Short Fiction

that his breakfast food was ground-up quail feathers, the rest of the carcass being thrown outdoors.

“I,” he continued, “spend my next ten minutes with my dromedaries. It is just a romp. Then I return to my own room, where an ostrich shaves me. Not too close.

“Then I sit down on a milk stool and begin my day’s work. I aim to never write lest than one poem a day. For instance, look at this one I turned out this morning, just after the ostrich had shaved me.”

And he read me the verse that was published by mistake in last month’s Applejack⁠—

Hail to thee, blithe owl!
Bird thou never wantest to been.
Queenly and efflorien,
How did thou ever begin?

“That,” I said, “sounds like a steal on Kipling.”

“Kipling yourself!” said the poet, and I loped over the nearest hedge.

“But listen,” he said: “Have you heard my ‘Gooseflesh,’ after the style of Alfred Geese?”

There was no use saying no:

Quiescent, a person sits heart and soul,
Thinking of daytime and Amy Lowell.
A couple came walking along the street;
Neither of them had ever met.

“That,” said Mr. Splew, “is the verse I have worked on all winter.”

“It’s been a hard winter,” I said. “We didn’t have enough coal either.”

With that, he climbed up on top of the pigeon house.

“I want to tell you about my wife,” he said. “She has got what is called chronic paralysis. She has a stroke every day, but it is never quite enough.”

With that, he led me into the beehive, where he and the dromedaries eat all their meals.

“Now, Mr. Splew,” I said, “my editor wanted me to ask you how you got the name ‘Domba.’ He thought it might be a contraction of Dumbbell.”

“Your editor is both wrong,” said Mr. Splew. “I was named for my father, who gave the money to found the Kalter Aufschnitt (Cold High School) in Rome. And the children that attended the school said it must have been dumbfounded. Would you like to go into the pool?”

What of It?

I was telling this to a friend of mine that’s in the furniture game; travels out of Grand Rapids for the Phillips people. And he says I ought to tell it to other friends of mine that’s on the road a good deal so as they’ll know how to protect themself when they bump into one of these here broadcasters like Lacey.

Well, it seems they was a fella named Dexter Cosset and in his spare time he wrote a play and mailed it to a friend of his in New York that was personally acquainted with Joe Morris, the producer. So he give it to Morris and somebody in Morris’ office that could read told Morris the play was good, so Morris got somebody that could write to wire a telegram to Cosset. It says in the telegram:

Accept your play Ghosts but must change title as it seems man named Ibsen has a farce that title come New York at once as we want to go right into rehearsal have renamed play Carlotta’s Corns which will be permanent title unless you can think of better one.

Well, it seems Cosset lived in South Bend and clerked in Ellsworth’s, and his gal clerked there, too, and when he wrote this play he named the heroine Carlotta because that was his gal’s name if you get what I mean. He thought it would kind of tickle her to have the heroine of a play named after her, do you understand me?

But as I say, Carlotta clerked in Ellsworth’s, too, and she was on her feet all day and had a good deal of trouble with them, and if she ever got word that Cosset had wrote a play and used her name in connections with the chiropody game, she would of give him the air and submitted to the caresses of Orville Pleat that was in the automobile game on Vistula Avenue.

And besides they wasn’t no place in the play where any reference was made to anybody’s corns let alone the heroine’s, so if it was produced under the title suggested by Mr. Morris, why unless the author wrote in a new scene devoted to pedal disorders which he had no personal experience, why the critics would say what the hell.

So anyway Cosset got on this train this night determined to think up a decent title for his play before he clumb into Mrs. Pullman’s spare bed, but Cosset, like a good many other South Bend boys, could not even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mush. So the first thing he done when he got on this train this night was look up a porter he knew personally named George something, a colored man. He asked George was they a buffet on the train.

“Why, no, massa,” replied George in his laughable darky dialect. “We dinna run no buffet car on this train since ze railroads quit selling what you call ze liquor. But if you got something on ze hip,” he added, rolling those big eyes and doing the double shuffle, “I get you ze ice and ze water.”

Cosset then exclaimed that what he wanted was a place where he could sit and smoke and think without interruptions and the best the clever darky could suggest was the washroom in his own car. It seems the washrooms in the other cars was jammed with members of the Grand Forks Well-Kept Lawns Association, bound for the annual Get-Together Dinner at Saratoga, with a one-day stopover at Troy to get their collar cleaned.

As Cosset entered the washroom of his own Pullman⁠—“Gastritis”⁠—he noted that the only occupant was a man in the late twenties or forties who he remembered having seen once or twice walking up and down Michigan Street with such a big sample case that a great many people thought he must be selling warships. He was a travelling man named Ben Lacey;