Frenzied Fiction, Stephen Leacock [books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

you have to do is to look upstairs. If they are not there, you simply come down again. But stop, you are going to walk up the street? I’ll go with you.”

At the outer door of the station—just as I had remembered it—stood a group of hotel bus-men and porters.

But how changed!

They were like men blasted by a great sorrow. One, with his back turned, was leaning against a post, his head buried on his arm.

“Prince George Hotel,” he groaned at intervals. “Prince George Hotel.”

Another was bending over a little handrail, his head sunk, his arms almost trailing to the ground.

“King Edward,” he sobbed, “King Edward.”

A third, seated on a stool, looked feebly up, with tears visible in his eyes.

“Walker House,” he moaned. “First-class accommodation for—” then he broke down and cried.

“Take this handbag,” I said to one of the men, “to the Prince George.”

The man ceased his groaning for a moment and turned to me with something like passion.

“Why do you come to us?” he protested. “Why not go to one of the others. Go to him,” he added, as he stirred with his foot a miserable being who lay huddled on the ground and murmured at intervals, “Queen’s! Queen’s Hotel.”

But my new friend, who stood at my elbow, came to my rescue.

“Take his bags,” he said, “you’ve got to. You know the by-law. Take it or I’ll call a policeman. You know me. My name’s Narrowpath. I’m on the council.”

The man touched his hat and took the bag with a murmured apology.

“Come along,” said my companion, whom I now perceived to be a person of dignity and civic importance. “I’ll walk up with you, and show you the city as we go.”

We had hardly got well upon the street before I realized the enormous change that total prohibition had effected. Everywhere were the bright smiling faces of working people, laughing and singing at their tasks, and, early though it was, cracking jokes and asking one another riddles as they worked.

I noticed one man, evidently a city employe, in a rough white suit, busily cleaning the street with a broom and singing to himself: “How does the little busy bee improve the shining hour.” Another employe, who was handling a little hose, was singing, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, Tra, la, la, la, la la, Prohibition’s grand.”

“Why do they sing?” I asked. “Are they crazy?”

“Sing?” said Mr Narrowpath. “They can’t help it. They haven’t had a drink of whisky for four months.”

A coal cart went by with a driver, no longer grimy and smudged, but neatly dressed with a high white collar and a white silk tie.

My companion pointed at him as he passed.

“Hasn’t had a glass of beer for four months,” he said.

“Notice the difference. That man’s work is now a pleasure to him. He used to spend all his evenings sitting round in the back parlours of the saloons beside the stove. Now what do you think he does?”

“I have no idea.”

“Loads up his cart with coal and goes for a drive—out in the country. Ah, sir, you who live still under the curse of the whisky traffic little know what a pleasure work itself becomes when drink and all that goes with it is eliminated. Do you see that man, on the other side of the street, with the tool bag?”

“Yes,” I said, “a plumber, is he not?”

“Exactly, a plumber. Used to drink heavily—couldn’t keep a job more than a week. Now, you can’t drag him from his work. Came to my house to fix a pipe under the kitchen sink—wouldn’t quit at six o’clock. Got in under the sink and begged to be allowed to stay—said he hated to go home. We had to drag him out with a rope. But here we are at your hotel.”

We entered.

But how changed the place seemed.

Our feet echoed on the flagstones of the deserted rotunda.

At the office desk sat a clerk, silent and melancholy, reading the Bible. He put a marker in the book and closed it, murmuring “Leviticus Two.”

Then he turned to us.

“Can I have a room,” I asked, “on the first floor?”

A tear welled up into the clerk’s eye.

“You can have the whole first floor,” he said, and he added, with a half sob, “and the second, too, if you like.”

I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was in the old days, when the mere mention of a room used to throw him into a fit of passion, and when he used to tell me that I could have a cot on the roof till Tuesday, and after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.

Things had changed indeed.

“Can I get breakfast in the grill room?” I inquired of the melancholy clerk.

He shook his head sadly.

“There is no grill room,” he answered. “What would you like?”

“Oh, some sort of eggs,” I said, “and—”

The clerk reached down below his desk and handed me a hard-boiled egg with the shell off.

“Here’s your egg,” he said. “And there’s ice water there at the end of the desk.”

He sat back in his chair and went on reading.

“You don’t understand,” said Mr Narrowpath, who still stood at my elbow. “All that elaborate grill room breakfast business was just a mere relic of the drinking days—sheer waste of time and loss of efficiency. Go on and eat your egg. Eaten it? Now, don’t you feel efficient? What more do you want? Comfort, you say? My dear sir! more men have been ruined by comfort—Great heavens, comfort! The most dangerous, deadly drug that ever undermined the human race. But, here, drink your water. Now you’re ready to go and do your business, if you have any.”

“But,” I protested, “it’s still only half-past seven in the morning—no offices will be open—”

“Open!” exclaimed Mr. Narrowpath. “Why! they all open at daybreak now.”

I had, it is true, a certain amount of business before me, though of no very intricate or elaborate kind—a few simple arrangements with the head of a publishing house such as it falls to my lot to make every now and then. Yet in the old and unregenerate days it used to take all day