John Bangs - The Dreamers - A Club

“You miss the point of this association,” interjected Snobbe. “We haven’t banded ourselves together to immortalize a Welsh rabbit or a mince-pie – nay, nor even a ruddy duck. It’s our own glory we’re after.”

“That’s it,” cried Monty St. Vincent – “that’s the beauty of it. The scheme works two ways. If the stuff is good and there is glory in it, we’ll have the glory; but if it’s bad, we’ll blame the dinner. That’s what I like about it.”

“It’s a valuable plan from that point of view,” said the presiding officer. “And now, if the gentleman who secured the ball numbered two will make himself known, we will proceed.”

Hudson Rivers rose up. “I have number two,” he said, “but I have nothing to relate. The coffee I drank kept me awake all night, and when I finally slept, along about six o’clock next morning, it was one of those sweet, dreamless sleeps that we all love so much. I must therefore ask to be excused.”

“But how shall you be represented in the book?” asked Mr. Harry Snobbe.

“He can do the table of contents,” suggested St. Vincent.

“Or the fly-leaves,” said Tenafly Paterson.

“No,” said Huddy; “I shall ask that the pages I should have filled be left blank. There is nothing helps a book so much as the leaving of something to the reader’s imagination. I heard a great critic say so once. He said that was the strong point of the French writers, and he added that Stockton’s Lady or the Tiger took hold because Stockton didn’t insist on telling everything.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Mr. Jones. “I don’t know but that if those pages are left blank they’ll be the most interesting in the book.”

Mr. Rivers sat down with a smile of conscious pride, whereupon Mr. Tenafly Paterson rose up.

“As I hold the number three ball, I will give you the fruits of my dinner. I attribute the work which I am about to present to you to the mince-pie. Personally, I am a great admirer of certain latter-day poets who deal with the woes and joys of more or less commonplace persons. I myself would rather read a sonnet to a snow-shovel than an ode to the moon, but in my dream I seem to have conceived a violent hatred for authors of homely verse, as you will note when I have finished reading my dream-poem called ‘Retribution.’”

“Great Scott!” murmured Billie Jones, with a deep-drawn sigh. “Poetry! From Tenafly Paterson! Of all the afflictions of man, Job could have known no worse.”

“The poem reads as follows,” continued Paterson, ignoring the chairman’s ill-timed remark:

The lines were received with hearty appreciation by all save Dobbs Ferry, who looked a trifle gloomy.

“It is a strange thing,” said the latter, “but that mince-pie affected me in precisely the same way, as you will see for yourselves when I read my contribution, which, holding ball number four as I do, I will proceed to give you.”

Mr. Ferry then read the following poem, which certainly did seem to indicate that the man who prepared the fatal pie had certain literary ideas which he mixed in with other ingredients:

“A remarkable coincidence,” said Thomas Snobbe. “In fact, the coincidence is rather more remarkable than the poetry.”

“It certainly is,” said Billie Jones; “but what a wonderfully suggestive pie, considering that it was a mince!”

After which dictum the presiding officer called upon the holder of the fifth ball, who turned out to be none other than Bedford Parke, who blushingly rose up and delivered himself of what he called “The Overcoat, a Magazine Farce.”

Mrs. Robert Edwards. “I think it will rain to-day, but there is no need to worry about that. Robert has his umbrella and his mackintosh, and I don’t think he is idiotic enough to lend both of them. If he does, he’ll get wet, that’s all.” Mrs. Edwards is speaking to herself in the sewing-room of the apartment occupied by herself and her husband in the Hotel Hammingbell at Boston. It is not a large room, but cosey. A frieze one foot deep runs about the ceiling, and there is a carpet on the floor. Three pins are seen scattered about the room, in one corner of which is a cane-bottomed chair holding across its back two black vests and a cutaway coat. Mrs. Edwards sits before a Wilcox & Wilson sewing-machine sewing a button on a light spring overcoat. The overcoat has one outside and three inside pockets, and is single-breasted. “It is curious,” Mrs. Edwards continues, “what men will do with umbrellas and mackintoshes on a rainy day. They lend them here and there, and the worst part of it is they never remember where.” A knock is heard at the door. “Who’s there?”