V
A PSYCHIC VENTURE
"I beg your pardon, Doctor," said the Idiot, as he laid aside hismorning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon thebreakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-class home for singlegentlemen. "I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissfulintercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in theWaffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karatpsychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I needone in my business."
"Sike whats?" queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting asizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.
"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, amedium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business,who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again."
"H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor.
"Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot indouble harness?"
"Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said theDoctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that inall respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always foundthose I know wholly reliable."
"You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn'tlooking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had achance?" said the Idiot.
"That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A manmay be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, andabsolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yetwhen he goes off, er--when he goes off--"
"Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good title for a storythat--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?"
"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when hegoes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite soreliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyantpatients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not aspsychlists."
"That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I canbe sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all otherrespects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."
"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance."
"What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?"asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser ofpure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkersnow passed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?"
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider theirutterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got intocommunication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't getanything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pinkpajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but Ididn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind ofclimate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He neededhis summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else.I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair ofear-tabs and a fur overcoat."
"And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniacscornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-dayThomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to himby these people, having a chance to send a real message to hiscountrymen?"
"I've only seen one message from Jefferson," said the Idiot, "and itseemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up inSchenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz--whizz--whizz,buzz--buzz--buzz, whizz--whizz--whizz!' Lots of people considered itdrivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance."
"Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can," said theBibliomaniac. "The idea that the greatest political thinker of the agescould stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous."
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "You have not the understanding mind.Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapiditywith which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as herealized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political beliefwere putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple oldDemocrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit ofentomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums ofhis native land."
"Pouf!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You are a reactionary, Sir."
"Ubetcha," said the Idiot. "First principles first, say I. But to comeback to clairvoyants. I am very anxious to get hold of a medium, Doctor,and the sooner the better. I'm going to give up Wall Street. I can'tafford to stay there any longer unless I move out of this restfulparadise of food and thought and take up my abode in a Mills Hotel, orcharter a bench in the park from the city. The only business we had inour office last week was a game of poker between the firm and itsemployes, and the firm tided itself over the emergency by winning mysalary for the next six weeks. Another week of such activity wouldprostrate me financially, and I am going to open a literary bureau todeal in posthumous literature."
"Posthumous literature is the curse of letters," said the Bibliomaniac."It generally means the publication of the rejected, or personallydiscarded, manuscripts of a dead author, which results in the seriousimpairment of the quality of his laurels. It ought to be made amisdemeanor to print the stuff."
"I agree with you entirely as to that, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "Thisbusiness of emptying the pigeonholes of deceased scribes, and printingevery last scrap of scribbling to be found there, whether they intendedit to be printed or not, is reprehensible, and I for one would gladlyadvocate a law requiring executors of a literary estate to burn allunpublished manuscripts found among the decedent's papers merely as amatter of protection to a great name. But it isn't that kind ofposthumous production that I am going in for. It's the productionposthumously produced that I am after, and I need a first-class mediumas a side partner to get hold of the stuff for me."
"Preposterous!" sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's alady over in England has recently published a book of short stories bythe late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted tothe world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, Idon't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, andothers, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get upa posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity."
"I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor.
"Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall dowill be to send the lady after Charles Dickens and good old Thackeray,and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences,and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself withjust taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply themwith subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definitepolicy.
"Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could dowith little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results wouldcome from turning Dickens loose on the underworld, and settingThackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! Ifthere ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I canhardly sleep nights for thinking about it."
"I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quiteperfect as it is."
"No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. Forexample, think of a scene described by Dickens in which Fagin, nowbecome a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takeslittle Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunmanout of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of anelectric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly movingplatform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes soexpert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they
pass, missing thetwentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man Faginwants to scare and not kill.
"Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle andexpose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisitedullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man onthe outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with thesounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he iswriting about! Great heavens--the idea makes my mouth water!"
"That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how areyou going to get the facts over to Dickens and Thackeray?"
"I shall not need to," said the Idiot. "All they'll have to do will beto project themselves in spirit over here into the very midst of thescenes to be described. As spirits they will have the entree into anyold kind of society they wish to investigate, and in that respect theywill have the advantage over us poor mortals who can't go anywherewithout having to take our confounded old bodies along with us. Thenafter I had arranged matters with Dickens and Thackeray, I'd send mypsychic representative after Alexander Dumas, and get him to write asequel to 'The Three Musketeers', and 'Twenty Years After', which Ishould call 'Two Hundred and Ninety Years After, a Romance of 1916', inwhich D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should return to moderntimes and try their hands on trench work, introducing the aeroplane, thesubmarine, and all the other appurtenances of war, from the militantbrick to the dynamite bomb. Why, a good, rip-staving old Dumas tale ofadventure of to-day, with those old heroes of his mixed up with theMilitant Suffragettes and the Crown Prince of Germany, would be what oldDoctor Johnson would have called a cracker-jack, if he had had theslightest conception of the possibilities of the English language."
"Wouldn't interest me in the least," said the Bibliomaniac coldly, "Ifthere is anything under the canopy that I despise it is so-calledromance. Now, if you could get hold of some of the solider things, such,for instance, as Macaulay might write, or"--
"Ah!" said the Idiot, triumphantly, "it is there that my scheme wouldwork out most beneficently. My special articles on historic events bypersonal participators would thrill the world.
"From Adam I would secure the first and only authentic account of theFall, with possibly an expression of his opinion as to the validity ofthe Darwinian theory. From Noah, aided and abetted by Shem, Ham, andJaphet, would come a series of sea stories narrating in thrilling stylethe story of The Flood, or How We Landed the Zoo on Ararat. A line ortwo from Balaam's Ass on the subject of modern Socialism would fill thereading world with wonder. A series of papers specially prepared for awoman's magazine by Henry VIII. on 'Wild Wives I Have Wedded', edited,possibly, with copious footnotes by Brigham Young, would bring fortuneto the pockets of the publishers.
"And then the poets--ah, Mr. Bib, what treasures of poesy would thisplan of mine not bring within our reach! Dante could write a new'Inferno' introducing a new torture in the form of Satan compelling aMember of Congress to explain the Tariff bill. Homer could sing thesufferings and triumphs of arctic exploration in a new epic entitled'The Chilliad', or possibly expend his genius upon the story of the riseand fall of Bryan in immortal periods under the title of 'TheBilliad'"--
"Or describe your progressive idiocy under the title of 'The Silliad!'"put in the Bibliomaniac.
"Ubetcha!" cried the Idiot. "Or tell the sad tale of your life under thetitle of 'The Seniliad.' And in addition to these wonders, who canestimate to what extent we should all profit were our more seriousreviews to secure articles from Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and oldBen Franklin on the present state of the nation! Why, an articledictated off-hand by the shade of Lincoln on the thousands who are nowflattering themselves that they occupy his shoes, illustrated with thoseapt anecdotes of which he was a master, and pointed with his gloriouslydry humor, under the title of 'Later Links', would alone make theventure worth while, even if nothing else came of it."
"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, rising, "perhaps there is somethingin the idea after all, and I wish you success, Mr. Idiot--and, by theway, if the scheme works out as you expect it to, and you happen to comeacross old AEsculapius, ask him for me for an authoritative statement ofthe origin and proper treatment of idiocy, will you?"
"Sure," said the Idiot, turning to his breakfast, "but it really isn'tnecessary to do that, Mr. Bib. Our good old friend, the Doctor here, isquite capable of curing you at any time you consent to put yourselfunreservedly in his hands."