 | Poor Little Eddie |  |
1. Part I
Be helpless — that's what wins. Be a harmless, wide-eyed boob, and you won't have to rise early to get the money. No! All you have to do is lie in bed and wait for some sympathetic moneyed person to bring you plenty on a tray.
Let George do it — that's the idea. If you can't, there's always some George that will. Sure!
Of course, helpless stupidity is like every other accomplishment — you've got to be perfect to get the best results. You can't expect to have a silver spoon rammed down your throat if you're capable of guiding it to your lips by your own efforts. Oh, no! Nobody drops pennies into a cup held by a man owning one perfectly good eye. A blind man must be totally so to go into business for himself.
Same way with a boob that grows fat on his own folly — he must be a Simon-pure simp. He must believe politicians before an election and patent-medicine advertisements when he's sick.
Absolutely! He must be of the order of intelligence that derives no amusement from political editorials in partizan{sic} newspapers. He must be the kind of a fellow that stops on a moonlight evening when a pretty girl tells him to.
If you know any man as foolish as all that, cultivate his friendship while he's young and accessible, because later on he'll have money to lend and so many office-boys as a body-guard in front of his door that no card but that of a very old friend or a millionaire can get through to him.
Brains are a misfortune, I tell you. If you have brains, you have to use them, and the use of brains is work, and work is a curse. Therefore, brains being a curse, the lack of them must necessarily be a blessing.
And good looks? Hub! If a man's good-looking, some girl with no more sense than to marry him just because he's handsome, will. Then, if he's a gentleman, he's got to work like a dog for the rest of his life, to make enough to atone, so far as he can with money — which is some distance — for the irreparable mistake his manly cow-lick caused her to make.
And money? Why, if you've got money to start with, you're nothing but shark-bait. You can't be friends with anybody. No! You're either an opportunity or a pest. The first time you knock at a man's door you're opportunity, and he comes on the run at the first tap and borrows money from you.
If a man laughs at a funny story you tell, you don't get any pleasure from listening to his mirth. You're wondering how much it will cost you when he gets you alone and tells you his funny one about the check that should have been in the day before, but probably got lost in the mail. Isn't that right? Absolutely!
And, girls! Why, if you've got money, and a pretty girl tells you that you're different from any man she's ever known, and sits over a few inches nearer, you get a thrill all right, but it's not a thrill of ecstasy. It's apprehension that makes you shiver. You recall that you've told her she waltzes nicely, and you call your lawyer out of bed to ask him how much she can collect on the strength of that remark. Isn't that right? Absolutely!
But a mouse-haired, fish-eyed, pigeon-toed, bow-legged, brain-shy, poverty-stricken boob is immune. He hasn't got anything that anybody wants, whereas everybody has something that be needs.
Everything comes his way. The law of supply and demand, I suppose; but it's discouraging to an industrious striver like myself, who's been brought up in a humble but Presbyterian atmosphere, to believe that the early bird gets the worm, when I sit by and see a worm too stupid to know when it's time to get up, fall out of his bole in the late afternoon, and gobble the classiest bird on the lawn!
| Poor Little Eddie | |