GEORGE W. CABLE.
AGE 9. 1853.
1874. FIRST SKETCHES OF CREOLE LIFE.
AGE 19. 1863.
1882. “DOCTOR SEVIER.”
AGE 24. 1868.
AGE 40. 1884. “BONAVENTURE.”
MR. CABLE IN 1892.
THE JONESES’ TELEPHONE
By Annie Howells Fréchette.
“Now, we won’t be selfish with our telephone, will we, dear? We will let a few friends use it occasionally—it will be such a pleasure and a convenience,” and Mrs. Jones stood off and looked admiringly at the new telephone.
“By all means. It is here and it may as well be doing some one a service as to stand idle—and I like to feel that a friend isn’t afraid to ask a favor of me now and then. Yes, I suppose that telephone will save us many a car-fare during the year. You can use it to do your marketing, instead of tiring yourself out and wasting half a day three or four times a week; and days when I forget things, think how easy it will be to telephone and remind me. Why, it will entirely do away with the need for strings to tie around my fingers.”
“Of course it will. I’m sure that what we’ll save on strings and car-fare will pay the rent of the instrument,” joyously responded Mrs. Jones, who had no great head for figures.
Thus hope and kindly intentions presided at the inauguration of the Joneses’ telephone.
Three months passed, and the great invention had carried much information—useful and otherwise—not only to its owners, but to the entire neighborhood as well. There were even days when the Joneses questioned whether they were not running a public telephone, so often did the bell ring. It is true, it had not quite paid for itself in the anticipated saving of car-fares and finger strings; still, it had certainly been a great comfort, and “Well, we’ll just face the music and call it a luxury,” said Jones, as he put away the receipt for his first quarter’s rent; “especially for our friends,” he added, with just a touch of bitterness.
Scarce twenty-four hours after this philosophical stand was taken, Mrs. Jones, who was rather a light sleeper, was aroused by a violent and prolonged ringing. It was six o’clock and Sunday morning—a day and hour usually dedicated to undisturbed slumber. After a brief debate in her own mind as to whether the house was on fire or the milkman was ringing, she realized that it was the telephone bell. She hastily donned slippers and gown and ran down-stairs. In reply to her interrogative “Yes?” (Mrs. Jones could never bring herself to say “Hello!”) came the following, in measured and clerical tones:
“It is Mr. Brown—Reverend Mr. Brown, speaking.”
“Oh, yes?” instinctively covering her half-clad feet in the folds of her gown.
“I believe you live near the Reverend Mr. Smith, and are a member of his church.”
“Yes.”
“Will you be good enough to send to him, and ask if he can spare his curate to take Mr. Brown’s early service for him, as he is called away. I would be glad if you would send immediately, as I must have his answer within fifteen minutes. Thank you. Please call up 1001,” and snap went the telephone.
Mrs. Jones looked at her raiment and reflected that her one servant was at mass and would not be back for an hour. She went slowly up-stairs.
“Tom, Tom dear, wake up.”
“What is it?”
“The Reverend Brown has telephoned to know whether the Reverend Smith can send his curate to take his early service.”
“Well, what in the world have I got to do with the peddling out of early services?” snapped Jones, as he turned and shook up his pillows.
“He has to have an answer to his message within fifteen minutes.”
“Well, let Susan take it,” settling back comfortably.
“But Susan has gone to mass.”
“And I suppose that means that I am to be turned out of my bed at daybreak, and canter half a mile!” cried Jones, in a high and excited voice, as he bounced from his bed and began to grope sleepily for his clothes. His toilet was made amidst grumblings of “Confound their early services, why can’t they stay in bed like Christians, instead of prowling about, and sending men out in the chilly morning air,” etc., etc.
Jones’s temper was soured for the day, and that night, as he was winding his watch, he said severely, “Jane, I’m going to draw the line at delivering messages. Tom, Dick, and Harry can come here and bellow into the telephone until they are hoarse, but I’ll be switched if I’ll be messenger boy any longer.”
But messages continued to come and go, increasing rather than decreasing in frequency. People in the neighborhood fell into the habit of saying to friends in distant parts of the city, when leaving a question open: “Just telephone me when you make up your mind. I haven’t a telephone myself, but the Joneses have, and they are very obliging about letting me use it.”
So the fact that a telephone was owned by an obliging family circulated almost as rapidly as if it had been a lie.
There were times when Mrs. Jones hadn’t the face to ask Susan to stop her work and carry these messages, so she carried them herself—trying to keep up her self-respect by combining an errand of her own in the same direction. There were a few messages, however, which remained forever indignantly shut within the telephone; as, for instance, that of the little girl, which came in a shrill, piping voice:
“Mrs. Jones, will you send your servant over to Mrs. Graham’s to ask Milly where she got that perfectly delicious delight she gave me the other day, and tell her to be quick about it, please, for I’m waiting.”
And another which came in chuffy, distorted, conversational English—regular 396 “chappie” English, very hard to understand, but which she finally straightened out into: “I say there—aw—oh—is that you, Mrs. Jones? Sorry to trouble you, but would you be so awfully good as to send word to Mrs. Bruce—aw—that I’m awfully cut up about it, but I won’t be able to dine there to-night. Aw—I wouldn’t trouble you, but it’s so awfully hot I can’t go round to explain to her—you know. Thanks, awfully.” The telephone was closed, and the awfully-cut-up young man, whose sole claim on Mrs. Jones was that they had once met at a party, was left to be healed by time.
He had for company in his fate the enthusiastic tennis-player, who, in the midst of “a little summer shower,” summoned Mrs. Jones.
“I want to speak to Flannigan, the gardener.”
“This is not Flannigan’s telephone.”
“And who is speaking?”
“Mrs. Jones.”
“Oh, well, Mrs. Jones, I can give my message to you just as well. I want you to tell Flannigan to come and roll the tennis ground at once. He will understand. Tell him right away, please.”
“Flannigan does not live here.”
“Well, you can send him word, I suppose,” in a surprised and offended voice, “to oblige a lady. It is Miss Mortimer who is speaking,” and there was an impressive silence. Mrs. Jones remembered Miss Mortimer as a high-stepping young woman whom she had met at a friend’s house, and who had given her the impression of taking an inventory of her. So Mrs. Jones took pleasure in replying, “Miss Mortimer probably does not know that she is addressing a private telephone. Good day.”
But it was Jones, the luckless Jones, who seemed set aside for the cruel buffeting of the telephoning public. One night, which he will ever point to as the wildest and wettest night he has known, he had settled himself into his most comfortable chair, with a pile of new magazines beside him, when he was disturbed by a summons from the telephone. He responded with readiness, for he was rather expecting a call from his partner, and to his cheerful “Hello, old fellow, I’m here,” came, in a sputtering and wind-tossed voice, “Will you please tell Mrs. Goodson that as it is so stormy her daughter will not go home to-night?”
Jones turned and confronted his wife, and for a time words refused to come.
“Well, this is a little too much! Now think of an unknown voice barking at me to go out into a storm like this and tell the Goodsons that their daughter will not be at home to-night!”
The Goodsons lived just six squares away.
“And what will you do, dear? Why didn’t you say plainly that you would not and could not go out into a storm like this—that they must send a messenger?”
“They shut me off without giving me time to answer.”
“Well, call them up. Call them up at once.”
“Jane, please have some sense. How do I know where Miss Goodson has gadded off to? How do I know what number to call up?”
“Well, I just wouldn’t go.”
“Oh, I’ll have to. They are friends, and if they are expecting that girl of theirs home to-night and she doesn’t come Mrs. Goodson will go out of her mind.”
So Jones drove himself forth, clad in righteous indignation and a waterproof coat. The cold rain lashed him and the wind belabored his umbrella, and he was more than once obliged to pause under friendly porches to get his breath. At last the home of the Goodsons was reached, and spent and weary he staggered up the steps. Goodson himself opened the door.
“Hello, Jones, you’re no fair weather friend indeed. Come in, come in.”
“No, I’m too wet,” he answered, pointedly (and he felt like adding “and too mad”). “I only came to tell you that Miss Goodson won’t be at home to-night.”
“My daughter! She is at home. Don’t you hear her playing on the piano now? Come into the vestibule, anyway.”
Jones walked in, with the rain streaming from his coat.
“Katey!” called Mr. Goodson to his wife. “Here is Jones come to say that Julia won’t be home to-night.”
“What?” demanded Mrs. Goodson, appearing in the hall and regarding Jones as if he were a mild sort of lunatic; “Julia is at home.”
“Well, I don’t understand it,” said Jones, plaintively. “I was rung up half an hour ago, and asked to come and tell you that your daughter wouldn’t be at home on account of the storm.”
“And do you mean to say that you stand ready to turn out at all hours and deliver messages free of cost?” cried Goodson.
“It looks that way.”
“Well, you are an ass!”
“Don’t compliment me too freely, Goodson, I can’t take in much more; I’m soaked as it is.”
Mrs. Goodson stood thinking. “Who could have been meant? Oh, I’ve just thought! It must be that Mrs. Goodson who sews for Mrs. Jones and me. And she has a daughter—a typewriter down town—and she has friends living in the suburbs. She has doubtless gone there to dinner and concluded to stay all night. But she lives just around the corner from you.”
Goodson laughed loudly and brutally. “A bonny sort of a night for a respectable family man like you, Jones, to be skylarking around carrying messages for typewriting maidens!”
“Oh, come now, that’s a little too much!”
“Well, old man, I’ll show my gratitude for your friendly intentions toward me by going round to the telephone people the first thing in the morning, and complaining of you. You’ve no right to be running opposition to the public telephones in this way.”
“If you only would!” and Jones wrung his friend’s hand while tears of thankfulness welled up to his eyes.
Once in the street, he longed for a contemptuous enemy to kick him briskly to the door of the Widow Goodson. The latter was evidently about to retire, as it was a long time before she responded to his ring. When, finally, she did come, she heard him calmly through and then answered languidly: “Yes, I didn’t much expect Bella home to-night, for she said if it come on to rain she thought she’d stay with her cousins. Good night. Quite drizzly, isn’t it?” peering out into the darkness.
Full of bitterness, Jones turned homeward. It seemed to him that his cup was full; and so it was, for it refused to hold more. As he entered his home, chilled without but hot within, he was greeted by an unfamiliar voice coming from the regions of the telephone.
“Give me Blair’s,” it said. “Is that Blair’s? Is that—Blair’s—B-l-a-i-r-’s, do you understand? Oh, yes, it is you, is it, Mrs. Blair? Well, say I want to speak to Miss McCrea—Oh—pshaw! you must know her—she’s the young lady that works for you. Oh, she’s out, is she? Well, when she comes in, tell her Miss Doolan told you to say that 398 Mr. Brennan has broke his leg—she’ll know, he drives Judson’s horses—and me and Mrs. Judson want to know whether he’s to go to the hospital or to his friends. You can send your answer to No. 999. They’ll let me know. Give Miss McCrea my love and tell her not to worry about Mr. Brennan. Good-by.”
Jones confronted a stately creature as she stepped into the hall.
“Look here, young woman, who are you?”
“I’m Miss Doolan, and I’m stopping at Judson’s—as housemaid,” she answered, so taken aback that for the moment her self-possession failed her.
“And to whom have you been telephoning?”
“To Blair’s—Judge Blair’s, over on the avenue—a friend of mine stops there.”
“And are you in the habit of calling up ladies in that fashion?”
“It’s a very good fashion, for all I can see,” she retorted impudently.
“And what business have you to order an answer sent here for me to carry on a night like this?”
“Mrs. Judson and me took you for a gentleman, sor, and we thought you wouldn’t mind obliging ladies.”
“Nor do I, but I don’t know either Mrs. Judson or you, and I don’t propose running errands for you.”
“Oh, then don’t bother yourself, sor—we can hire a boy,” she flung back with a scornful laugh as she bounced out.
“Now, Jane, I want you to distinctly understand that the last message has been carried from this house. I have probably to-night sown the seeds of pleurisy and pneumonia broadcast in my system; I have walked twelve squares to deliver a message to the wrong person; we have had a baggage here using our telephone as if it were her own, and we have been at the beck and call of the unpaying public for the last six months. Now, if the telephone people are not here by noon to-morrow, to threaten legal proceedings against me (Goodson has promised to complain of me) for undermining their business, I shall have that wretched instrument dragged away, body and soul, and we will try some other form of economy in the future.”
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT HARVARD.
By Herbert Nichols, Ph.D.,
Instructor in Psychology, Harvard University.
Editor’s Note.—The illustrations of this article are from photographs, specially taken for the Harvard University Exhibit at the World’s Fair.
What do they do there?
What do they expect to come out of it?
The notion of a mental laboratory is still a mystery to most persons. They ask themselves the above questions, and many feel as they do so an uncanny shiver. They cannot realize that the study of the mind is already an established natural science, here, at sober Harvard, in all the leading universities, and free of spooks and mediums.
Yet a psychological laboratory looks much like any other modern laboratory. Around the rooms run glass-cases filled with fine instruments. Shelves line up, row after row, of specimen-jars and bottles. Charts cover the remainder of the walls. The tables and floors are crowded with working apparatus. Two large rooms and one small one are now occupied at Harvard. Four more rooms will be added to these this summer.
Also, the spirit that reigns in these rooms is the same that is found in other laboratories of exact science. This is the important thing. The minds of these workers are not wandering in dialectics and vagrant hypotheses. Reverence has opened her eyes. Hypotheses they have, and must have. Often they hold conflicting opinions. But the referee is always present—Nature herself. To experiment, to show the 400 fact, is always the method of debate. This is the great advantage of the modern way of studying psychology over the old.
The American public is so practical that I feel I can alone satisfy its “whats and wherefores” by explicitly describing some of the investigations being carried on here.