The Autobiography of Methuselah

by John Kendrick Bangs

"Monkeys, my dear Methy," she replied, "were always more efficient in the higher branches. Seriously, however," she went on, "we had that same idea ourselves, and we tried Simian labor for a while, but it was far from satisfactory. They were too playfully impetuous, and we had to give them up as indoor servants. We had a Monkey Butler one season, and nothing could induce him to serve our dinner in that dignified fashion in which a dinner should be served. He would pass the soup with one paw, the fish with the other, while serving the bread with his tail, and all simultaneously, so that instead of dinner becoming a peaceful meal, it was at all times, a highly excitable function that left us all in a state of trembling nervousness when it was over. Try as we might we could not induce them to do one thing at a time, and finally when this particular butler, to whom I have referred, instead of standing as he was instructed to do behind Adam's chair, insisted on swinging from the chandelier over the center of the table suspended by his caudal appendage, we decided that we would rather wait on ourselves."

Asked once if she had not found the primitive life uncomfortable, she shook her head in a decided negative.

Eve's Scrap Book.

"There were too many compensations in our freedom from the things that make your social life of to-day a complex problem," she replied. "In the first place I never had to worry much over Adam. When he was not out getting the raw material for our daily meals he was most generally at home, for the very excellent reason that there was no other place to go. We hadn't any Clubs to begin with, so that on his way home from business there was no temptation for him to stop off anywhere and frivol away his time playing billiards, or squandering his limited means on rubbers of bridge or other ruinous games. The only Vaudeville shows we had at the time consisted of the somewhat too continuous performances of the monkeys and the poll-parrots right there in our own back-yard, so that that menace to the happy home was entirely unknown to us, and inasmuch as I was the only cook in all Christendom at the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to Adam. It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view of certain ancestral limitations from which he suffered, I never had to sit quietly and listen to an exasperating disquisition on the Pies That Mother Used To Make, a line of conversation that in these modern days has broken up many an otherwise happy home. Socially the time had its draw-backs, but even in that respect there were advantages. The fact that we had no next-door neighbors enabled us to live without ostentation. I have discovered that much of the trouble in the world to-day arises from a love of showing-off, and of course, if there is no one about to show-off to, you don't indulge in that sort of foolishness. Being the only family in the place we were not spurred into extravagances of living, either because we had to keep up an end in society, or because we wished to make a better showing than someone else was making. There was correspondingly no gossip going on all about us. The absence of society meant that there were no Sewing Circles anywhere where peoples' reputations were pulled apart while under-clothes for alleged heathen were put together. Nobody ever descended upon us at unreasonable hours with unwelcome Surprise Parties eating us out of house and home and compelling us to stay up all night dancing the Virginia Reel when we were so sleepy we could hardly keep our eyes open. We didn't have to give dinners to people we didn't like, or make calls on persons in whom we took no earthly interest whatever. There was no question of Woman's Suffrage to make an everlasting breach between Adam and myself; no church squabbles over whether the new carpet should be pink or green, and as for politics, there was not anything even remotely resembling a politic in the whole broad land. If Adam or I felt the need of a law now and then, we'd make it, and if it didn't work, we'd repeal it, so that there were no endless discussions on such subjects, involving hard feeling, acrimonious correspondence, and an endless chain of Chapters of the Ananias Club all over creation. And when the children came along I was permitted to bring them up according to my own ideas, thanks to the entire absence from the country of inspired old-maids, and omniscient editors, ceaselessly endeavoring to reduce a natural maternal function to an arbitrary science. It has been said that I did not have much to be proud of in the results of my efforts to bring up my children right, and I suppose that in the case of Cain and Abel I must admit that I have not; but I am not so sure that things would have turned out any different if I had reared them after a Fireside Companion pattern for the making of a panne velvet posterity. I will go so far as to say that after looking over the comic supplements of the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were better than those which now exist. I never heard of my boys running loose about town waking up the whole community with their cheers because their college football team had crippled eleven other boys from another college for life; and hard to manage as Cain and Abel were at times, Adam and I never had to put them to bed at five o'clock in the morning because they had paralyzed their throats at a college banquet announcing to an exasperated world that they were Sons of a Gambolier. In fact, the educational problem of those early days was an educational problem and not a social one. We did not spend our time teaching boys to speak seventeen languages, without any ideas to express in any one of them, but went in for the ideas first. We regarded speech merely as a vehicle for the expression of ideas, and went at it from that point of view, rather than the other way around according to modern notions. Cain and Abel didn't have to go to a military school to learn how to haze each other, and no young man of that day ever thought of qualifying for his A. B. by compelling another young man to sip Tabasco sauce through a straw. What they learned, they learned by experience, and not through the pages of a book. If we felt it well to teach one of them that water was wet, we did not subject his young mind to a nine months course of lectures by a Professor on Hydropathy, but took him out and dropped him in the duck-pond and let him draw his own conclusions; and when it came to Botany, we found that either one of them could get a more comprehensive idea of the habits of growing plants from weeding a ten-acre lot than he could get out of a four years' course at a Correspondence School. The result was that when he came to graduate and go out into the world he was ready for business, and didn't have to serve as an Office-Boy on a salary of nothing a week for seventy-five or a hundred years before he was able to earn his own living."

It surely was an idyllic picture that the dear old lady drew, and I have often wished myself amid the rush and roar of modern life, that we might go back to the simpler methods of those Arcadian days.

On the subject of dress, Eve was entirely out of accord with her husband. She viewed Adam's theories on that subject with toleration, however, and always laughed when they were mentioned.

"He's just like a man," she smiled. "He really has no objection to fetching costumes when they are worn by other people. He merely does not wish to be bothered with such things himself. He has just as much of an eye for a daintily dressed little bit of femininity as anybody else, but he is eternally afraid that if I go in for that sort of thing he will be turned into a lady's maid. The idea of a hook-and-eye fills him with horror. His eyesight is not as good as it used to be, and he dreads the notion that if I come out in one of these new-fangled waists that hook up at the back he will be compelled to put in an hour or two fastening it up for me every time I put it on, and I don't blame him. It seems to me that if there is anything in this world that is unbefitting the glorious manhood of a true masculine being it is to have to sit down in a chair for an hour before dinner looking for a half million hooks and eyes, or cloth-covered buttons and loops, on the back of his wife's gown, and trying to fasten them up properly without the use of language unsuited to a lady's ears. When you think that the hand of man was made to wield the sceptre of imperial power over this magnificent world, it becomes a gross impropriety to divert it from the path of destiny into so futile an effort as hooking up a mere bit of fuss, feathers and fallals. You might just as well hitch up a pair of thoroughbred elephants to a milk wagon. It will do, as Adam says, for the Mollycoddle and the meticulous weakling, but never for a real man worthy of the name. But after all that is no reason why woman should be shorn of one of her chief glories, and I totally disagree with him in his condemnation of all clothes just because some of them are conceived in foolishness. Dresses can be made to button up at the side, or in front, and when I think of some of the new fall styles that are coming in I find myself regretting that I am over five hundred years old, and cannot with strict propriety, go in for them myself. Take those little chiffon—"

And so the dear old lady went on into an enthusiastic disquisition on the glories of dress that was so intimately feminine that I hesitate to attempt to quote her words in this place, knowing little as I do on the subject, and hardly able myself to tell the difference between a gimp and a café parfait. I will merely close this chapter by quoting Eve's last remark on the subject.

"All I can say is," she observed, "that Adam makes a great mistake in objecting to woman's thinking so much about her clothes, for I can tell him that if she didn't think about her own clothes she would begin to think about his, and if that were to happen it wouldn't be long before all men in creation would be going about looking as if somebody had picked them off a Christmas tree. In the matter of clothes woman is the court of last resort, and it is better for men that she should concentrate all her attention on herself!"