In the Best of Humour

Otago Witness, Issue 4028, 26 May 1931, Page 5

In the Best of Humour

( Copyright.— For. the Otago Witness.)

OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES.

By

STEPHEN LEACOCK.

(Note: The insatiable demand for memoirs and still more memoirs bears witness to the increasing interest of the readers of to-day in other people’s lives. Our critics and reviewers eagerly recognise and acclaim anything and everything that represents a human document. Without doubt they will welcome enthusiastically the following autobiography, cut directly from the stuff of life itself.) ¥ * * I have the honour to belong to a very old family connected for generations with the night. I have heard my father, who was a furnace man, say’that his ancestors were ’l..highwaymen, And he would speak of the blessing that coal heating had brought to the world in opening up night occupations for men of adventurous character. While I was still but a little boy my father would take me with him on his rounds. I would sit and watch him stoke up the furnace in the homes of

the rich, and after he had brought it to a glow, father would fetch some eggs from the ice-box upstairs and fry them in the furnace. . While we ate them, father would talk to me about the night and why it was. superior to the day. As our clientele was a rich one, 1 became accustomed early in life to move in luxurious basements with cement floors and spacious coal rooms, which has given ever since an ease of bearing and a quiet step that no doubt helped the success of my career. We fed everywhere, for my father believed in a generous and varied diet; on the other hand, he drank but little—a pint or so of champagne, prehaps, or if the night were cold, possibly a touch of old French brandy. For me he would open, perhaps, a pint of claret, but we drank in always in the cellar. My father -was very old-fashioned and strict in his ideas, and made no use of the drawing room nor even of the dining room, except, perhaps, on some special occasion. In one or two houses, .where the billiard room was in the ■ basement, father and I would knock up a hundred points after his work was over. But in all such matters he was strict; only in very, very cold weather, for example, have I seen him make use of a sealskin coat for his work at the furnace. As a rule, we had the night to ourselves; there was no one moving in the houses. And after the furnace was well stoked up and burning nicely, father would sit on a trestle in the cellar and talk to me of the principles of ventilation and :of the question of clinkers and back-draughts, so that I learned a great deal in being with him We generally arrived home a little before daybreak, bringing home break-

fast for my mother and mv vounger brother. Father would generally briim home a satchel of coal with him, and would give some also to any of our neighbours .who lived in the same basement as .we did; for, after all, as my father said, the coal cost only the trouble of carrying it. We generally got to bed 1 ight aftei* breakfast, as we kept early hours. On Sunday, father and I went to church, or rather to several churches, where father tended .fires in the basements, from which we could hear the organ. My father had no religious prejudices, and told me that he would .just as soon fire one. church as another. But he was rather bitter, for so mild a man, against churches that refuse. to have heat in their places of worship., My father regarded them as misguided. Meantime, I attended night school regularly, as father laid great stress

on education. He would have wished me to go from night school to a night college, and if possible to take a degree. Father said he had known several college graduates in furnace work, and considered them fully equal to first-class men. He always spoke of Oxford with great respect, and recalled that when he was a young man in marine boiler work on night shift, they looked on Oxford men as better suited for that than anything else.

But I was young enough and ardent enough to view education with impatience. I wanted to get forward in life and dreamed already of being night warden in a hospital or a night warden in a penitentiary. Father had some influential friends in the penitentiary, and he said that when they came out he would see what they could do. But the chance never came my way. We also talked of banking, and father said that if you could once get a footing in a bank at night, there was no telling what it might lead to. He had a friend who was very high up in one of the banks: in fact, on the principal vault itself, but nothing came of that idea either. Sometimes, too, we talked of the sea, and, of course, father, as I said, had been a sailor himself in the stokehold, and my imagination was fired as that of any boy is with the idea of the sea. I loved to picture myself in the stokehold of a great ship. Among such day dreams, or rather night dreams. I grew gradually towards! manhood. Meantime, I had tried out a few desultory occupations, but found none to my liking. For a while J held a post as night porter in a family hotel, my hours being from l a.m. to 7. But it was too disturbed. I found that- I

had hardly settled down to mv morning newspaper, next morning’s, for an hour or so, when there might be a ring of a bell, or a casual anival that necessitated my presence. Ihe surroundings were not congenial, the lounge room fairly confortable, bid the library, poorly selected and unsatisfactory. I worked also as night clerk in a lire station, which I found congenial and quiet, but in the second month of

my work there was an outbreak of a fire in a neighbouring part of the city, and I left. Chance fate, however, decided where deliberate intention failed.

I returned home one day to find that my father had given up his job to accept a more or less permanent position in the county penitentiary. His removal there was not wholly of his own choice, but his duties were entirely congenial, as he found himself in charge of five night furnaces where his companions were men of education and Culture, several of them college graduates. Indeed, his circumstances were such that at the expiration of his original contract, which I believe had been for three years a matter of insistence on the part of the authorities—father was invited to stay on as a salaried member of the staff The change involved very little disadvantage, except that he lost his uniform and had to supply his own clothes. Meantime, as a compensation for father’s removal from his family—a matter on which his contract insisted—influential friends obtained for me the post of nightwatchman in a large downtown office building. This position I have now held for 50 years, during which time I have every reason to believe that my career in and through the building has been a complete success. My hours are from midnight, when the last •of the day staff leave, until 6 a.m., when the first of them come back. During this time it is my duty to visit all the doors of the offices and try the locks, though, thus far, I have never been able to get into them. It is also necessary to punch a time clock at each floor of the building every half-hour. It is a crowded life, and in a way I shall not be sorry when some day the time for retirement comes.

I have found by experience that it is scarcely possible to do any serious reading, as it is interrupted every hour by duties. After the first 20 years I read less and less, and after the first 30 years I got into the way of contenting myself with reading the teleplione book and the calendar. The necessitj’ of keep, ing posted all the time as to which day of the month it is prevents intellectual stagnation.

Nor is it, as my reader might imagine, a life without incident. Every ten years or so something happens. I recall distinctly how, about 20 years ago, the burglar alarm rang, but I heard it in ample time to leave the building. On another occasion there was a great fire, a few blocks away, which prevented all thought of sleep. But yet I have begun to find that in the long run the position has a certain monotony, a kind of dullness about it. This feeling did not dawn on me at first, and often I forget it for five years, but it comes back. I ask myself, is this after all quite the work and quite the life for an active man? I asked myself this six years ago, and very soon I intend to ask it of myself again.

I am well aware that at my age, seventy, the time has hardly come to think of retiring. There is a man engaged in the next building on the street (I was talking to him only two years ago) who is nearly 10 years older than ,1 am. But without retiring from work altogether, I often think I may' give up my present job and strike out into something more strenuous. But no doubt many people think that.