“It was an elegant set-back for the chronic busybodies, but I haven’t much hope it will be permanent. Mark my words, those fellows are only getting ready to break out in some new place. If they can’t prohibit tobacco they’ll attack chewing gum or ice cream soda. One of these days I expect to pick up the paper and read: ‘New Sundae Law Proposed. Association Opposed to Ice Cream Soda in Any Form Applies for Charter.’ I may have made a few mistakes that time when I was supposed to be a little off my balance, but I never made the same mistake twice. I tilted at those old windmills, as they turned out to be, but I didn’t respond to an encore. Some of your modern reformers are continually butting their heads against stone walls, and if their heads weren’t so thick they couldn’t get away with it.
“Folks laugh at that account of my exploits and adventures, but they don’t stop to notice that there are lots of fellows running around loose who are ten times funnier than Don Quixote ever was. For instance, I understand you have a good many Congressmen-at-large. There are societies already comprising some fifty-seven and one-half varieties of butters-in, advocating all kinds of reforms, including the prohibiting of flowers from growing on Sunday. The first thing we know they’ll be having each new Congress decide whether men shall wear their hair pompadour or brushed down (if they have any), rule on the question of visible suspenders in summer and settle the length of moustaches, coats, sermons, stockings, lawns, skirts, soft drinks and hatpins. And of course there’ll be a law compelling all persons to wear long faces.
“Now, I may have been a bit erratic at one time, but I never got up a Society for the Prevention of Public Enjoyment. The trouble with lots of your reformers is, that not satisfied with being ‘off’ themselves, they want to drive other folks crazy. They’re doing it. Take that proposed state anti-snoring law out in Oklahoma. It’s going to declare any person a public nuisance who keeps other folks awake at night with solos by his nasal organ. But nobody dreams of interfering with the scoundrel who dashes along the street in his automobile at two A. M. with his muffler cut-out. I see you’re surprised at my keeping tab on things down below. There’s a reason. It gratifies me to realize that if I were back on earth I should have no trouble procuring a certificate of perfect sanity after the way so many folks are behaving. I see one man was paid $300,000 for pounding another man who got $200,000 for letting him do it. And the very persons who contributed to that fund kick the loudest about the high cost of living. And yet they used to call me unsound! Puck said a mouthful when he remarked: ‘What fools these mortals be.’ The world is a place of perpetual change, and yet lots of women continue cheerfully to give up two dollars a curl for a ‘permanent’ Marcel wave. Foolish men are less concerned with how many miles they can get out of a gallon than with how many smiles they can get out of a quart.
“But what showed me more clearly than anything else whither you earth folks are drifting was a sign, on my last trip, outside a butcher’s: ‘Tongue, 48 cents a pound; brains, 33 cents.’ If tongue is getting to be worth so much more than brains, then I’m glad I shuffled off when I did.”
And as I volplaned back to earth I wondered also why our topsy-turvy world ever considered Don Quixote loco.
XVII
PHARAOH SOLVES SERVANT PROBLEM
All the way to King Pharaoh’s house I kept wondering how I should enter the presence of decayed royalty. More modern monarchs, I knew from my reportorial experience, were frequently regular fellows whom it was perfectly safe to offer to shake hands with and perhaps, after a brief acquaintance, to slap on the back and ask for the loan of a cigarette or the “makin’s.” But the thought of conversing with a four-thousand-year-old personage who had retired from the king business, yet retained his former notions of dignity and grandeur, filled me with awe. Imagine my astonishment, therefore, when in response to my ring at the front door it slowly opened about half an inch, as if someone were trying to peek out and size up the visitor, and then a moment later it was thrown back and a commanding figure, who I knew from his pictures was none other than Pharaoh himself, stood in the doorway with a smile of welcome.
“Come right in,” he exclaimed. “I was afraid at first you might be a walking delegate of the Dish-Breakers’ Union.” And there stood the erstwhile mighty monarch clad in a long blue-checked apron, the kind that pins up over the shoulders with a couple of thing-a-ma-jigs and comes ’way down below the belt. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows and he had the general appearance of a cross between a chauffeur who had been digging in the garden and a butler who had taken an automobile apart and was now trying to put the pieces back again.
“Your Majesty,” I began, with a low obeisance, but that was as far as I got with my speech of introduction.