“I fancy a baby show is about your size,” said the Doctor.
“Well—yes,” said the Idiot, “I guess perhaps you are right, as far as the exhibit is concerned. There’s something almost human about a baby, and it’s the human element always that takes hold of me. It’s the human element in the Horse Show that takes me and most other people as well. Fact is, so many go to see the people and so few to see the horses that I have an idea that some day they’ll have it with only one horse—just enough of a nag to enable them to call it a Horse Show—and pay proper attention to the real things that make it a success even now.”
The Doctor sniffed contemptuously. “What factors in your judgment contribute most to the success of the Horse Show?” he asked.
“Duds chiefly,” said the Idiot, “and the people who are inside of them. If there were a law passed requiring every woman who goes to the Horse Show to wear a simple gown in order not to scare the horses, ninety per cent. of ’em would stay at home, and all the blue-ribbon steeds in creation couldn’t drag them to the Garden—and nobody’d blame them for it, either. Similarly with the men. You don’t suppose for an instant, do you, that young Hawkins Van Bluevane would give seven cents for the Horse Show if it didn’t give him a chance to appear every afternoon in his Carnegie plaid waistcoat?”
“That’s a new one on me,” said Mr. Brief. “Is there such a thing as a Carnegie plaid?”
“It’s the most popular that ever came out of Scotland,” said the Idiot. “It’s called the Carnegie because of the size of the checks. Then there’s poor old Jimmie Varickstreet—the last remnant of a first family—hasn’t enough money to keep a goat-wagon, and couldn’t tell you the difference between a saw-horse and a crupper. He gives up his hall bedroom Horse-Show week and lives in the place day and night, covering up the delinquencies of his afternoon and evening clothes with a long yellow ulster with buttons like butter-saucers distributed all over his person—”
“Where did he get it, if he’s so beastly poor?” demanded the Lawyer.
“He’s gone without food and drink and clothes that don’t show. He has scrimped and saved, and denied himself for a year to get up a gaudy shell in which for six glorious days to shine resplendent,” said the Idiot. “Jimmie lives for those six days, and as you see him flitting from box to box and realize that he is an opulent swell for six days of every year, and a poor, down-trodden exile for the rest of the time, you don’t grudge him his little diversion and almost wish you had sufficient will power to deny yourself the luxuries and some of the necessities of life as well to get a coat like that. If I had my way they’d award Jimmie Varickstreet at least an honorable mention as one of the most interesting exhibits in the whole show.
“And there are plenty of others. There’s raw material enough in that Horse Show to make it a permanent exhibition if the managers would only get together and lick it into shape. As a sort of social zoo it is unsurpassed, and why they don’t classify the various sections of it I can’t see. In the first place, imagine a dozen boxes filled with members of the Four Hundred, men and women whose names have become household words, and wearing on their backs garments made by the deft fingers of the greatest sartorial artists of the ages. You and I walk in and are permitted to gaze upon this glorious assemblage—the American nobility—in its gayest environment. Wouldn’t it interest you to know that that very beautiful woman in the lavender creation, wrapped up in a billion-dollar pearl necklace, is the famous Mrs. Bollington-Jones, who holds the divorce championship of South Dakota, and that those two chaps who are talking to her so vivaciously are two of her ex-husbands, Van Bibber Beaconhill and ‘Tommy’ Fitz Greenwich? Wouldn’t it interest you more than any horse in the ring to know that her gown was turned out at Mrs. Robert Bluefern’s Dud Studio at a cost of nine thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars, hat included? Yet the programme says never a word about these people. Every horse that trots in has a number so that you can tell who and what and why he is, but there are no placards on Mrs. Bollington-Jones by which she may be identified.
“Then on the promenade, there is Hooker Van Winkle. He’s out on bail for killing a farmer with his automobile up in Connecticut somewhere. There is young Walston Addlepate, whose father pays him a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year for keeping out of business. There’s Jimson Gooseberry, the cotillon leader, whose name is on every lip during the season. Approaching you, dressed in gorgeous furs, is Mrs. Dinningforth Winter, who declined to meet Prince Henry when he was here, because of a previous engagement to dine with Tolby Robinson’s pet monkey just in from a cruise in the Indies. And so it goes. The place fairly shrieks with celebrities whose names appear in the Social Register, and whose photographs in pink and green are the stock in trade of the Sunday newspapers of saffron tendencies everywhere—but what is done about it? Nothing at all. They come and go, conspicuous but unidentified, and wasting their notoriety on the desert air. It is a magnificent opportunity wasted, and, unless you happen to know these people by sight, you miss a thousand and one little points which are the sine qua non of the show.”