Hot Sketch No. 22 — Typical American and Critical American
There was once a comfortable piece of suet who considered himself a Typical American and oozed oleaginous sentiments of Lofty Patriotism through a three-dimensional Mid Western brogue every time he saw a good opening.
He loved America so much that he used to spend six months out of every year Abroad with his big cigars and his fat wife. He liked to get up on a barrel in every port he backed into, and tell the natives a few things about Our great liberty-loving America where every man was free to spit on the sidewalk if he wanted to.
He took a Keen Delight in roasting everything that was non-American and making himself miserable every time he turned a foreign corner. He used to grease down three 18-inch collars every day pointing out to his billow-chinned Helpmeet how senseless These Here Foreigners were for doing things this way instead of doing them that way. Any time he overlooked anything for condemnation, the Little One (Ton) would heave-to and remind him of it in a whistling nasaletto that made you instinctively hang onto your hat.
From two to four hours were put in each day of the calender month grousing about the cold rooms, cold hotels, cold shops, cold theatres, cold everything. It made them both hot to think of the cold. During these protest meetings, Typical American would tread the floor heavily and work his cigar angrysomely from one side of his gasser to the other and then back again, and take a solemn oath before his Maker that if he ever got back home without cracking he would turn on the steam-heat until the walls began to run like sap.
Another thing that always added to the merriment of their foreign philandering was the Customs. Every time an inspector requested Typ. Am. or his Better Half Ton to open up a piece of luggage, Typ would bring down upon the inquisitive little inspectorial head a torrent of biting injective that would have made it crawl under the culvert in shame had it been able to get next to the linguistic delivery.
For the inconveniences and jarring out-of-dateness of Foreign Travel were but a mild rash when it came to the question of power to annoy. It was the systematic pillaging of Typ and Mrs. Typ that proved to be the big aching carbuncle.
Every time Typ went to pay a taxi fare, they tried to flam him out of two or three cents and he used to have to use up about seven dollars’ worth of American energy arguing the hold-up with the robber at the wheel and trying to prove to him in excited expletives that the legal Scale of Rates showed 20 cents for two miles instead of 22 cents.
When Typ would register at a hotel he always had to get into the ring for ten rounds with the Swiss Cheese in the long prince albert before he could get anything like the rate and the room he wanted. What he didn’t tell the Concierge down stairs about his old hotel he would tell the porters up stairs when they were juggling in the baggage.
Meanwhile Mrs. Typ would be examining the curtains and things, and giving the pirates a piece of her mind for charging Four Dollars a day for one double room and bath when they should have had the whole floor for that price.
Typ got chronic indigestion from scrapping over the price of his dejeuner, and Mrs. Typ swore regularly every morning that she’d see the buccaneers in the sixteenth sub-basement of Gehenna before she’d pay 18 cents for two measley boiled eggs—then she’d go ahead and order them.
Their daily sight-seeing and shopping excursions in all foreign countries were continually marred by the petty pilferings and short-change manoeuvering of foreign highbinders, and many a night as they sat fingering their finances in the hotel lobby and adding up how much they had squandered during the day, they would discover where they had been bilked of anywhere from seventy-five cents to one dollarr and a quarterrrrrr besides finding among their small change a worthless Portuguese coin that some low-down dragoman had handed them instead of a piastre.
When Typ and Mrs. Typ returned to America at the end of the year fagged to a frazzle and pining for just one peep at the Land of the Free and the home of the Oil Trust, their joy knew no anchor. They could hardly wait for their ship to bring them in sight of the Lady of Liberty and they pedaled the deck like jailed jaguars and Typ smoked cigar after cigar and spit over the deck-rail in wild abandon.
At last they arrived at New York and were so anxious to set feet on terry firmy that their eagerness carried them down the gang-plank before the Veterinary had come Aboard, and so they ran up against a Minion of the Law who gave them a call that reverberated for miles along the Palisades and made the Goddess of Liberty almost spill her torch. Whereupon they both got crimson back of their large ears and apologized profusely and stepped all over each other getting back into line where they crouched for seven hours without moving a muscle of the map.
Before the day was wholly gone, they were permitted to go into the Customs House, and the Inspector told them to open all baggage, and they said Yessir and got busy with the keys, and for the next hour-and-a-half were bowing and bending over 18 boxes and bags, and pulling things apart and trying their very doggondest to prove that they were on the level.
When they had at last begun to feel that they had proved their innocence, the Inspector, with his arm dug shoulder-deep in the last of the trunks, fished up a pill-box and all bets were off again until he had opened it and shaken the pills out and run his finger-nail around the crevices and turned it upside down and inside out, and put it to his ear and smelled it and trained an X-Ray machine on it, and then declared everything was all right and they could depart in peace.
Thanking the Inspector for his interest, and with a sigh of relief that was full of humility and unshed tears, they got a couple of porters to wheel their stuff out to a Taxi, and in the fullness of a swift joy that came upon them when they got outside and sniffed the free American winter air, they gave the two portering gentlemen a crisp dollar bill for the service.
Whereupon the gentlemen looked at the bill like it was some kind of curiosity, then looked at each other and groaned, and then gave the givers a look that scared them to a pope’s purple and made them finger further with the purse-string until the gentlemen had grunted their approval and departed.
When they arrived at their hotel they found they had only a couple of hundred dollars to pay the taxi fare with, but they managed to get by with it without inciting any murderous thought in the breast of the driver, and went in and registered.
When they informed the Room Clerk that they had not made any reservations he said he was sorry but everything was taken except one room without bath adjoining the boiler-house which was being held for a certain gentleman who had wired for it several months ago. Then King Klerk tapped his fingers on the desk and looked boredly out beyond their square heads and repeated that he was sorry.
At this, Mr. and Mrs. Typ got down on their knees and said the Litany, and the room clerk thawed and told them they could have the room for $20 a day if they barked quick. They barked. They also thanked him from the bottom of their grateful American hearts and told him whenever he came to their town to look them up.
When they had squeezed into their little ingrowing room they found that it had only one window, and that was an opening in the ceiling about the size of a silver dollar, but fifty times the value. They also found the porters hanging around for a tip and forgot that it was the custom at home to fee the beetles a quarter every time they did something instead of giving the whole bunch a couple of shillings at the end of a week’s work. They apologized for this oversight and then settled down for a little rest.
The temperature of the room was between 300 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit and Mr. Typ began to sweat like a brewery horse and got up to pull off his coat, but found the room was too cramped to do it and so he took off his necktie instead.
About the time that their eyes were beginning to hang out on their cheek-bones with the heat, and their ears were ringing like a Broadway New Year’s eve celebration, they managed to throw off the approaching comatose and back out of the room and down to the restaurant for lunch.
The head waiter said all the tables were full but if they didn’t mind sitting outside for a couple of weeks he would see what he could do. They said “Oh-that’s-all-right” and thanked him very kindly and gave him a Dollar Bill and sat down outside the door and tried to look as if they didn’t mind it at all. They didn’t want to give the Head Waiter the slightest suspicion that they were inconvenienced and run the risk of his getting sore at them and shutting them off altogether from the privilege of eating in the restaurant which he didn’t own.
During the same epoch they managed to get a little table facing the wall and a pillar, and were soon rummaging through the Feed Folder for some dish that they could afford to buy without becoming insolvent. They finally took refuge in the haven of all who don’t know what they want, and after they had eaten the last scrap of the roast beef they quietly paid the eleven-dollar check and went out to find the bank.
The next day they took a train for their home, and were so accustomed to foreign compartment cars that they decided to get a compartment. But when they found out the price, they concluded to buy a motor car instead and compromised on a berth in the main dormitory. There were no lowers to be had, and so they thanked the Pullman Conductor and took an upper.
The car seemed a trifle like a dry-kiln in temperature and they asked the porter if he would mind introducing a little outside atmosphere. He looked at the thermomenter and said it was only 190 degrees in the car and that the rules of the company forbade him from opening any more air-holes unless it got up to 3,000 degrees. They thanked the porter for the trouble they had caused him and asked him how all the folks were and bade him good-night and crawled up the ladder and disappeared back of the curtains, and were soon wrapped in the arms of Morph.
A week after they had arrived home, and had told everybody how glad they were to get back to God’s Country, the Cost of living began to show unusual agility in the high jump. The trial heats had caused people to gasp, but when the finals came on, everybody became highly excited and ran to and fro wondering what was coming next in way of sensation.
Mr. and Mrs. Typical American, with their originality of brain convolutions, decided that the only reasonable thing to do was to teach the people how to starve. And so they organized a Gradual Starvation Class and secured many other Typical Americans as pupils and thanked God that through his bounty, the people did not have to do the job suddenly, but could dwindle away slowly and almost painlessly.
They were getting on Very Well until a certain few Americans—not in any sense typical—came out in the open here and there, and said: “Not by a damsight! With grainaries groaning with unused grain, with eggs piled Babel-high in gigantic warehouses, with cotton enough in one State to clothe the whole Nation in summer, and wool enough on the backs of one-tenth of the sheep of the country to clothe the whole Nation in winter, with banks bursting with gold and freight cars enough to move the wares of the planet when not cornered in the holy cause of Pillage—not by a damsight will America starve herself to make a few Rich richer!”
And so it came to pass that these voices crying in the wilderness jarred loose in time the sluggish national contentment of Mr. and Mrs. Typ and other Americans everywhere, and made them think.
But just when they began to think, it was time for them to go Abroad again.