Part 15 (1/2)
”Maybe so--but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by it. I don't see that we doctors can do anything to mitigate the evil effects of the consequences _ab initio_. After the event we can pump you full of quinine and cod-liver oil and build you up again, but the ounce of prevention for shopping troubles is as easily attainable as a ton of radium to a man with eight cents and a cancelled postage-stamp in his pocket,” said the Doctor.
”Nonsense, Doctor. You're only fooling,” said the Idiot. ”A college president might as well say that boys will play football, and that there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it. You know as well as anybody else that from November 15th to December 24th every year an epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst. You know that it will rage violently in the last stage beginning December 15th, thanks to our habit of leaving everything to the last minute. You know that the men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can do nothing. What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season? We'd bounce him, that's what.”
”Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest,”
sneered the Doctor.
”Certainly,” quoth the Idiot. ”I dreamed it all out in my sleep last night. I dreamed that you and I together had started a series of establishments all over the country--”
”To eradicate the shopping evil?” laughed the Doctor. ”A sort of Keeley Cure for shopping inebriates?”
”Nay, nay,” retorted the Idiot. ”The shopping inebriate is too much of a factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that popular. My scheme was a sort of shopnasium.”
”A what?” roared the Doctor.
”A shopnasium,” explained the Idiot. ”We have gymnasiums in which we teach gymnastics. Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what we might call shopnastics? Just think of what a boon it would be for a lot of delicate women, for instance, who know that along about Christmas-time they must hie them forth to the department stores, there to be crushed and mauled and pulled and hauled until there is scarcely anything left to them, to feel that they could come to our shopnasium and there be trained for the ordeal which they cannot escape.”
”Very nice,” said the Doctor. ”But how on earth can you train them?
That's what I'd like to know.”
”How? Why, how on earth do you train a football team except by practice?” demanded the Idiot. ”It wouldn't take a very ingenious mind to figure out a game called shopping that would be governed by rules similar to those of football. Take a couple of bargain-counters for the goals. Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other. Then let sixty women start from number one and try to get to number two across the field through another body of sixty women bent on getting to the other one, and _vice versa_. You could teach 'em all the arts of the rush-line, defence, running around the ends, breaking through the middle, and all that. At first the scrimmage would be pretty hard on the beginners, but with a month's practice they'd get hardened to it, and by Christmas-time there isn't a bargain-counter in the country they couldn't reach without more than ordinary fatigue. An interesting feature of the game would be to have automatic cars and automobiles and cabs running to and fro across the field all the time so that they would become absolute masters of the art of dodging similar vehicles when they encounter them in real life, as they surely must when the holiday season is in full blast and they are compelled by the demands of the hour to go out into the world.”
”The women couldn't stand it,” said the Doctor. ”They might as well be knocked out at the real thing as in the imitation.”
”Not at all,” said the Idiot. ”They wouldn't be knocked out if you gave them preliminary individual exercise with punching-bags, dummies for tackle practice, and other things the football player uses to make himself tough and irresistible.”
”But you can't reason with shopping as you do with football,” suggested the Lawyer. ”Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains the football player through the toughest of fights. The knowledge that the nation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is half the backing of your quarter-back.”
”That's all right,” said the Idiot, ”but the make-up of the average woman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, the chase after a bargain does for a woman. I have known women so worn and weary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strength an hour later at a Monday marked-down sale of laundry soap and Yeats's poems. What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so on the question of incentive to action, Mr. Brief, the s.e.xes are about even. I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me to make a fortune. Dr. Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for the training and development of expert shoppers in all branches of shopnastics, under the medical direction of yourself and my business management would be a winner. Moreover, it would furnish a business opening for all those football players our colleges are turning out, for, as our inst.i.tution grew and we established branches of it all over the country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city, and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist of the hour?”
”Oh, well,” said the Doctor, ”perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, after all; but I don't think I care to go into it. I don't want to be rich.”
”Very well,” said the Idiot. ”That being the case, I will modify my suggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Va.s.sar and other heads of women's colleges. As things are now they all ought to have a course of shopping for the benefit of the young women who will soon graduate into the larger inst.i.tution of matrimony. That is the only way I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be able to cope with the strenuous life that is involved to-day in the purchase of a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas. I know, for I have been through it; and rather than do it again I would let the All-American eleven for 1908 land on me after a running broad jump of sixteen feet in length and four in the air.”
XVIII
FOR A HAPPY CHRISTMAS
”I have a request to make of you gentlemen,” observed the Idiot, as the last buckwheat-cake of his daily allotment disappeared within. ”And I sincerely hope you will all grant it. It won't cost you anything, and will save you a lot of trouble.”
”I promise beforehand under such conditions,” said the Doctor. ”The promise that doesn't cost anything and saves a lot of trouble is the kind I like to make.”
”Same here,” said Mr. Brief.
”None for me,” said the Bibliomaniac. ”My confidence in the Idiot's prophecies is about as great as a defeated statesman's popular plurality. My experience with him teaches me that when he signals no trouble ahead then is the time to look out for squalls. Therefore, you can count me out on this promise he wants us to make.”
”All right,” said the Idiot. ”To tell the truth, I didn't think you'd come in because I didn't believe you could qualify. You see, the promise I was going to ask you to make presupposes a certain condition which you don't fulfil. I was going to ask you, gentlemen, when Christmas comes to give me not the rich and beautiful gifts you contemplate putting into my stocking, but their equivalent in cash. Now you, Mr. Bib, never gave me anything at Christmas but advice, and your advice has no cash equivalent that I could ever find out, and even if it had I'm long on it now. That piece of advice you gave me last March about getting my head shaved so as to give my brain a little air I've never been able to use, and your kind suggestion of last August, that I ought to have my head cut off as a sure cure of chronic appendicitis, which you were certain I had, doctors tell me would be conducive to heart failure, which is far more fatal than the original disease. The only use to which I can put it, on my word of honor, is to give it back to you this Christmas with my best wishes.”
”Bos.h.!.+” sneered the Bibliomaniac.
”It was, indeed,” said the Idiot. ”And there isn't any market for it.