Chapter 18

FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS

I HAVE a request to make of you gentlemen,” observed the Idiot, as the last buckwheat-cake of his daily allotment disappeared within. “And I sincerely hope you will all grant it. It won’t cost you anything, and will save you a lot of trouble.”

“I promise beforehand under such conditions,” said the Doctor. “The promise that doesn’t cost anything and saves a lot of trouble is the kind I like to make.”

“Same here,” said Mr. Brief.

“None for me,” said the Bibliomaniac. “My confidence in the Idiot’s prophecies is about as great as a defeated statesman’s popular plurality. My experience with him teaches me that when he signals no trouble ahead then is the time to look out for squalls. Therefore, you can count me out on this promise he wants us to make.”

“All right,” said the Idiot. “To tell the truth, I didn’t think you’d come in because I didn’t believe you could qualify. You see, the promise I was going to ask you to make presupposes a certain condition which you don’t fulfil. I was going to ask you, gentlemen, when Christmas comes to give me not the rich and beautiful gifts you contemplate putting into my stocking, but their equivalent in cash. Now you, Mr. Bib, never gave me anything at Christmas but advice, and your advice has no cash equivalent that I could ever find out, and even if it had I’m long on it now. That piece of advice you gave me last March about getting my head shaved so as to give my brain a little air I’ve never been able to use, and your kind suggestion of last August, that I ought to have my head cut off as a sure cure of chronic appendicitis, which you were certain I had, doctors tell me would be conducive to heart failure, which is far more fatal than the original disease. The only use to which I can put it, on my word of honor, is to give it back to you this Christmas with my best wishes.”

“Bosh!” sneered the Bibliomaniac.

“It was, indeed,” said the Idiot. “And there isn’t any market for it. But the rest of you gentlemen will really delight my soul if you will do as I ask. You, Mr. Brief—what is the use of your paying out large sums of money, devoting hour after hour of your time, and practically risking your neck in choosing it, for a motor-car for me, when, as a matter of fact, I’d rather have the money? What’s the use of giving thirty-six hundred dollars for an automobile to put in my stocking when I’d be happier if you’d give me a certified check for twenty-five hundred dollars? You couldn’t get any such discount from the manufacturers, and I’d be more greatly pleased into the bargain. And you, Doctor—generous heart, that you are—why in thunder should you wear yourself out between now and Christmas-day looking for an eighteen-hundred-dollar fur-lined overcoat for me, when, as a matter of actual truth, I’d prefer a twenty-two-dollar ulster with ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in the change-pocket?”

“I’m sure I don’t see why I should,” said the Doctor. “And I promise you I won’t. What’s more, I’ll give you the ulster and the ten crisp one hundred dollars without fail if you’ll cash my check for eighteen hundred dollars and give me the change.”

“Certainly,” said the Idiot. “How will you have it, in dimes or nickels?”

“Any way you please,” said the Doctor, with a wink at Mr. Brief.

“All right,” returned the Idiot. “Send up the ulster and the ten crisps and I’ll give you my check for the balance. Then I’ll do the same by you, Mr. Poet. My policy involves a square deal for everybody whatever his previous condition of servitude. Last year, you may remember, you sent me a cigar and a lovely little poem of your own composition:

“When I am blue as indigo, you wrote,
And cold as is the Arctic snow,
Give me no megrims rotting.
I choose the friend
The Heavens send
Who takes me Idiyachting.

Remember that? Well, it was a mighty nice present, and I wouldn’t sell it for a million abandoned farms up in New Hampshire, but this year I’d rather have the money—say one thousand dollars and five cents—a thousand dollars instead of the poem and five cents in place of the cigar.”

“I am afraid you value my verse too high,” smiled the Poet.

“Not that one,” said the Idiot. “The mere words don’t amount to much. I could probably buy twice as many just as good for four dollars, but the way in which you arranged them, and the sentiment they conveyed, made them practically priceless to me. I set their value at a thousand dollars because that is the minimum sum at which I can be tempted to part with things that on principle I should always like to keep—like my word of honor, my conscience, my political views, and other things a fellow shouldn’t let go of for minor considerations. The value of the cigar I may have placed too high, but the poem—never.”

“And yet you don’t want another?” asked the Poet, reproachfully.

“Indeed I do,” returned the Idiot, “but I can’t afford to own so much literary property any more than I can afford to possess Mr. Brief’s automobile—and this is precisely what I am driving at. So many people nowadays present us at Christmas with objects we can’t afford to own, that we cannot possibly repay, and overwhelm us with luxuries when we are starving for our necessities, so that Christmas, instead of bringing happiness with it, brings trial and tribulation. I know of a case last year where a very generous-hearted individual sent a set of Ruskin, superbly bound in full calf that would have set the Bibliomaniac here crazy with joy, to a widow who had just pawned her wedding-ring to buy a Christmas turkey for her children. A bundle of kindling-wood would have been far more welcome than a Carnegie library at that moment, and yet here was a generous soul who was ready to spend a good hundred dollars to make the recipient happy. Do you suppose the lady looked upon that sumptuous Ruskin with anything but misery in her heart?”

“Oh, well, she could have pawned that instead of her wedding-ring,” sniffed the Bibliomaniac.

“She couldn’t for two reasons,” said the Idiot. “In the first place, her sensibilities were such that she could not have pawned a present just received, and, in the second place, she lived in the town of Hohokus on the Nepperhan, and there isn’t a pawnshop within a radius of fifty miles of her home. Besides, it’s easier to sneak into a pawnshop with a wedding-ring for your collateral than to drive up with a van big enough to hold a complete set of Ruskin bound in full calf. It takes nerve and experience to do that with a cool and careless mien, and, whatever you may have in that respect, Mr. Bib, there are few refined widows in reduced circumstances who are similarly gifted. Then take the case of my friend Billups—some sharp of a tailor got out a judgment against Billups for ninety-eight dollars for a bill he couldn’t pay on the fifteenth of December. Billups got his name in the papers, and received enough notoriety to fill him with ambition to go on the stage, and it nearly killed him, and what do you suppose his friends did when Christmas came around? Did they pay off that judgment and relieve him of the odium of having his name chalked up on the public slate? Not they. They sent him forty dollars’ worth of golf-clubs, sixteen dollars’ worth of cuff-buttons, eight ten-dollar umbrellas, a half-dozen silver match-boxes, a cigar-cutter, and about two hundred dollars’ worth of other trash that he’s got to pay storage-room for. And on top of that, in order to keep up his end, Billups has had to hang up a lot of tradesmen for the match-cases and cigar-cutters and umbrellas and trash he’s sent to his generous friends in return for their generosity.”

“Oh, rot,” interrupted the Bibliomaniac. “What an idiot your friend Billups must be. Why didn’t he send the presents he received to others, and so saved his money to pay his debts with?”

“Well, I guess he didn’t think of that,” said the Idiot. “We haven’t all got the science of Christmas-giving down as fine as you have, Mr. Bib. But that is a valuable suggestion of yours and I’ll put it down among the things that can be done in the plan I am formulating for the painless Christmas.”

“We can’t relieve one another’s necessities unless we know what they are, can we?” asked Mr. Whitechoker.

“We can if we adopt my cash system,” said the Idiot. “For instance, I know that I need a dozen pairs of new socks. Modesty would prevent my announcing this fact to the world, and as long as I wear shoes you’d never find it out, but if, when Christmas came, you gave me twenty-five dollars instead of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in words of one syllable, you would relieve my necessities and so earn my everlasting gratitude. Dr. Capsule here wouldn’t acknowledge to you or to me that his suspenders are held together in three places with safety-pins, and will so continue to be until these prosperous times moderate; but if we were to present him with nine dollars and sixty-eight cents on Christmas morning, we should discern a look of gratitude in his eye on that suspender account that would be missing if we were to hand him out a seven-dollar gold-mounted shaving-mug instead. We should have shown our generous spirit on his behalf, which is all a Christmas present ever does, whether it is a diamond tiara or a chain of sausages, and at the same time have relieved his anxieties about his braces. His gratitude would be double-barrelled, and his happiness a surer shot. Give us the money, say I, and let us relieve our necessities first, and then if there is anything left over we can buy some memorial of the day with the balance.”

“Well, I think it’s a pretty good plan,” said Mrs. Pedagog. “It would save a lot of waste, anyhow. But it isn’t possible for all of us to do it, Mr. Idiot. I, for instance, haven’t any money to give you.”

“You could give me something better,” said the Idiot. “I wouldn’t accept any money from you for a Christmas present.”

“Then what shall it be?” asked the Landlady.

“Well—a receipt in full for my bill to date,” said the Idiot.

“Mercy!” cried the Landlady. “I couldn’t afford that—”

“Oh, yes you could,” said the Idiot. “Because for your Christmas I’d give you a check in full for the amount.”

“Oh—I see,” smiled the Landlady. “Then what do we get for our Christmas? Strikes me it’s about as broad as it is long.”

“Precisely,” said the Idiot. “We get even—and that’s about as conducive to a happy Christmas, to Peace on Earth and Good-will to men, as any condition I know of. If I can get square for Christmas I don’t want anything else.”

THE END