Among the commonplace white and yellow envelopes that compose
the bulk of one’s correspondence, appear from time to time
dainty epistles on tinted paper, adorned with crests or
monograms. “Ha! ha!” I think when one of these
appears, “here is something worth opening!” For
between ourselves, reader mine, old bachelors love to receive
notes from women. It’s so flattering to be remembered
by the dear creatures, and recalls the time when life was
beginning, and poulets in feminine writing suggested such
delightful possibilities.
Only this morning an envelope of delicate Nile green caused me
a distinct thrill of anticipation. To judge by appearances
it could contain nothing less attractive than a declaration, so,
tearing it hurriedly open, I read: “Messrs. Sparks &
Splithers take pleasure in calling attention to their patent
suspenders and newest designs in reversible paper
collars!”
Now, if that’s not enough to put any man in a bad humor
for twenty-four hours, I should like to know what is?
Moreover, I have “patents” in horror, experience
having long ago revealed the fact that a patent is pretty sure to
be only a new way of doing fast and cheaply something that
formerly was accomplished slowly and well.
Few people stop to think how quickly this land of ours is
degenerating into a paradise of the cheap and nasty, but allow
themselves to be heated and cooled and whirled about the streets
to the detriment of their nerves and digestions, under the
impression that they are enjoying the benefits of modern
progress.
So complex has life become in these later days that the very
beds we lie on and the meals we eat are controlled by
patents. Every garment and piece of furniture now pays a
“royalty” to some inventor, from the hats on our
heads to the carpets under foot, which latter are not only
manufactured, but cleaned and shaken by machinery, and (be it
remarked en passant) lose their nap prematurely in the
process. To satisfy our national love of the new, an
endless and nameless variety of trifles appears each season,
so-called labor and time-saving combinations, that enjoy a brief
hour of vogue, only to make way for a newer series of
inventions.
As long as our geniuses confined themselves to making life one
long and breathless scramble, it was bad enough, but a line
should have been drawn where meddling with the sanctity of the
toilet began. This, alas! was not done. Nothing has
remained sacred to the inventor. In consequence, the
average up-to-date American is a walking collection of Yankee
notions, an ingenious illusion, made up of patents, requiring as
nice adjustment to put together and undo as a thirteenth-century
warrior, and carrying hardly less metal about his person than a
Crusader of old.
There are a number of haberdashery shops on Broadway that have
caused me to waste many precious minutes gazing into their
windows and wondering what the strange instruments of steel and
elastic could be, that were exhibited alongside of the socks and
ties. The uses of these would, in all probability, have
remained wrapped in mystery but for the experience of one fateful
morning (after a night in a sleeping-car), when countless hidden
things were made clear, as I sat, an awestruck witness to my
fellow-passengers’—toilets?—No! Getting
their machinery into running order for the day, would be a more
correct expression.
Originally, “tags” were the backbone of the
toilet, different garments being held together by their
aid. Later, buttons and attendant button-holes were
evolved, now replaced by the devices used in composing the
machine-made man. As far as I could see (I have overcome a
natural delicacy in making my discoveries public, because it
seems unfair to keep all this information to myself), nothing so
archaic as a button-hole is employed at the present time by our
patent-ridden compatriots. The shirt, for instance, which
was formerly such a simple-minded and straightforward garment,
knowing no guile, has become, in the hands of the inventors, a
mere pretence, a frail scaffold, on which an elaborate
superstructure of shams is erected.
The varieties of this garment that one sees in the shop
windows, exposing virgin bosoms to the day, are not what they
seem! Those very bosoms are fakes, and cannot open, being
instead pierced by eyelets, into which bogus studs are fixed by
machinery. The owner is obliged to enter into those
deceptive garments surreptitiously from the rear, by stratagem,
as it were. Why all this trouble, one asks, for no apparent
reason, except that old-fashioned shirts opened in front, and no
Yankee will wear a non-patented garment—if he can help
it?
There was not a single accessory to the toilet in that car
which behaved in a normal way. Buttons mostly backed into
place, tail-end foremost (like horses getting between shafts),
where some hidden mechanism screwed or clinched them to their
moorings.
Collars and cuffs (integral parts of the primitive garment)
are now a labyrinth, in which all but the initiated must lose
themselves, being double-decked, detachable, reversible, and made
of every known substance except linen. The cuff most in
favor can be worn four different ways, and is attached to the
shirt by a steel instrument three inches long, with a nipper at
each end. The amount of white visible below the coat-sleeve
is regulated by another contrivance, mostly of elastic, worn
further up the arm, around the biceps. Modern collars are
retained in position by a system of screws and levers.
Socks are attached no longer with the old-fashioned garter, but
by aid of a little harness similar to that worn by pug-dogs.
One traveller, after lacing his shoes, adjusted a contrivance
resembling a black beetle on the knot to prevent its
untying. He also wore “hygienic suspenders,” a
discovery of great importance (over three thousand patents have
been taken out for this one necessity of the toilet!). This
brace performs several tasks at the same time, such as holding
unmentionable garments in place, keeping the wearer erect, and
providing a night-key guard. It is also said to cure liver
and kidney disease by means of an arrangement of pulleys which
throw the strain according to the wearer’s position—I
omit the rest of its qualities!
The watches of my companions, I noticed with astonishment, all
wore India-rubber ruffs around their necks. Here curiosity
getting the better of discretion, I asked what purpose that
invention served. It was graciously explained to me how
such ruffs prevented theft. They were so made that it was
impossible to draw your watch out of a pocket unless you knew the
trick, which struck me as a mitigated blessing. In fact,
the idea kept occurring that life might become terribly
uncomfortable under these complex conditions for absent-minded
people.
Pencils, I find, are no longer put into pockets or slipped
behind the ear. Every commercial “gent” wears a
patent on his chest, where his pen and pencil nestle in a coil of
wire. Eyeglasses are not allowed to dangle aimlessly about,
as of old, but retire with a snap into an oval box, after the
fashion of roller shades. Scarf-pins have guards screwed on
from behind, and undergarments—but here modesty stops my
pen.
Seeing that I was interested in their make-up, several
travelling agents on the train got out their boxes and showed me
the latest artifices that could be attached to the person.
One gentleman produced a collection of rings made to go on the
finger with a spring, like bracelets, an arrangement, he
explained, that was particularly convenient for people afflicted
with enlarged joints!
Another tempted me with what he called a “literary shirt
front,”—it was in fact a paper pad, from which for
cleanliness a leaf could be peeled each morning; the
“wrong” side of the sheet thus removed contained a
calendar, much useful information, and the chapters of a
“continued” story, which ended when the
“dickey” was used up.
A third traveller was “pushing” a collar-button
that plied as many trades as Figaro, combining the functions of
cravat-holder, stud, and scarf-pin. Not being successful in
selling me one of these, he brought forward something
”without which,” he assured me, “no
gentleman’s wardrobe was complete”! It proved
to be an insidious arrangement of gilt wire, which he adjusted on
his poor, overworked collar-button, and then tied his cravat
through and around it. “No tie thus made,” he
said, “would ever slip or get crooked.” He had
been so civil that it was embarrassing not to buy something of
him; I invested twenty-five cents in the cravat-holder, as it
seemed the least complicated of the patents on exhibition; not,
however, having graduated in a school of mechanics I have never
been able to make it work. It takes an hour to tie a cravat
with its aid, and as long to get it untied. Most of the men
in that car, I found, got around the difficulty by wearing
ready-made ties which fastened behind with a clasp.
It has been suggested that the reason our compatriots have
such a strained and anxious look is because they are all trying
to remember the numbers of their streets and houses, the floor
their office is on, and the combination of their safes. I
am inclined to think that the hunted look we wear comes from an
awful fear of forgetting the secrets of our patents and being
unable to undo ourselves in an emergency!
Think for a moment of the horror of coming home tired and
sleepy after a convivial evening, and finding that some of your
hidden machinery had gone wrong; that by a sudden movement you
had disturbed the nice balance of some lever which in revenge
refused to release its prey! The inventors of one
well-known cuff-holder claim that it had a “bull-dog
grip.” Think of sitting dressed all night in the
embrace of that mechanical canine until the inventor could be
called in to set you free!
I never doubted that bravery was the leading characteristic of
the American temperament; since that glimpse into the secret
composition of my compatriots, admiration has been vastly
increased. The foolhardy daring it must
require—dressed as those men were—to go out in a
thunder-storm makes one shudder: it certainly could not be found
in any other race. The danger of cross-country hunting or
bull-fighting is as nothing compared to the risk a modern
American takes when he sits in a trolley-car, where the chances
of his machinery forming a fatal “short circuit” must
be immense. The utter impossibility in which he finds
himself of making a toilet quickly on account of so many
time-saving accessories must increase his chances of getting
“left” in an accident about fifty per cent. Who
but one of our people could contemplate with equanimity the
thought of attempting the adjustment of such delicate and
difficult combinations while a steamer was sinking and the
life-boats being manned?
Our grandfathers contributed the wooden nutmeg to
civilization, and endowed a grateful universe with other
money-saving devices. To-day the inventor takes the
American baby from his cradle and does not release him even at
the grave. What a treat one of the machine-made men of
to-day will be to the archeologists of the year 3000, when they
chance upon a well-preserved specimen, with all his patents thick
upon I him! With a prophetic eye one can almost see the
kindly old gentleman of that day studying the paraphernalia found
in the tomb and attempting to account for the different
pieces. Ink will flow and discussions rage between the camp
maintaining that cuff-holders were tutelar deities buried with
the dead by pious relatives and the croup asserting that the
little pieces of steel were a form of pocket money in the year
1900. Both will probably misquote Tennyson and Kipling in
support of their theories.
The question has often been raised, What side of our
nineteenth-century civilization will be most admired by future
generations? In view of the above facts there can remain
little doubt that when the secrets of the paper collar and the
trouser-stretcher have become lost arts, it will be those
benefits that remote ages will envy us, and rare specimens of
“ventilated shoes” and “reversible tissue-paper
undergarments” will form the choicest treasures of the
collector.
