Read Ebook: The Philistine: a periodical of protest (Vol. III No. 2 July 1896) by Various Hubbard Elbert Editor

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A GLOOMY STAGE. SLENDER CURTAINS AT A WINDOW, CENTRE. BEFORE THE WINDOW, A TABLE, AND UPON THE TABLE, A LARGE BOOK, OPENED. A MOONBEAM, NO WIDER THAN A SWORD-BLADE, PIERCES THE CURTAINS AND FALLS UPON THE BOOK.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE.

FROM WITHOUT, THEN--AN ADJACENT ROOM IN INTENTION--COME SOUNDS OF CELEBRATION, OF RIOTOUS DRINKING AND LAUGHTER. FINALLY, A SWIFT QUARREL. THE DIN AND CRASH OF A FIGHT. A LITTLE STILLNESS. THEN A WOMAN'S SCREAM. "AH, MY SON, MY SON."

A MOMENT OF SILENCE.

CURTAIN.

STEPHEN CRANE.

A HOT WEATHER IDYLL.

The new assistant sat in the office, vainly endeavoring to discourage the perspiration in its efforts to show him how the water comes down at Lodore. But, with a perseverance worthy a wetter cause than the dry weather, it continued to flow from his mobile brow and neck, mop he never so well. The thermometer on the wall registered 89, and the calendar only May 1st. It was the new assistant's first day in the office, and he had already begun to contemplate with humid horror the prospect of spending an entire summer in a place that was already warm enough to have caused his once stiff and glossy collar to emulate his puff-bosom shirt.

The latter, who had been a cent short in his cash the night before, gruffly replied that it would probably be June 1st. But, before the day was over, he, too, was forced to realize the heat and to speak of it. So, when his face began to assume the appearance of a greasy plank under a hydrant, he concluded that it might not be so great a compromise to his dignity for him to agree with his junior, and his looks showed him to be rapidly thawing. They managed to survive that day and the next and several others that followed. In the meantime the thermometer seemed bent, in fact, warped, upon beating all previous records, and the two sufferers watched the mercury climb, until it seemed to be trying to reach its Olympian namesake. The thought that the worst was to come served to increase their distress. It always does.

Finally, the Old Book-keeper, who occupied a sort of oldest inhabitant position in the neighborhood, although he had always worked for a living, threw up the sponge and reluctantly admitted that, for so early in the season, it really beat all the weather he ever saw. The new assistant sympathized with the old man in his defeat, and went so far in his efforts to cheer him, as across the street to buy the beer, without first proposing to match for it.

ESTES BAKER.

Knoxville, Tenn.

A VENTURE IN MANUSCRIPT.

And I set out on my next story wondering if the time would ever come when a man could speak his mind to his fellow men in print, or if all written things would have to be shaped according to the Procrustean notions of the average editor.

CHARLES M. SKINNER.

THE MICKETTS OF A WYBIRT.

IAN TAYLOR.

THE PURPLE INSURGENT.

Clangingharp told Frostembight the only prophetic way to write an epic was to save all the rough drafts, with interlinear corrections. He said your biographer could thus trace the growth of your work from its earliest inception to its final bloom, and the photographic reproductions would do away with the cost of sketches. Frostembight said a man that would write an epic was a lunk-head. Clangingharp started to get up and destroy Frostembight, but he stepped on Marcus Aurelius, and with a rush of words to the throat fell helpless into his chair. Marcus Aurelius was the cat. "Dam that cat," added Clangingharp.

One night when Clangingharp sat writing, an episode occurred. Clangingharp couldn't write on an empty stomach, and the verses he made when he was sober were so drab and elegiac that in spite of his remark to Frostembight he threw them away and went out after cocktails. He could write shriller and hotter stuff when he had had cocktails. Well, one night he sat thinking of what an empty thing a cocktail is. He had been writing verses, and he knew they were regrettable. But he did not go out and have cocktails. It might be told why he didn't, but what's the use? You go to a comedy to get away from your business troubles, and the chief clown constantly thrusts under your nose a big wad of stage money. It would simply be dragging in sordid matter that should have no place in a psychological study. It is enough to say he didn't go out. He sat and plunked drops of purple ink from his pen into a blotter with an insurance advertisement on it that lay submissively on the desk. Then Marcus Aurelius leaped onto the blotter, and a fiendish shine glittered dryly in the epicist's eye. He noticed the cat was white. Rainy afternoons on the fire-escape had made the beast very white. Clangingharp plunked a drop of royal purple on the tip of Marcus Aurelius's tail.

The next instant Clangingharp had written:

"And gave him hemorrhage of the soul."

"Great!" he screeched in a seething cauldron of joy. "Powerful!"

He began to wonder whether or not cattails were as effective as cocktails. He plunked another royal purple drop onto the cat's tail, and wrote another line. It was not so good as hemorrhage of the soul, but it was pretty fair:

"And freshet-flushed his hydrant eye."

For two weeks Clangingharp's days and nights were dry. He did not go out after cocktails, and as there was a drought on the fire-escape the cat was becoming splendidly regal. The window was kept open, for the weather was hot; but Marcus Aurelius got no nourishment excepting an occasional mouse and what he absorbed from the ink, so he staid in. Clangingharp would sit there for hours and deliberately sling ink at him. Not a growl from Marcus. At last he would take down the folding-bed, and before getting in would remember the pen and wipe it along Marcus's spine. Not a plaint from the cat: always patient and forgiving.

The epic was growing. It had become so vast now that Clangingharp had long since stopped saving rough drafts, and the complete copy was piled up neatly on his desk. There was so much that he had even ceased reading the whole of it through after writing each new line. The evening came when Clangingharp felt that he could finish the last canto. His heroine was about to get her document so she could be married to the hero, and Clangingharp felt that without stimulants he was scarcely up to writing the heroine's final spasm to the jury. It may as well be said here that Clangingharp had been hearing from home lately, so he decided to go out and have them for a last strain. He piled his manuscript fondly on a corner of the desk, dipped his pen thoughtfully into the ink-well, and gazing abstractedly at Marcus, plunked the whole penful into a mute Aurelian eye.

"Dam that cat!" said Clangingharp.

FRANK W. NOXON.

HEART TO HEART TALKS WITH MEN

QUERY ONE.

Formerly, this matter was in doubt; but there can be no dispute over this point in recent years. But, unfortunately, both good taste and modesty prevent me from making a more definite reply.

QUERY TWO.

I notice you frequently refer to Henry Ward Beecher as a great man; will you kindly state why you consider him such?

Mr. Beecher acquired some reputation in Brooklyn a few years ago as a preacher; this contributed somewhat to his fame. His principal claim to greatness, however, rests on his wonderful power of recognizing genius in others. He early saw the advantage of seeking out and connecting himself with the great geniuses of his neighborhood. I need scarcely add that I was raised in Brooklyn, and that he was among my first admirers.

QUERY THREE.

Should a young man smoke cigarettes?

QUERY FOUR.

Which of our great poets do you consider led the happiest lives?

Whittier and Tennyson, because they were so blessed with great friendships. I knew them both well myself.

QUERY FIVE.

This question it is almost impossible to answer; to you my work would seem Herculean, unceasing, impossible; but to me it is so different that I feel that I cannot answer this question to make myself intelligible. This question is doubly difficult to answer, for I have systematized my work by establishing a drag net for getting material. I will explain my method. I take up the latest magazine; I see a story by some new great writer, a society leader in the metropolis. Presto! I order a series of articles on "How Women Should Behave at Teas" from her pen. I hear that a great English novelist is coming over to seek the American dollar; again, as with lightning, I order an article "How Your Women Impress Me." It is immaterial to me what they actually do write, or how far they wander from their text, so long as they use my ready made titles. They look so nice in the index.

In this way, I use the small talk of the writers as a soft food for my readers. Just as you attempt, in your feeble way, to serve up the gossip of your little hamlet in your weekly paper, so I do; for I tell you in confidence what women want is not literature, not art, not science, but gossip. So I make all the great writers of the day write gossip for them. This is the secret of my success. You should feel very happy now, for, although my thoughts and pen fly with lightninglike rapidity, I have spent five hundred dollars' worth of time in answering your inquiry.

I will answer the rest of my anxious readers as soon as I can systematize other incidents in my very short but successward career. In the meantime, young men by following the lines laid down in this paper cannot fail of success, real, pure, noble success.

J. HOWE ADAMS.

PLOTS AND THINGS.

UNFORBIDDEN FRUIT.

I have a plot:--A man and a girl in a boarding house in Duesseldorf were rather sweet on each other. It might have become love and a marriage, since they were the only Americans there, were both to stay all summer, and both attractive.

The romance began well, they even got so far that one day he held her hand and leaned forward, gazing deeply into her eyes.

Here was a catastrophe. Her reputation according to German ideas, gone. "Ein junges Maedchen sich se zu eenehmen--abschenlich!" Nothing but an engagement could excuse the holding of the hand of a junges Maedchen by a man.

They looked at each other and laughed, ruefully. Then they agreed to become engaged, temporarily: what in Virginia is known as "just engaged," in contradistinction to "engaged to be married."

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