Kitabı oku: «Mollie and the Unwiseman Abroad», sayfa 7
"Wouldn't it cost a lot to take it over?" asked Whistlebinkie.
"Not if the Company owned its own ships," said the Unwiseman. "If the Company owned its own ships it could carry it over for nothing."
The Unwiseman was so carried away with the possibilities of his plan that for several days he could talk of nothing else, and several times Mollie and Whistlebinkie found him working in the writing room of the hotel on what he called his Perspectus.
"I'm going to work out that idea of mine, Mollie," he explained, "so that you can show it to your father and maybe he'll take it up, and if he does – well, I'll have a man to exercise my umbrella, a pair of wings built on my house where I can put a music room and a library, and have my kitchen-stove nickel plated as it deserves to be for having served me so faithfully for so many years."
An hour or two later, his face beaming with pleasure, the Unwiseman brought Mollie his completed "Perspectus" with the request that she show it to her father. It read as follows:
THE SWITZER SNOW AND ICE CO
The Unwiseman, President
Mr. Mollie J. Whistlebinkie, Vice-President
A. Burgular, Seketary and Treasurer
I. To purchase all right, title, and interest in one first class Alp known as Mount Blank, a snow-clad peak located at Switzerville, Europe. For further perticulars, see Map if you have one handy that is any good and has been prepared by somebody what has studied jography before.
II. To orginize the Mount Blank Toboggan Slide and Sled Company and build a fence around it for the benefit of the young at ten cents ahead, using the surplus snow and ice on Mount Blank for this purpose. Midsummer coasting a speciality.
III. To mine ice and to sell the same by the pound, ton, yard, or shipload, to Americans at one cent less a pound, ton, yard, or shipload, than they are now paying to unscrupulous ice-men at home, thereby putting them out of business and bringing ice in midsummer within the reach of persons of modest means to keep their provisions on, who without it suffer greatly from the heat and are sometimes sun-struck.
IV. To gather and sell snow to the American people in summer time for the purpose of cooling off their houses by throwing the same into the furnace like coal in winter, thereby taking down the thermometer two or three inches and making fans unnecessary, and killing mosquitoes, flies and other animals that ain't of any use and can only live in warm weather.
V. Also to sell a finer quality of snow for use at children's parties in the United States of America in July and August where snow-ball fights are not now possible owing to the extreme tenderness of the snow at present provided by the American climate which causes it to melt along about the end of March and disappear entirely before the beginning of May.
VI. Also to sell snow at redoosed rates to people at Christmas Time when they don't always have it as they should ought to have if Christmas is to look anything like the real thing and give boys and girls a chance to try their new sleds and see if they are as good as they are cracked up to be instead of having to be put away as they sometimes are until February and even then it don't always last.
This Company has already been formed by Mr. Thomas S. Me, better known as the Unwiseman, who is hereby elected President thereof, with a capital of ten million dollars of which three dollars has already been paid in to Mr. Me as temporary treasurer by himself in real money which may be seen upon application as a guarantee of good faith. The remaining nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven dollars worth is offered to the public at one dollar a share payable in any kind of money that will circulate freely, one half of which will be used as profits for the next five years while the Company is getting used to its new business, and the rest will be spent under the direction of the President as he sees fit, it being understood that none of it shall be used to buy eclairs or other personal property with.
"There," said the Unwiseman, as he finished the prospectus. "Just you hand that over to your father, Mollie, and see what he says. If he don't start the ball a-rolling and buy that old Mountain before we leave this place I shall be very much surprised."
But the Unwiseman's grand scheme never went through for Mollie's father upon inquiry found that nobody about Chamounix cared to sell his interest in the mountain, or even to suggest a price for it.
"They're afraid to sell it I imagine," said Mollie's father, "for fear the new purchasers would dig it up altogether and take it over to the United States. You see if that were to happen it would leave an awfully big hole in the place where Mount Blank used to be and there'd be a lot of trouble getting it filled in."
For all of which I am sincerely sorry because there are times in midsummer in America when I would give a great deal if some such enterprise as a "Switzer Snow & Ice Co." would dump a few tons of snow into my cellar for use in the furnace.
XI
THE UNWISEMAN PLANS A CHAMOIS COMPANY
The Unwiseman's disappointment over the failure of his Switzer Snow & Ice Company was very keen at first and the strange old gentleman was inclined to be as thoroughly disgusted with Switzerland as he had been with London and Paris. He was especially put out when, after travelling seven or eight miles to see a "glazier," as he called it, he discovered that a glacier was not a frozen "window-pane mender" but a stream of ice flowing perennially down from the Alpine summits into the valleys.
"They bank too much on their snow-drifts over here," he remarked, after he had visited the Mer-de-Glace. "I wouldn't give seven cents to see a thing like that when I've been brought up close to New York where we have blizzards every once in a while that tie up the whole city till it looks like one glorious big snow-ball fight."
And then when he wanted to go fishing in one of the big fissures of the glacier, and was told he could drop a million lines down there without getting a bite of any kind he announced his intention of getting out of the country as soon as he possibly could. But after all the Unwiseman had a naturally sun-shiny disposition and this added to the wonderful air of Switzerland, which in itself is one of the most beautiful things in a beautiful world, soon brought him out of his sulky fit and set him to yodeling once more as gaily as a Swiss Mountain boy. He began to see some of the beauties of the country and his active little mind was not slow at discovering advantages not always clear to people with less inquisitiveness.
"I should think," he observed to Mollie one morning as he gazed up at Mount Blanc's pure white summit, "that this would be a great ice-cream country. I'd like to try the experiment of pasturing a lot of fine Jersey cows up on those ice-fields. Just let 'em browze around one of those glaciers every day for a week and give 'em a cupful of vanilla, or chocolate extract or a strawberry once in a while and see if they wouldn't give ice-cream instead o' milk. It would be worth trying, anyhow."
Mollie thought it would and Whistlebinkie gave voice to a long low whistle of delight at the idea.
"It-ud-be-bettern-soder-watter-rany-way!" he whistled.
"Anything would be better than soda water," said the Unwiseman, who had only tried it once and got nothing but the bubbles. "Soda water's too foamy for me. It's like drinking whipped air."
But the thing that pleased the Unwiseman more than anything else was a pet chamois that he encountered at a little Swiss Chalet on one of his tours of investigation. It was a cunning little animal, very timid of course, like a fawn, but tame, and for some reason or other it took quite a fancy to the Unwiseman – possibly because he looked so like a Swiss Mountain Boy with a peaked cap he had purchased, and ribbons wound criss-cross around his calves and his magnificent Alpen-stock upon which had been burned the names of all the Alps he had not climbed. And then the Unwiseman's yodel had become something unusually fine and original in the line of yodeling, which may have attracted the chamois and made him feel that the Unwiseman was a person to be trusted. At any rate the little animal instead of running away and jumping from crag to crag at the Unwiseman's approach, as most chamois would do, came inquiringly up to him and stuck out its soft velvety nose to be scratched, and permitted the Unwiseman to inspect its horns and silky chestnut-brown coat as if it recognized in the little old man a true and tried friend of long standing.
"Why you little beauty you!" cried the Unwiseman, as he sat on the fence and stroked the beautiful creature's neck. "So you're what they call a shammy, eh?"
The chamois turned its lovely eyes upon his new found friend, and then lowered his head to have it scratched again.
"Mary had a little sham
Whose hide was soft as cotton,
And everywhere that Mary went
The shammy too went trottin'."
sang the Unwiseman, dropping into poetry as was one of his habits when he was deeply moved.
The chamois evidently liked this verse for its eyes twinkled and it laid its head gently on the Unwiseman's knee and looked at him appealingly as if to say, "More of that poetry please. You are a bard after my own heart." So the Unwiseman went on, keeping time to his verse by slight taps on the chamois' nose.
"It followed her to town one day
Unto the Country Fair,
And earned five hundred dollars just
In shining silver-ware."
Whistlebinkie indulged in a loud whistle of mirth at this, which so startled the little creature that it leapt backward fifteen feet in the air and landed on top of a small pump at the rear of the yard, and stood there poised on its four feet just like the chamois we see in pictures standing on a sharp peak miles up in the air, trembling just a little for fear that Whistlebinkie's squeak would be repeated. A moment of silence seemed to cure this, however, for in less than two minutes it was back again at the Unwiseman's side gazing soulfully at him as if demanding yet another verse. Of course the Unwiseman could not resist – he never could when people demanded poetry from him, it came so very easy – and so he continued:
"The children at the Country Fair
Indulged in merry squawks
To see the shammy polishing
The family knives and forks.
"The tablespoons, and coffee pots,
The platters and tureens,
The top of the mahogany,
And crystal fire-screens."
"More!" pleaded the chamois with his soft eyes, snuggling its head close into the Unwiseman's lap, and the old gentleman went on:
"'O isn't he a wondrous kid!'
The wondering children cried.
We didn't know a shammy could
Do such things if he tried.
"And Mary answered with a smile
That dimpled up her chin
'There's much that shammy's cannot do,
But much that shammy-skin.'"
Whistlebinkie's behavior at this point became so utterly and inexcusably boisterous with mirth that the confiding little chamois was again frightened away and this time it gave three rapid leaps into the air which landed it ultimately upon the ridge-pole of the chalet, from which it wholly refused to descend, in spite of all the persuasion in the world, for the rest of the afternoon.
"Very intelligent little animal that," said the Unwiseman, as he trudged his way home. "A very high appreciation of true poetry, inclined to make friendship with the worthy, and properly mistrustful of people full of strange noises and squeaks."
"He was awfully pretty, wasn't he," said Mollie.
"Yes, but he was better than pretty," observed the Unwiseman. "He could be made useful. Things that are only pretty are all very well in their way, but give me the useful things – like my kitchen-stove for instance. If that kitchen-stove was only pretty do you suppose I'd love it the way I do? Not at all. I'd just put it on the mantel-piece, or on the piano in my parlor and never think of it a second time, but because it is useful I pay attention to it every day, polish it with stove polish, feed it with coal and see that the ashes are removed from it when its day's work is done. Nobody ever thinks of doing such things with a plain piece of bric-a-brac that can't be used for anything at all. You don't put any coal or stove polish on that big Chinese vase you have in your parlor, do you?"
"No," said Mollie, "of course not."
"And I'll warrant that in all the time you've had that opal glass jug on the mantel-piece of your library you never shook the ashes down in it once," said the Unwiseman.
"Mity-goo-dreeson-wy!" whistled Whistlebinkie. "They-ain't never no ashes in it."
"Correct though ungrammatically expressed," observed the Unwiseman. "There never are any ashes in it to be shaken down, which is a pretty good reason to believe that it is never used to fry potatoes on or to cook a chop with, or to roast a turkey in – which proves exactly what I say that it is only pretty and isn't half as useful as my kitchen-stove."
"It would be pretty hard to find anything useful for the bric-a-brac to do though," suggested Mollie, who loved pretty things whether they had any other use or not.
"It all depends on your bric-a-brac," said the Unwiseman. "I can find plenty of useful things for mine to do. There's my coal scuttle for instance – it works all the time."
"Coal-scuttles ain't bric-a-brac," said Whistlebinkie.
"My coal scuttle is," said the Unwiseman. "It's got a picture of a daisy painted on one side of it, and I gilded the handle myself. Then there's my watering pot. That's just as bric-a-bracky as any Chinese china pot that ever lived, but it's useful. I use it to water the flowers in summer, and to sift my lump sugar through in winter. Every pound of lump sugar you buy has some fine sugar with it and if you shake the lump sugar up in a watering pot and let the fine sugar sift through the nozzle you get two kinds of sugar for the price of one. So it goes all through my house from my piano to my old beaver hat – every bit of my bric-a-brac is useful."
"Wattonearth do-you-do with a-nold beevor-at?" whistled Whistlebinkie.
"I use it as a post-office box to mail cross letters in," said the Unwiseman gravely. "It's saved me lots of trouble."
"Cross letters?" asked Mollie. "You never write cross letters to anybody do you?"
"I'm doing it all the time," said the Unwiseman. "Whenever anything happens that I don't like I sit down and write a terrible letter to the people that do it. That eases off my feelings, and then I mail the letters in the hat."
"And does the Post-man come and get them?" asked Mollie.
"No indeed," said the Unwiseman. "That's where the beauty of the scheme comes in. If I mailed 'em in the post-office box on the lamp-post, the post-man would take 'em and deliver them to the man they're addressed to and I'd be in all sorts of trouble. But when I mail them in my hat nobody comes for them and nobody gets them, and so there's no trouble for anybody anywhere."
"But what becomes of them?" asked Mollie.
"I empty the hat on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of every month and use them for kindling in my kitchen-stove," said the Unwiseman. "It's a fine scheme. I keep out of trouble, don't have to buy so much kindling wood, and save postage."
"That sounds like a pretty good idea," said Mollie.
"It's a first class idea," returned Mr. Me, "and I'm proud of it. It's all my own and if I had time I'd patent it. Why I was invited to a party once by a small boy who'd thrown a snow-ball at my house and wet one of the shingles up where I keep my leak, and I was so angry that I sat down and wrote back that I regretted very much to be delighted to say that I'd never go to a party at his house if it was the only party in the world besides the Republican; that I didn't like him, and thought his mother's new spring bonnet was most unbecoming and that I'd heard his father had been mentioned for Alderman in our town and all sorts of disgraceful things like that. I mailed this right in my hat and used it to boil an egg with a month later, while if I'd mailed it in the post-office box that boy'd have got it and I couldn't have gone to his party at all."
"Oh – you went, did you?" laughed Mollie.
"I did and I had a fine time, six eclairs, three plates of ice cream, a pound of chicken salad, and a pocketful of nuts and raisins," said the Unwiseman. "He turned out to be a very nice boy, and his mother's spring bonnet wasn't hers at all but another lady's altogether, and his father had not even been mentioned for Water Commissioner. You see, my dear, what a lot of trouble mailing that letter in the old beaver hat saved me, not to mention what I earned in the way of food by going to the party which I couldn't have done had it been mailed in the regular way."
Here the old gentleman began to yodel happily, and to tell passersby in song that he was a "Gay Swiss Laddy with a carpet-bag, That never knew fear of the Alpine crag, For his eye was bright and his conscience clear, As he leapt his way through the atmosphere, Tra-la-la, tra-la-la, Trala-lolly-O."
"I do-see-how-yood-make-that-shammy-useful," said Whistlebinkie. "Except to try your poems on and I don't b'lieve he's a good judge o' potery."
"He's a splendid judge of queer noises," said the Unwiseman, severely. "He knew enough to jump a mile whenever you squeaked."
"Watt-else-coodie-doo?" asked Whistlebinkie through his hat. "You haven't any silver to keep polished and there aren't enough queer noises about your place to keep him busy."
"What else coodie-do?" retorted the Unwiseman, giving an imitation of Whistlebinkie that set both Mollie and the rubber doll to giggling. "Why he could polish up the handle of my big front door for one thing. He could lie down on his back and wiggle around the floor and make it shine like a lookin' glass for another. He could rub up against my kitchen stove and keep it bright and shining for a third – that's some of the things he couldie-doo, but I wouldn't confine him to work around my house. I'd lead him around among the neighbors and hire him out for fifty cents a day for general shammy-skin house-work. I dare say Mollie's mother would be glad to have a real live shammy around that she could rub her tea-kettles and coffee pots on when it comes to cleaning the silver."
"They can buy all the shammys they need at the grocer's," said Whistlebinkie scornfully.
"Dead ones," said the Unwiseman, "but nary a live shammy have you seen at the grocer's or the butcher's or the milliner's or the piano-tuner's. That's where Wigglethorpe – "
"Wigglethorpe?" cried Whistlebinkie.
"Yes Wigglethorpe," repeated the Unwiseman. "That's what I have decided to call my shammy when I get him because he will wiggle."
"He don't thorpe, does he?" laughed Whistlebinkie.
"He thorpes just as much as you bink," retorted the Unwiseman. "But as I was saying, Wigglethorpe, being alive, will be better than any ten dead ones because he won't wear out, maids won't leave him around on the parlor floor, and just because he wiggles, the silver and the hardwood floors and front door handles will be polished up in half the time it takes to do it with a dead one. At fifty cents a day I could earn three dollars a week on Wigglethorpe – "
"Which would be all profit if you fed him on potery," said Whistlebinkie with a grin.
"And if I imported a hundred of them after I found that Wigglethorpe was successful," the Unwiseman continued, very wisely ignoring Whistlebinkie's sarcasm, "that would be – hum – ha – "
"Three hundred dollars a week," prompted Mollie.
"Exactly," said the Unwiseman, "which in a year would amount to – ahem – three times three hundred and sixty-five is nine, twice nine is – "
"It comes to $15,600 a year," said Mollie.
"Right to a penny," said the Unwiseman. "I was figuring it out by the day. Fifteen thousand six hundred dollars a year is a big sum of money and reckoned in eclairs at fifty eclairs for a dollar is – er – is – well you couldn't eat 'em if you tried, there'd be so many."
"Seven hundred and eighty thousand eclairs," said Mollie.
"That's what I said," said the Unwiseman. "You just couldn't eat 'em, but you could sell 'em, so really you'd have two businesses right away, shammys and eclaires."
"Mitey-big-biziness," hissed Whistlebinkie.
"Yes," said the Unwiseman, "I think I'll suggest it to my burgular when I get home. It seems to me to be more honorable then burguling and it's just possible that after a summer spent in the uplifting company of my kitchen stove and having got used to the pleasant conversation of my leak, and seen how peaceful it is to just spend your days exercising a sweet gentle umbrella like mine, he'll want to reform and go into something else that he can do in the day-time."
By this time the little party had reached the hotel, and Mollie's father was delighted to hear of the Unwiseman's proposition. It was an entirely new idea, he said, although he was doubtful if it was a good business for a burgular.
"People might not be willing to trust him with their silver," he said.
"Very well then," said the Unwiseman. "Let him begin on front door knobs and parlor floors. He's not likely to run away with those."
The next day the travellers left Switzerland and when I next caught sight of them they had arrived at Venice.
