Part 3 (1/2)
”No,” said the Idiot; ”p.a.w.n tickets, interest on which is always paid in advance.”
V
A PSYCHIC VENTURE
”I beg your pardon, Doctor,” said the Idiot, as he laid aside his morning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon the breakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-cla.s.s home for single gentlemen. ”I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissful intercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in the Waffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karat psychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I need one in my business.”
”Sike whats?” queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting a sizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.
”Psychrobes,” said the Idiot. ”You know what I mean--a clairvoyant, a medium, a sike--somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business, who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again.”
”H'm! Why--yes, I know one or two mediums,” said the Doctor.
”Strictly up-to-date and reliable?” said the Idiot. ”Ready to trot in double harness?”
”Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify,” said the Doctor. ”You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found those I know wholly reliable.”
”You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a chance?” said the Idiot.
”That's it,” said the Doctor. ”But, as I say, you never can tell. A man may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet when he goes off, er--when he goes off--”
”Psychling,” suggested the Idiot. ”Bully good t.i.tle for a story that--'Psychling with a Psychrobe'--eh? What?”
”Fair,” said the Doctor. ”But what I was going to say was that when he goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as psychlists.”
”That's all right,” said the Idiot. ”That's all I really want. If I can be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient.”
”As a transient?” repeated the Bibliomaniac.
”Yes,” said the Idiot. ”A person in a state of trance.”
”What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?”
asked the Doctor. ”Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers now pa.s.sed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?”
”Not at all,” said the Idiot. ”Fact is, I do not consider their utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else.
I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of ear-tabs and a fur overcoat.”
”And do you really believe, also for instance,” put in the Bibliomaniac scornfully, ”that with so many big questions before the public to-day Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his countrymen?”
”I've only seen one message from Jefferson,” said the Idiot, ”and it seemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up in Schenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz--whizz--whizz, buzz--buzz--buzz, whizz--whizz--whizz!' Lots of people considered it drivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance.”
”Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can,” said the Bibliomaniac. ”The idea that the greatest political thinker of the ages could stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous.”
”Not at all,” said the Idiot. ”You have not the understanding mind.
Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapidity with which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as he realized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political belief were putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple old Democrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit of entomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums of his native land.”