Mince Pie Part 3

When at last we have hounded ourself into robbing our employer of those thirty-three minutes, plus fifteen seconds for you know what, we find ourself in the barber's chair. Despairingly we gaze about at the little blue flasks with flowers enameled on them; at the piles of clean towels; at the bottles of mandrake essence which we shall presently have to affirm or deny. Under any other circ.u.mstances we should deeply enjoy a half hour spent in a comfortable chair, with nothing to do but do nothing. Our barber is a delightful fellow; he looks benign and does not prattle; he respects the lobes of our ears and other vulnerabilia.

But for some inscrutable reason we feel strangely ill at ease in his chair. We can't think of anything to think about. Blankly we brood in the hope of catching the hem of some intimation of immortality. But no, there is nothing to do but sit there, useless as an incubator with no eggs in it. The processes of wasting and decay are hurrying us rapidly to a pauperish grave, every instant brings us closer to a notice in the obit column, and yet we sit and sit without two worthy thoughts to rub against each other.

Oh, the poverty of mortal mind, the sad meagerness of the human soul!

Here we are, a vital, breathing ent.i.ty, transformed to a mere chemical carca.s.s by the bleak magic of the barber's chair. In our anatomy of melancholy there are no such atrabiliar moments as those thirty-three (and a quarter) minutes once every ten weeks. Roughly speaking, we spend three hours of this living death every year.

And yet, perhaps it is worth it, for what a jocund and pantheistic merriment possesses us when we escape from the shop! Bay-rummed, powdered, shorn, brisk and perfumed, we fare down the street exhaling the syrups of Cathay. Once more we can take our rightful place among aggressive and well-groomed men; we can look in the face without blenching those human leviathans who are ever creased, razored, and white-margined as to vest. We are a man among men and our untethered mind jostles the stars. We have had our hair cut, and no matter what gross contours our cropped skull may display to wives or ethnologists, we are a free man for ten dear weeks.

BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES

"What is an equinox?" said t.i.tania.

I pretended not to hear her and prayed fervently that the inquiry would pa.s.s from her mind. Sometimes her questions, if ignored, are effaced by some other thought that possesses her active brain. I rattled my paper briskly and kept well behind it.

"Yes," I murmured husbandly, "delicious, delicious! My dear, you certainly plan the most delightful meals." Meanwhile I was glancing feverishly at the daily Quiz column to see if that n.o.ble cascade of popular information might give any help. It did not.

Clear brown eyes looked across the table gravely. I could feel them through the spring overcoat ads.

"What is an equinox?"

"I think I must have left my matches upstairs," I said, and went up to look for them. I stayed aloft ten minutes and hoped that by that time she would have pa.s.sed on to some other topic. I did not waste my time, however; I looked everywhere for the "Children's Book of a Million Reasons," until I remembered it was under the dining-room table taking the place of a missing caster.

When I slunk into the living room again I hastily suggested a game of double Canfield, but t.i.tania's brow was still perplexed. Looking across at me with that direct brown gaze that would compel even a milliner to relent, she asked:

"What is an equinox?"

I tried to pa.s.s it off flippantly.

"A kind of alarm clock," I said, "that lets the bulbs and bushes know it's time to get up."

"No; but honestly, Bob," she said, "I want to know. It's something about an equal day and an equal night, isn't it?"

"At the equinox," I said sternly, hoping to overawe her, "the day and the night are of equal duration. But only for one night. On the following day the sun, declining in perihelion, produces the customary inequality. The usual working day is much longer than the night of relaxation that follows it, as every toiler knows."

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "but how does it work? It says something in this article about the days getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, while they are getting shorter in the Southern."

"Of course," I agreed, "conditions are totally different south of Mason and Dixon's line. But as far as we are concerned here, the sun, revolving round the earth, casts a beneficent shadow, which is generally regarded as the time to quit work. This shadow--"

"I thought the earth revolved round the sun," she said. "Wasn't that what Galileo proved?"

"He was afterward discovered to be mistaken," I said. "That was what caused all the trouble."

"What trouble?" she asked, much interested.

"Why, he and Socrates had to take hemlock or they were drowned in a b.u.t.t of malmsey, I really forget which."

"Well, after the equinox," said t.i.tania, "do the days get longer?"

"They do," I said; "in order to permit the double-headers. And now that daylight saving is to go into effect, equinoxes won't be necessary any more. Very likely the pan-Russian Soviets, or President Wilson, or somebody, will abolish them."

"June 21 is the longest day in the year, isn't it?"

"The day before pay-day is always the longest day."

"And the night the cook goes out is always the longest night," she retorted, catching the spirit of the game.

"Some day," I threatened her, "the earth will stop rotating on its...o...b..t, or its axis, or whatever it is, and then we will be like the moon, divided into two hostile hemispheres, one perpetual day and the other eternal night."

She did not seem alarmed. "Yes, and I bet I know which one you'll emigrate to," she said. "But how about the equinoctial gales? Why should there be gales just then?"

I had forgot about the equinoctial gales, and this caught me unawares.

"That was an old tradition of the Phoenician mariners," I said, "but the invention of lat.i.tude and longitude made them unnecessary. They have fallen into disrepute. Dead reckoning killed them."

"And the precession of the equinoxes?" she asked, turning back to her magazine.

This was a poser, but I rallied stoutly. "Well," I said, "you see, there are two equinoxes a year, the vernal and the autumnal. They are well known by coal dealers. The first one is when he delivers the coal and the second is when he gets paid. Two of them a year, you see, in the course of a million years or so, makes quite a majestic series. That is why they call it a procession."

t.i.tania looked at me and gradually her face broke up into a charming aurora borealis of laughter.

"I don't believe you know any more about the old things than I do," she said.

And the worst of it is, I think she was right.

163 INNOCENT OLD MEN

I found t.i.tania looking severely at her watch, which is a queer little gold disk about the size of a waistcoat b.u.t.ton, swinging under her chin by a thin golden chain. t.i.tania's methods of winding, setting and regulating that watch have always been a mystery to me. She frequently knows what the right time is, but how she deduces it from the data given by the hands of her timepiece I can't guess. It's something like this: She looks at the watch and notes what it says. Then she deducts ten minutes, because she remembers it is ten minutes fast. Then she performs some complicated calculation connected with when the baby had his bath, and how long ago she heard the church bells chime; to this result she adds five minutes to allow for leeway. Then she goes to the phone and asks Central the time.

"Hullo," I said; "what's wrong?"

"I'm wondering about this daylight-saving business," she said. "You know, I think it's all a piece of Bolshevik propaganda to get us confused and encourage anarchy. All the women in Marathon are talking about it and neglecting their knitting. Junior's bath was half an hour late today because Mrs. Benvenuto called me up to talk about daylight saving. She says her cook has threatened to leave if she has to get up an hour earlier in the morning. I was just wondering how to adjust my watch to the new conditions."

"It's perfectly simple," I said. "Put your watch ahead one hour, and then go through the same logarithms you always do."

"Put it ahead?" asked t.i.tania. "Mrs. Borgia says we have to put the clock _back_ an hour. She is fearfully worried about it. She says suppose she has something in the oven when the clock is put back, it will be an hour overdone and burned to a crisp when the kitchen clock catches up again."

"Mrs. Borgia is wrong," I said. "The clocks are to be put ahead one hour. At 2 o'clock on Easter morning they are to be turned on to 3 o'clock. Mrs. Borgia certainly won't have anything in the oven at that time of night. You see, we are to pretend that 2 o'clock is really 3 o'clock, and when we get up at 7 o'clock it will really be 6 o'clock. We are deliberately fooling ourselves in order to get an hour more of daylight."

"I have an idea," she said, "that you won't get up at 7 that morning."

"It is quite possible," I said, "because I intend to stay up until 2 a.m. that morning in order to be exactly correct in changing our timepieces. No one shall accuse me of being a time slacker."