Chapter V. The Editing of Xanthippe

The Enchanted Typewriter

by John Kendrick Bangs

After my interview with Xanthippe, I hesitated to approach the
type-writer for a week or two. It did a great deal of clicking after
the midnight hour had struck, and I was consumed with curiosity to
know what was going on, but I did not wish to meet Mrs. Socrates
again, so I held aloof until Boswell should have served his sentence.
I was no longer afraid of the woman, but I do fear the good fellow of
the weaker sex, and I deemed it just as well to keep out of any and
all disputes that might arise from a casual conversation with a
creature of that sort. An agreement with a real good fellow, even
when it ends in a row, is more or less diverting; but a disputation
with a female good fellow places a man at a disadvantage. The
argumentum ad hominem is not an easy thing with men, but with women
it is impossible. Hence, I let the type-writer click and ring for a
fortnight.

Finally, to my relief, I recognized Boswell's touch upon the
keys and sauntered up to the side of the machine.

"Is this Boswell--Jim Boswell?" I inquired.

"All that's left of him," was the answer. "How have you
been?"

"Very well," said I. And then it seemed to me that tact required
that I should not seem to know that he had been in the superheated
jail of the Stygian country. So I observed, "You've been off on a
vacation, eh?"

"How do you know that?" was the immediate response.

"Well," I put in, "you've been absent for a fortnight, and you
look more or less--ah--burned."

"Yes, I am," replied the deceitful editor. "Very much burned, in
fact. I've been--er--I've been playing golf with a friend down in
Cimmeria."

"I envy you," I observed, with an inward chuckle.

"You wouldn't if you knew the links," replied Boswell, sadly.
"They're awfully hard. I don't know any harder course than the
Cimmerian."

And then I became conscious of a mistrustful gaze fastened upon
me.

"See here," clicked the machine. "I thought I was invisible to
you? If so, how do you know I look burned?"

I was cornered, and there was only one way out of it, and that
was by telling the truth. "Well, you are invisible, old chap," I
said. "The fact is, I've been told of your trouble, and I know what
you have undergone."

"And who told you?" queried Boswell.

"Your successor on the Gazette, Madame Socrates, nee Xanthippe,"
I replied.

"Oh, that woman--that woman!" moaned Boswell, through the medium
of the keys. "Has she been here, using this machine too? Why didn't
you stop her before she ruined me completely?"

"Ruined you?" I cried.

"Well, next thing to it," replied Boswell. "She's run my paper
so far into the ground that it will take an almighty powerful grip to
pull it out again. Why, my dear boy, when I went to--to the ovens, I
had a circulation of a million, and when I came back that woman had
brought it down to eight copies, seven of which have already been
returned. All in ten days, too."

"How do you account for it?" I asked.

"'Side Talks with Men' helped, and 'The Man's Corner' did a
little, but the editorial page did the most of it. It was given over
wholly to the advancement of certain Xanthippian ideas, which were
very offensive to my women readers, and which found no favor among
the men. She wants to change the whole social structure. She thinks
men and women are the same kind of animal, and that both need to be
educated on precisely the same lines--the girls to be taught
business, the boys to go through a course of domestic training. She
called for subscriptions for a cooking-school for boys, and demanded
the endowment of a commercial college for girls, and wound up by
insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell you, if you'd
worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper the way I have,
it would have broken your heart to see the suggested fashion-plates
that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror. It was a
combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers were
to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were
discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted.
Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes
cropped up everywhere. Imagine it if you can--and everybody in all
Hades was to be forced into garments of that sort!"

"I should enjoy seeing it," I said.

"Possibly--but you wouldn't enjoy wearing it," retorted the
machine. "And then that woman's funny column--it was frightful. You
never saw such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a
covert attack upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that
was a bit of verse called 'Fair Play for the Little Girls.' It went
like this:

    "'If little boys, when they are young,
 
          Can go about in skirts,
 
  And wear upon their little backs
     
      Small broidered girlish shirts,
 
  Pray why cannot the little girls,
     
      When infants, have a chance
    To
toddle on their little ways
         
  In little pairs of pants?'"

"That isn't at all bad," said I, smiling in spite of poor
Boswell's woe. "If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I
don't see why the circulation fell off."

"Well, she took liberties, that's all," said Boswell. "For
instance, in her 'Side Talks with Men' she had something like this:
'Napoleon-- It is rather difficult to say just what you can do with
your last season's cocked-hat. If you were to purchase five yards of
one-inch blue ribbon, cut it into three strips of equal length, and
fasten one end to each of the three corners of the hat, tying the
other ends into a choux, it would make a very acceptable work-basket
to send to your grandmother at Christmas.' Now Napoleon never asked
that woman for advice on the subject. Then there was an answer to a
purely fictitious inquiry from Solomon which read: 'It all depends on
local custom. In Salt Lake City, and in London at the time of Henry
the Eighth, it was not considered necessary to be off with the old
love before being on with the new, but latterly the growth of
monopolistic ideas tends towards the uniform rate of one at a time.'
A purely gratuitous fling, that was, at one of my most eminent
patrons, or rather two of them, for latterly both Solomon and Henry
the Eighth have yielded to the tendency of the times and gone into
business, which they have paid me well to advertise. Solomon has
established an 'Information Bureau,' where advice can always be had
from the 'Wise-man,' as he calls himself, on payment of a small fee;
while Henry, taking advantage of his superior equipment over any
English king that ever lived, has founded and liberally advertised
his 'Chaperon Company (Limited).' It's a great thing even in Hades
for young people to be chaperoned by an English queen, and Henry has
been smart enough to see it, and having seven or eight queens, all in
good standing, he has been doing a great business. Just look at it
from a business point of view. There are seven nights in every week,
and something going on somewhere all the time, and queens in demand.
With a queen quoted so low as $100 a night, Henry can make nearly
$5000 a week, or $260,000 a year, out of evening chaperonage alone;
and when, in addition to this, yachting-parties up the Styx and
slumming-parties throughout the country are being constantly given,
the man's opportunity to make half a million a year is in plain
sight. I'm told that he netted over $500,000 last year; and of course
he had to advertise to get it, and this Xanthippe woman goes out of
her way to get in a nasty little fling at one of my mainstays for his
matrimonial propensities."

"Failing utterly to see," said I, "that, in marrying so many
times, Henry really paid a compliment to her sex which is without
parallel in royal circles."

"Well, nearly so," said Boswell. "There have been other kings
who were quite as complimentary to the ladies, but Henry was the only
man among them who insisted on marrying them all."

"True," said I. "Henry was eminently proper--but then he had to
be."

"Yes," said Boswell, with a meditative tap on the letter Y.
"Yes-- he had to be. He was the head of the Church, you know."

"I know it," I put in. "I've always had a great deal of sympathy
for Henry. He has been very much misjudged by posterity. He was the
father of the really first new woman, Elizabeth, and his other
daughter, Mary, was such a vindictive person."

"You are a very fair man, for an American," said Boswell. "Not
only fair, but rare. You think about things."

"I try to," said I, modestly. "And I've really thought a great
deal about Henry, and I've truly seen a valid reason for his
continuous matrimonial performances. He set himself up against the
Pope, and he had to be consistent in his antagonism."

"He did, indeed," said Boswell. "A religious discussion is a
hard one."

"And Henry was consistent in his opposition," said I. "He didn't
yield a jot on any point, and while a great many people criticise him
on the score of his wives--particularly on their number--I feel that
I have in very truth discovered his principle."

"Which was?" queried Boswell.

"That the Pope was wrong in all things," said I.

"So he said," commented Boswell.

"And being wrong in all things, celibacy was wrong," said I.

"Exactly," ejaculated Boswell.

"Well, then," said I, "if celibacy is wrong, the surest way to
protest against it is to marry as many times as you can."

"By Jove!" said Boswell, tapping the keys yearningly, as though
he wished he might spare his hand to shake mine, "you are a man after
my own heart."

"Thanks, old chap," said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it
in the air with my visionary friend--"thanks. I've studied these
things with some care, and I've tried to find a reason for everything
in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man--as
is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of
the English Church. He wasn't willing to be married a second or a
seventh time unless he was really a widower. He wasn't as long in
taking notice again as some modern widowers that I have met, but I do
not criticise him on that score. I merely attribute his record to his
kingly nature, which involves necessarily a quickness of decision and
a decided perception of the necessities which is sadly lacking in
people who are born to a lesser station in life. England demanded a
queen, and he invariably met the demand, which shows that he knew
something of political economy as well as of matrimony; and as I see
it, being an American, a man needs to know something of political
economy to be a good ruler. So many of our statesmen have acquired a
merely kindergarten knowledge of the science, that we have had many
object-lessons of the disadvantages of a merely elementary knowledge
of the subject. To come right down to it, I am a great admirer of
Henry. At any rate, he had the courage of his heart-convictions."

"You really surprise me," tapped Boswell. "I never expected to
find an American so thoroughly in sympathy with kings and their
needs."

"Oh, as for that," said I, "in America we are all kings and we
are not without our needs, matrimonial and otherwise, only our courts
are not quite so expeditious as Henry's little axe. But what was
Henry's attitude towards this extraordinary flight of
Xanthippe's?"

"Wrath," said Boswell. "He was very much enraged, and withdrew
his advertisements, declined to give our society reporters the usual
accounts of the functions his wives chaperoned, and, worst of all,
has withdrawn himself and induced others to withdraw from the
symposium I was preparing for my special Summer Girls' issue, which
is to appear in August, on 'How Men Propose.' He and Brigham Young
and Solomon and Bonaparte had agreed to dictate graphic accounts of
how they had done it on various occasions, and Queen Elizabeth, who
probably had more proposals to the square minute that any other woman
on record, was to write the introduction. This little plan, which
was really the idea of genius, is entirely shattered by Mrs.
Socrates's infernal interference."

"Nonsense," said I. "Don't despair. Why don't you come out with
a plain statement of the facts? Apologize."

"You forget, my dear sir," interposed Boswell, "that one of the
fundamental principles of Hades as an institution is that excuses
don't count. It isn't a place for repentance so much as for
expiation, and I might apologize nine times a minute for forty years
and would still have to suffer the penalty of the offence. No, there
is nothing to be done but to begin my newspaper work again, build up
again the institution that Xanthippe has destroyed, and bear my
misfortunes like a true spirit."

"Spoken like a philosopher!" I cried. "And if I can help you, my
dear Boswell, count upon me. In anything you may do, whether you
start a monthly magazine, a sporting weekly, or a purely American
Sunday newspaper, you are welcome to anything I can do for you."

"You are very kind," returned Boswell, appreciatively, "and if I
need your services I shall be glad to avail myself of them. Just at
present, however, my plans are so fully prepared that I do not think
I shall have to call upon you. With Sherlock Holmes engaged to write
twelve new detective stories; Poe to look after my tales of horror;
D'Artagnan dictating his personal memoirs; Lucretia Borgia running my
Girls' Department; and others too numerous to mention, I have a
sufficient supply of stuff to fill up; but if you feel like writing a
few poems for me I may be able to use them as fillers, and they may
help to make your name so well known in Hades that next year I shall
be able to print a Worldly Letter from you every week with a good
chance of its proving popular."

And with this promise Boswell left me to get out the first
number of The Cimmerian: a Sunday Magazine for all. Taking him at his
word, I sent him the following poem a few days later:

        LOCALITY

        Whither do we drift,
 
      Insensate souls, whose every breath
 
      Foretells the doom of nothingness?
 
      Yet onward, upward let it be
   
    Through all the myriad circles
     
  Of the ensuing years--
        And
then, pray what?
        Alas! 'tis all, and
never shall be stated.
        Atoms, yet
atomless we drift,
        But
whitherward?

I had intended this for one of our leading magazines, but it
seemed so to lack the mystical quality, which is essential to a
successful magazine poem in our sphere, that I deemed it best to try
it on Boswell.