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Page 78
In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with
such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.
Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.
I wish you might know John A. Pescud. He is of the stuff that heroes
are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a
wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red
spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of
necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes. He is as
hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works;
and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers
compulsory, St. Peter will come down and sit at the foot of
Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the
branch heaven. He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most
important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home
town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.
During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had
never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We
had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted,
after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and
coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate). Now I was to get more of
his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up
since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at
Coketown.
II
"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his
right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean the
kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from Chicago-
-who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling
under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom or
principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes this
going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and
sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-
broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break into the
king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and
princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B. and
0. There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their
being here.
"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and
finds out who she is. He meets here on the corso or the strasse one
evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of
the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring
in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns. If you'd
take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away
from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.
"Well, you know how it runs on, if you ve read any of 'em--he slaps
the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get
in his way. He's a great fencer, too. Now, I've known of some
Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any
fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the
royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier
in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors
who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.
"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel,
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian
bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-
ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for
the advance royalties.
"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the
bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!'
to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's
left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then and
there. The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be an
expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the
Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with
the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the
linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love-story
plenty good enough. But I notice that the book dodges the final
issue. Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a
Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over
a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on
Michigan Avenue. What do you think about 'em?"
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