Ch. 8 - Every Man and his Friends

Mr. Crunch's 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.