the Poet.

"It was at first," rejoined the Idiot, "and I rather liked to see it. Indeed, I once suggested to Mrs. Idiot that we should have the coping upholstered, so that they might sit more comfortably. I even wanted to put a back along the inner side of it for them to lean against, but after a while it palled. We couldn't sit out on our own front porch on a summer evening and talk without sentimental interruptions that were demoralizing to a sustained conversation. We'd try to talk, for instance, about Browning, or Tennyson, or Le Gallienne, or some other poet of their class, when we'd be interrupted by such sentiments as, 'Ess I is,' and 'I's oo ducky,' and 'Ain't de moon boofer?' Then when we had guests we never dared to take them out-of-doors, but remained cooped up inside the house, because Mrs. Idiot feared to intrude upon the sacred right of those ten couples to do their courting comparatively unobserved."

"It must have been a nuisance," said the Poet.

"It grew to be so; but I hadn't the heart to stop it, even if I could have done so, so I put up a hedge to hide them from view and soften the sound of their voices; but it didn't work very long. They didn't seem to appreciate my motive, and it so happened that the hedge which I put up with the most innocent of intentions was a Japanese quince that blossoms out in thorns half an inch long, to an extent which suggests the fretful porcupine. These, for some reason or other, excited the animosity of my twenty young friends on the wall, and at the end of the season there were not two consecutive feet of the hedge that had not been hacked and cut to pieces by my indignant but uninvited guests."

"What impudence!" cried the Poet.

"Only the ardor of youth," observed the Idiot, calmly. "Put yourself in the same place. Suppose that you, just as you were about to declare your undying love for the girl of your choice, and while gently stealing your arm about her waist, were to have the back of your hand ripped off by a brutal hedge?"

"I see," laughed the Poet. "I dare say I should be indignant."

"They were properly so," said the Idiot, "properly so; and neither Mrs. Idiot nor I really blamed them."

"We let the matter rest, and made no complaint," he continued. "Time went on, and the courters became a trifle more assertive. One of them came into the house one evening and demanded to know what I meant by assaulting him and his lady friend, holding up a great Osage orange which he alleged to have been the murderous weapon I had used; and I really had to apologize, for I was guilty. It happened that while walking about my small preserves I had picked up this orange, which had fallen onto my lawn from a tree on Jimpsonberry's place, and had unthinkingly tried to see how far I could throw it. It went just over the hedge, and had unceremoniously knocked Strephon's hat into the middle of next week and frightened Phyllis into hysterics. I was placed on the defensive, but for the life of me I couldn't help laughing, with the result that Strephon stalked angrily away, alleging that I should hear from him further in the matter."

"And did you?" asked the Poet.

"No," said the Idiot, "I never did; but the incident rather soured me towards the people who seemed to regard my stone wall as their property. I even came to feel like purchasing a gatling-gun and loading it with Osage oranges for the purpose of repelling them, but even under this provocation I still continued to ignore the matter."

"You are too easy-going," suggested the Poet.

"I was," said the Idiot, "until they began to use the sidewalk that runs parallel with the wall as a tablet upon which to inscribe in letters of flame their undying affection. One Sunday morning, as Mrs. Idiot and I started for church, we were horrified to find our flagstones scribbled all over with poetry, done in chalk, after the order of

"Roses is pink, and violets is blue,
Sugar is sweet, and so be you.

"Further along was the picture of a heart with an arrow drawn through it, and the two names 'Larry' and 'Mame' written on either side. And one unusually affectionate youth had actually cut the initials of his young lady and himself in the top of the coping, with a cold-chisel, I suspect. It's there yet. It was then my spirit rose up into fierce denunciation. That night, when the clans had gathered and were going through the initial stages I marched out in front of them, cleared my throat ostentatiously, and made a speech. It was the most nervous speech I ever made; worse than after-dinner speaking by a good deal. I called their attention to how I had suffered: referred pathetically to the destruction of the hedge; inveighed sarcastically against the Osage-orange man; told them in highly original fashion that worms, if taken at the ebb that leads on to fortune, would surely turn and rend their persecutors, and that I'd had enough. I forgave them the hedge; I forgave them the annoyance they had cost me, but I asserted that I'd see them all condemned to eternal celibacy before I would permit my sidewalk to be turned into an anthology of love, and my coping into an intaglio of eternal blessedness. I requested them if they wished to write poetry to write it upon their own hearths, and if they had any inscriptions to cut to chip in and buy an obelisk of their own and hieroglyph to their hearts' content. I even offered to buy them each a slate and pencil, which they might bring with them when they came, upon which to send their sentiments down to posterity, and I finished with what I consider to be a pleasing perversion of Longfellow's poem on the Woodman, with a few lines beginning:

"Scribbler, spare that sidewalk.

"Then I departed, threatening to have them all arrested."

"Good!" said the Poet. "I didn't think you'd ever do it. You have nerve enough, but you are too good-natured."

"I wasn't good-natured then," said the Idiot, regretfully; "and when I got through I stalked back into the house, scolded Mollie, sent Tommy to bed, and behaved like a bear for the rest of the evening."

"And the people on the wall? They slunk away in despair, I suppose," said the Poet.

"Not they," said the Idiot; "not by a long shot. They combined against me, and next morning when I started for town I found my sidewalk in worse shape than ever. One flag had written upon it the pleasing mandate 'Go drown yourself.' Another bore the mystic word 'Chump' in great capital letters, and at the end of my walk was a pastel portrait of myself, of rough and awkward composition, labelled with my name in full. It took my hired man two weeks to scrub it out. And on the following Hallowe'en they strung a huge banner on my telephone wires, inscribed 'The Idiot Asylum,' and every blessed gate I have to my name had been removed from the premises."

"What an outrage!" cried the Poet.

"Not a bit of it. Merely a suburban ebullition," said the Idiot. "They don't mean anything by it. They are mere children, after all, and from their point of view I have interfered with their rights."

"And you propose to stand all this?" asked the Poet. "If I were you I'd get a pile of broken bottles, as they do in England, and place them along the top of that wall so that they couldn't possibly use it."

"Brutal custom, that," said the Idiot. "May do for Englishmen; won't do here at all. In the first place, it spoils the appearance of the wall; in the second place, it is not efficacious; in the third place, it would place me in a false position. Everybody'd soon be asking where I got all those bottles. An Englishman drinks enough beer in the course of a week to keep his walls covered with broken bottles for a century. I don't, and I'm not going to buy bottles. I've got a better scheme."

"Ah!" cried the Poet. "Now we are coming to the invention."

"Merely an extension of my 'Hired-Man-Discourager,'" said the Idiot. "Simple, and I trust efficacious. I am going to put a live wire along the coping of my wall. Broken bottles are cheap, my dear Poet, but they don't work. If I put broken bottles on my wall the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Wooers would meet on my lawn and pass resolutions against me, and ultimately they would demand the use of my parlor, unless I misunderstand their nature.

"The lovers' rights must be respected always, and I'm truly thankful that they have stopped short at my frontage. When they operate along my frontier-line they are harmless, interesting, even amusing. If they carry their principles through and penetrate beyond the edge, why, then Mrs. Idiot and I will have to give it up.

"My scheme is to make them feel that they are welcome to the wall, but to make the wall – well, to give an element of surprise to the wall. Just as Jimpsonberry's man is soon to be surprised electrically, which is legitimately, so do I propose to surprise these inconsiderate persons who cut down my hedges, who scribble up my sidewalk with their poems, and who hang Hallowe'en banners on my telephone wires. I wish them all well, but next spring when they attempt to revive the customs of the past they will find that even I am resentful."

"But how?"

"I shall have a wire running along the coping, as I have already said, that between the hours of eight and twelve p.m. will be so full of shocking things that my uninvited guests will cease to bother me. Can you imagine the effect of a live wire upon ten loving couples engaged in looking at the moon while sitting on it?"

"Yet you claim to insist upon their rights as lovers," said the Poet, deprecatingly.

"Certainly I do," said the Idiot. "Man has a right to make love wherever he can. If he can't make love on my wall, let him make love somewhere else."