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Title: Every Man And His Friends. Mr. Crunch's
Author: Stephen Leacock [
More Titles by Leacock]
Portrait Gallery (as Edited from his Private Thoughts)
(I) HIS VIEWS ON HIS EMPLOYER
A mean man. I say it, of course, without any prejudice, and without the slightest malice. But the man is mean. Small, I think, is the word. I am not thinking, of course, of my own salary. It is not a matter that I would care to refer to; though, as a matter of fact, one would think that after fifteen years of work an application for an increase of five hundred dollars is the kind of thing that any man ought to be glad to meet half-way. Not that I bear the man any malice for it. None. If he died to-morrow, no one would regret his death as genuinely as I would: if he fell into the river and got drowned, or if he fell into a sewer and suffocated, or if he got burned to death in a gas explosion (there are a lot of things that might happen to him), I should feel genuinely sorry to see him cut off.
But what strikes me more than the man's smallness is his incompetence. The man is absolutely no good. It's not a thing that I would say outside: as a matter of fact I deny it every time I hear it, though every man in town knows it. How that man ever got the position he has is more than I can tell. And, as for holding it, he couldn't hold it half a day if it weren't that the rest of us in the office do practically everything for him.
Why, I've seen him send out letters (I wouldn't say this to anyone outside, of course, and I wouldn't like to have it repeated)--letters with, actually, mistakes in English. Think of it, in English! Ask his stenographer.
I often wonder why I go on working for him. There are dozens of other companies that would give anything to get me. Only the other day--it's not ten years ago--I had an offer, or practically an offer, to go to Japan selling Bibles. I often wish now I had taken it. I believe I'd like the Japanese. They're gentlemen, the Japanese. They wouldn't turn a man down after slaving away for fifteen years.
I often think I'll quit him. I say to my wife that that man had better not provoke me too far; or some day I'll just step into his office and tell him exactly what I think of him. I'd like to. I often say it over to myself in the street car coming home.
He'd better be careful, that's all.
(II) THE MINISTER WHOSE CHURCH HE ATTENDS
A dull man. Dull is the only word I can think of that exactly describes him--dull and prosy. I don't say that he is not a good man. He may be. I don't say that he is not. I have never seen any sign of it, if he is. But I make it a rule never to say anything to take away a man's character.
And his sermons! Really that sermon he gave last Sunday on Esau seemed to me the absolute limit. I wish you could have heard it. I mean to say--drivel. I said to my wife and some friends, as we walked away from the church, that a sermon like that seemed to me to come from the dregs of the human intellect. Mind you, I don't believe in criticising a sermon. I always feel it a sacred obligation never to offer a word of criticism. When I say that the sermon was punk, I don't say it as criticism. I merely state it as a fact. And to think that we pay that man eighteen hundred dollars a year! And he's in debt all the time at that. What does he do with it? He can't spend it. It's not as if he had a large family (they've only four children). It's just a case of sheer extravagance. He runs about all the time. Last year it was a trip to a Synod Meeting at New York--away four whole days; and two years before that, dashing off to a Scripture Conference at Boston, and away nearly a whole week, and his wife with him!
What I say is that if a man's going to spend his time gadding about the country like that--here to-day and there to-morrow--how on earth can he attend to his parochial duties?
I'm a religious man. At least I trust I am. I believe --and more and more as I get older--in eternal punishment. I see the need of it when I look about me. As I say, I trust I am a religious man, but when it comes to subscribing fifty dollars as they want us to, to get the man out of debt, I say "No."
True religion, as I see it, is not connected with money.
(III) HIS PARTNER AT BRIDGE
The man is a complete ass. How a man like that has the nerve to sit down at a bridge table, I don't know. I wouldn't mind if the man had any idea--even the faintest idea--of how to play. But he hasn't any. Three times I signalled to him to throw the lead into my hand and he wouldn't: I knew that our only ghost of a chance was to let me do all the playing. But the ass couldn't see it. He even had the supreme nerve to ask me what I meant by leading diamonds when he had signalled that he had none. I couldn't help asking him, as politely as I could, why he had disregarded my signal for spades. He had the gall to ask in reply why I had overlooked his signal for clubs in the second hand round; the very time, mind you, when I had led a three spot as a sign to him to let me play the whole game. I couldn't help saying to him, at the end of the evening, in a tone of such evident satire that anyone but an ass would have recognised it, that I had seldom had as keen an evening at cards.
But he didn't see it. The irony of it was lost on him. The jackass merely said--quite amiably and unconsciously --that he thought I'd play a good game presently. Me! Play a good game presently!
I gave him a look, just one look as I went out! But I don't think he saw it. He was talking to some one else.
(IV) HIS HOSTESS AT DINNER
On what principle that woman makes up her dinner parties is more than human brain can devise. Mind you, I like going out to dinner. To my mind it's the very best form of social entertainment. But I like to find myself among people that can talk, not among a pack of numbskulls. What I like is good general conversation, about things worth talking about. But among a crowd of idiots like that what can you expect? You'd think that even society people would be interested, or pretend to be, in real things. But not a bit. I had hardly started to talk about the rate of exchange on the German mark in relation to the fall of sterling bills--a thing that you would think a whole table full of people would be glad to listen to--when first thing I knew the whole lot of them had ceased paying any attention and were listening to an insufferable ass of an Englishman--I forget his name. You'd hardly suppose that just because a man has been in Flanders and has his arm in a sling and has to have his food cut up by the butler, that's any reason for having a whole table full of people listening to him. And especially the women: they have a way of listening to a fool like that with their elbows on the table that is positively sickening.
I felt that the whole thing was out of taste and tried in vain, in one of the pauses, to give a lead to my hostess by referring to the prospect of a shipping subsidy bill going through to offset the register of alien ships. But she was too utterly dense to take it up. She never even turned her head. All through dinner that ass talked --he and that silly young actor they're always asking there that is perpetually doing imitations of the vaudeville people. That kind of thing may be all right, for those who care for it--I frankly don't--outside a theatre. But to my mind the idea of trying to throw people into fits of laughter at a dinner-table is simply execrable taste. I cannot see the sense of people shrieking with laughter at dinner. I have, I suppose, a better sense of humour than most people. But to my mind a humourous story should be told quietly and slowly in a way to bring out the point of the humour and to make it quite clear by preparing for it with proper explanations. But with people like that I find I no sooner get well started with a story than some fool or other breaks in. I had a most amusing experience the other day--that is, about fifteen years ago--at a summer hotel in the Adirondacks, that one would think would have amused even a shallow lot of people like those, but I had no sooner started to tell it--or had hardly done more than to describe the Adirondacks in a general way--than, first thing I know, my hostess, stupid woman, had risen and all the ladies were trooping out.
As to getting in a word edgeways with the men over the cigars--perfectly impossible! They're worse than the women. They were all buzzing round the infernal Englishman with questions about Flanders and the army at the front. I tried in vain to get their attention for a minute to give them my impressions of the Belgian peasantry (during my visit there in 1885), but my host simply turned to me for a second and said, "Have some more port?" and was back again listening to the asinine Englishman.
And when we went upstairs to the drawing-room I found myself, to my disgust, side-tracked in a corner of the room with that supreme old jackass of a professor--their uncle, I think, or something of the sort. In all my life I never met a prosier man. He bored me blue with long accounts of his visit to Serbia and his impressions of the Serbian peasantry in 1875.
I should have left early, but it would have been too noticeable.
The trouble with a woman like that is that she asks the wrong people to her parties.
BUT,
(V) HIS LITTLE SON
You haven't seen him? Why, that's incredible. You must have. He goes past your house every day on his way to his kindergarten. You must have seen him a thousand times. And he's a boy you couldn't help noticing. You'd pick that boy out among a hundred, right away. "There's a remarkable boy," you'd say. I notice people always turn and look at him on the street. He's just the image of me. Everybody notices it at once.
How old? He's twelve. Twelve and two weeks yesterday. But he's so bright you'd think he was fifteen. And the things he says! You'd laugh! I've written a lot of them down in a book for fear of losing them. Some day when you come up to the house I'll read them to you. Come some evening. Come early so that we'll have lots of time. He said to me one day, "Dad" (he always calls me Dad), "what makes the sky blue?" Pretty thoughtful, eh, for a little fellow of twelve? He's always asking questions like that. I wish I could remember half of them.
And I'm bringing him up right, I tell you. I got him a little savings box a while ago, and have got him taught to put all his money in it, and not give any of it away, so that when he grows up he'll be all right.
On his last birthday I put a five dollar gold piece into it for him and explained to him what five dollars meant, and what a lot you could do with it if you hung on to it. You ought to have seen him listen.
"Dad," he says, "I guess you're the kindest man in the world, aren't you?"
Come up some time and see him.
[The end]
Stephen Leacock's essay: Every Man And His Friends. Mr. Crunch's
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