Pluck and Luck Read online

  The day of the festival arrives, bright and rainy. All preparations are made for a cozy evening in defiance of the elements; so when, along about four in the afternoon, it clears and turns into a nice hot day, everyone is caught with rubbers and steamy mackintoshes, to add to the fun. For, by four o’clock in the afternoon, practically everyone in the parish is at the vestry “helping out,” as they call it.

  “Helping out” consists of putting on an apron over your good clothes, tucking up the real lace cuffs, and dropping plates. The scene in the kitchen of the church at about five-thirty in the afternoon is one to make a prospective convert to Christianity stop and think. Between four and nine thousand women, all wearing aprons over black silk dresses, rush back and forth carrying platters of food, bumping into each other, hysterical with laughter, filling pitchers with hot coffee from a shiny urn, and poking good-natured fun at Mr. Numaly and Mr. Dow, husbands who have been drafted into service and who, amid screams of delight from the ladies, have also donned aprons and are doing the dropping of the heavier plates and ice-cream freezers.

  “Look at Mr. Dow!” they cry. “Some good-looking girl you make, Mr. Dow!”

  “Come up to my house, Mr. Numaly, and I’ll hire you to do our cooking.”

  “Alice says for Mr. Numaly to come up to her house and she’ll hire him as a cook! Alice, you’re a caution!”

  And so it goes, back and forth, good church-members all, which means that their banter contains nothing off-color and, by the same token, nothing that was coined later than the first batch of buffalo nickels.

  In the meantime, the paying guests are arriving out in the vestry and are sniffing avidly at the coffee aroma, which by now has won its fight with the smell of musty hymn books which usually dominates the place. They leave their hats and coats in the kindergarten room on the dwarfed chairs and wander about looking with week-day detachment at the wall-charts showing the startling progress of the Children of Israel across the Red Sea and the list of gold-star pupils for the month of May. Occasionally they take a peek in at the kitchen and remark on the odd appearance of Messrs. Numaly and Dow, who by this time are just a little fed up on being the center of the taunting and have stopped answering back.

  The kiddies, who have been brought in to gorge themselves on indigestible strawberry concoctions, are having a gay time tearing up and down the vestry for the purpose of tagging each other. They manage to reach the door just as Mrs. Camack is entering with a platter full of cabbage salad, and later she explains to Mrs. Reddy while the latter is sponging off her dress that this is the last time she is going to have anything to do with a church supper at which those Basnett children are allowed. The Basnett children, in the meantime, oblivious of this threat, are giving all their attention to slipping pieces of colored chalk from the blackboard into the hot rolls which have just been placed on the tables. And, considering what small children they are, they are doing remarkably well at it.

  At last everyone is ready to sit down. In fact, several invited guests do sit down, and have to be reminded that Dr. Murney has yet to arrange the final details of the supper with Heaven before the chairs can be pulled out. This ceremony, with the gentle fragrance of strawberries and salad rising from the table, is one of the longest in the whole list of church rites; and when it is finally over there is a frantic scraping of chairs and clatter of cutlery and babble of voices which means that the hosts of the Lord have completed another day’s work in the vineyard and are ready, nay, willing, to toy with several tons of foodstuffs.

  The adolescent element in the church has been recruited to do the serving, but only a few of them show up at the beginning of the meal. The others may be found by any member of the committee frantic enough to search them out, sitting in little groups of two on the stairs leading up to the organ loft or indulging in such forms of young love as tie-snatching and braid-pulling up in the study.

  The unattached youths and maids who are induced to take up the work of pouring coffee do it with a vim but very little skill. Pouring coffee over the shoulder of a person sitting at a long table with dozens of other people is a thing that you ought to practice weeks in advance for, and these young people step right in on the job without so much as a dress rehearsal. The procedure is, or should be, as follows:

  Standing directly behind the person about to be served, say in a loud but pleasant voice: “Coffee?” If the victim wishes it, he or she will lift the cup from the table and hold it to be filled, with the left forefinger through the handle and bracing the cup against the right upper-arm. The pourer will then have nothing to do but see to it that the coffee goes from the pitcher to the cup.

  Where the inexperienced often make a mistake is in reaching for the cup themselves and starting to pour before finding out if the victim wants coffee. This results in nine cases out of six in the victim’s turning suddenly and saying: “No coffee, thank you, please!”, jarring the arm of the pourer and getting the coffee on the cuff.

  For a long time nothing is heard but the din of religious eating and then gradually, one by one, forks slip from nerveless fingers, chairs are scraped back, and the zealots stir heavily to their feet. All that remains is for the committee to gather up the remains and congratulate themselves on their success.

  The next event in the calendar will not be until October, when the Men’s Club of the church will prepare and serve a supper of escalloped oysters and hot rolls. Join now and be enrolled for labor in the vineyard in the coming year.

  * * *

  PREV TOC INDEX NEXT

  Horse-Sense Editorial

  (In very large type on the first page

  of your favorite fiction magazine)

  * * *

  A man walked into my office the other day and tried to sell me some buttercups.

  Some buttercups, Mr. Blank?” he said, smiling.

  “When you say that, smile,” I replied. And from the way I spoke, he knew that I meant what I said.

  Now that man went about his job in the wrong way. Most of us go about our jobs in the wrong way. We forget the other fellow. They say that an elephant never forgets. Did you ever hear of an elephant failing in business? Elephants never forget, and daisies won’t tell. Two things that we humans might well take to heart.

  Supposing Moses had forgotten the other fellow. The great Law-Giver was, above all else, a two-fisted business man. He knew the rate of exchange, and he knew that what goes up must come down. Moses was no elephant. Neither was he a daisy. And yet Moses will be remembered when most of us are forgotten.

  The other day I met an old school-mate. He was crying. “Well, old timer,” I said, “what’s that you’ve got in your hand?”

  “My other hand,” he replied, shaking it.

  Now the reason my old school-mate hadn’t made good was that he kept one hand inside the other. He was drawing on his principal. He had never heard of such a thing as interest.

  A lot of people think interest is a bad thing. They call people who take interest on their money “usurers.” And yet Ezra was a “usurer.” Job was a “usurer.” St. Paul was a “usurer.” Samuel M. Vauclain, President of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, is a “usurer.” Think that over on your cash register and see if I am not right.

  Do you suppose that God sent manna down to the Israelites for nothing? Not much. They paid for it, and they paid for it good. The gold alone in the Ark of the Covenant ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in “interest.” Easy come, easy go.

  On the street in which I live there is a line of trees. They are fine, big trees, full of twigs and branches. All except one. This one tree has no twigs or branches. It hasn’t even any leaves. It just stands there. One day last week I determined to see what was wrong with that tree. I wanted to know why, in a line of fine, strong trees, there should be one weak one. I suspected that it wasn’t playing the game right. Not many of us do.

  So I went close to it and examined it. It wasn’t a tree at all. It was a hyd
rant.

  Watch out that you aren’t a hydrant in a line of trees. Or, worse yet, a line of trees in a hydrant.

  * * *

  PREV TOC INDEX NEXT

  Chemists’ Sporting Extra!

  Big Revolutionary Discovery

  Upsetting Everything

  * * *

  To appreciate the rapid strides which the science of chemistry has made in the last fifty years all one has to do is to think back on the days when we all, like a lot of poor saps, believed that the molecule was the smallest division into which you could divide matter. Then someone came along and proved that the molecule itself could be divided into something called atoms. Well, the relief we felt at this announcement! Everyone went out and got drunk.

  Then came another scientist (he married a Cheever), who said that if you honestly wanted to get down to the fine points of the thing you could divide the atom up into much smaller units. This tiniest of all divisions of matter he called the “electron,” after his little daughter Tiny, she being the smallest one in his family.

  This seemed to be just about final, for the man said that an electron was a particle of negative electricity (one which knows when to say “No”), and that a “proton” was a particle of positive electricity, and that if you didn’t believe it you could go and look for yourself. So it seemed pretty definitely settled that the electron was as small as you could get, and that unless you were crazy you wouldn’t ever want to get even that small. So people began to put on their coats and hats and started to go back to work.

  But that just shows. Now comes a Dr. Ernst J. Flazzer, of the University of Carlsbad, who declares that the electron is susceptible of being divided still further, and that, what is more, he has done it, right on his own porch. He calls the new subdivision “traffets,” and claims there are eight or ten million of them in one electron.

  This practically revolutionizes modern chemistry. Modern chemistry has been revolutionized seven times now. The discovery of the traffet means that we shall have to go back over all the researches that we have made in the past fifty years and throw away all that nice stuff in the test tubes.

  For instance, in the old days, when you passed an electric current through water (H2O), the free atoms of oxygen went in one direction and the free atoms of hydrogen went in the opposite one. At the count of ten they were supposed to turn around and see who had gone farthest. This game was called “Peek-o.”

  It was the same with a gas. A molecule of CO2 was the seat of such activity and good-natured rivalry on a pleasant day that you could hear the shouts a mile away. Everyone had a good time in a molecule of CO2. That was before even electrons were heard of. Just horse-cars. There were no jazz bands, and when any one wanted a drink, he took it.

  The introduction of the traffet into the scene, however, changes all that. Let us say that you have a combination of 72 atoms of carbon, 112 atoms of hydrogen, 18 atoms of nitrogen, a pony of brandy, White Rock and orange juice. It sounds all right, you say. Yes, but that’s because anything with a pony of brandy in it sounds all right. The trouble is that you can’t trust the hydrogen you get these days. It may be anything.

  Now the division of electrons into traffets makes the formation of crystals almost impossible. You know crystals. For while you can pass a colloid (white of an egg, for example) through a parchment paper, a crystalloid (such as pencils) will not go through. This is because the atoms of hydrogen, coming into conjunction with the atoms of oxygen, refuse to go any farther without some assurance that they aren’t going to be made suckers of and subdivided again by the next analyst that comes along. You can’t blame them.

  Lord Kelvin once said that the presence of 1/1000th part of bismuth in copper would reduce its electrical conductivity so as to make it practically useless. A lot of people laughed when Lord Kelvin said this, but now they are laughing out of the other side of their mouths, for, bismuth or no bismuth (see the famous cartoon in Punch called “Dropping the Pilot,” showing the Iron Chancellor himself being discarded by the young Emperor), the fact remains that during electrolysis you have to be very, very careful about catching cold. Of course, there is always a chance that Dr. Flazzer may not be right, and there may be no such things as “traffets” in an electron. The awful part of it all is, there is no way of ever finding out whether he is right or not. Once you start questioning these things, you end up back in the brute state with no science at all.

  * * *

  PREV TOC INDEX NEXT

  French for Americans

  A Handy Compendium for Visitors to Paris

  * * *

  The following lessons and exercises are designed for the exclusive use of Americans traveling in France. They are based on the needs and behavior of Americans, as figured from the needs and behavior of 14,000 Americans last summer. We wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to American Express Co., 11 Rue Scribe, for some of our material.

  THE FRENCH LANGUAGE

  1. Pronunciation

  Vowels / Pronounced

  a ~ ong

  e ~ ong

  i ~ ong

  o ~ ong

  u ~ ong

  2. Accents

  The French language has three accents, the acute e, the grave e, and the circumflex e, all of which are omitted.

  3. Phrases most in demand by Americans

  English / French

  Haven’t you got any griddle-cakes?

  N’avez-vous pas des griddle-cakes?

  What kind of a dump is this, anyhow?

  Quelle espèce de dump is this, anyhow?

  Do you call that coffee?

  Appellez-vous cela coffee?

  Where can I get a copy of the N.Y. Times?

  Oú est le N.Y. Times?

  What’s the matter? Don’t you understand English?

  What’s the matter? Don’t you understand English?

  Of all the godam countries I ever saw.

  De tous les pays godams que j’ai vu.

  Hey there, driver, go slow!

  Hey there, chauffeur, allez lentement!

  Where’s Sister?

  Oú est Sister?

  How do I get to the Louvre from here?

  Oú est le Louvre?

  Two hundred francs? In your hat.

  Deux cents francs? Dans votre chapeau.

  Where’s Brother?

  Oú est Brother?

  I haven’t seen a good-looking woman yet.

  Je n’ai pas vu une belle femme jusqu’a présent.

  Where can I get laundry done by six tonight?

  Oú est le laundry?

  Here is where we used to come when I was here during the War.

  Ici est oú nous used to come quand j’etais ici pendant le guerre.

  Say, this is real beer all right!

  Say, ceci est de la bierre vrai!

  Oh boy!

  O boy!

  Two weeks from tomorrow we sail for home.

  Deux semaines from tomorrow nous sail for home.

  Then when we land I'll go straight to Childs and get a cup of coffee and a glass of ice-water.

  Sogleich wir zu hause sind, geh ich zum Childs und eine tasse kaffee und ein glass eiswasser kaufen.

  Very well.

  Tres bien.

  Leave it in my room.

  Tres bien.

  Good night!

  Tres bien.

  Where did Father go to?

  Oú est Papa?

  PLACES IN PARIS FOR AMERICANS TO VISIT

  The Lobby of the Ritz

  This is one of the most interesting places in Paris for the American tourist, for it is there that he meets a great many people from America. If he will stand by the potted palms in the corner he will surely find someone whom he knows before long and can enter into a conversation on how things are going at home.

  The American Express Co., 11 Rue Scribe

  Here again the American traveler will find surcease from the irritating French quality of most of the rest of Paris. If he comes here fo
r his mail, he will hear the latest news of the baseball leagues, how the bathing is on the Maine Coast, what the chances are for the Big Fight in September at the Polo Grounds, and whom Nora Bayes has married in August. There will be none of this unintelligible French jabber with which Paris has become so infested of late years. He will hear language spoken as it should be spoken, whether he come from Massachusetts or Iowa.

  WHERE TO EAT IN PARIS

  Hartford Lunch

  There has been a Hartford Lunch opened at 115 Rue Lord Byron where the American epicure can get fried-egg-sandwiches, Boston baked beans, coffee rings, and crullers almost as good as those he can get at home. The place is run by Martin Keefe, formerly of the Hartford Lunch in Fall River, Massachusetts, and is a mecca for those tourists who want good food well cooked.

  United States Drug Store

  At the corner of Rue Bonsard and the Boulevard de Parteuille there is an excellent American drug store where are served frosted chocolates, ice-cream sodas, Coca-Cola, and pimento cheese sandwiches. A special feature which will recall the beloved homeland to Americans is the buying of soda checks before ordering.

  FRENCH CURRENCY

  Here is something which is likely to give the American traveler no little trouble. In view of the fluctuating value of the franc, the following table should be memorized in order to insure against mistakes:

  Day of Week American value of Franc

  Monday 5 cents

  Tuesday 5.1 cents

  Wednesday 4.9 cents

  Thursday 1 lb. chestnuts

  Friday 2 yds. linoleum

  Saturday What-have-you

  The proper procedure for Americans in making purchases is as follows: