Produced by David Widger






FRICTIONAL ELECTRICITY

By Max Adeler

Reprinted by permission of the author, Charles Heber Clark, from "The
Saturday Evening Post."


I happened to visit the accident ward of St. Paracelsus' Hospital
because a friend of mine who is interested in the Flower Mission asked
me to stop there during my afternoon walk and give a few flowers to the
sufferers.

When I had arranged the last half-dozen of the roses in a vase upon
the little stand by the bedside of one bruised and battered patient, he
looked at me gratefully, and said:

"Oh, thank you, sir! And would you mind, sir, stopping for a bit of
talk? I'm so lonely and miserable."

I sat upon the chair by the bed and with my hand smoothed the
counterpane, while the patient asked me:

"Do I really look like a burglar, sir, do you think?"

I hesitated to reply as I examined his face. It was really covered with
bandages, but his nose seemed swollen and there were bruises about both
eyes.

"I don't wonder you don't like to speak your mind when you see me here a
broken wreck, smashed all up and not looking a bit like myself, sir. But
if you would see me well and strong and all fixed up for going to church
you'd say right off that I don't favor no burglar in looks."

I asked the unfortunate man his name.

"Mordecai Barnes, sir, and I'm a journeyman plumber, sir, with a good
character, and don't take no second place in that business with no man.
How did I get here? What banged me all up into a shame and a disgrace
like this? Well, I'll tell you, sir, if you have the patience to listen,
for it does me good to talk who has been used so hard, and can get
no attention from the nurses or nobody in this here asylum. Do you
understand about frictional electricity, sir? No? I thought not; and
well had it been for me, for this shattered hulk that you see a-lying
here, if I had never heard of it neither! I'll tell you how it was, sir.
My mate, George Watkins, and there ain't no better man nowheres if
you go clear round the globe--George Watkins is one of these men with
inquiring minds, always a-hungering for knowledge, and so George off
he goes week after week to the lectures up at the Huxley Institute. You
know it; in that yallow building over by Nonpareil Square. And George
often he told me about the wonderful things he learned there, and among
others he was fond of explaining to me about frictional electricity.

"It seems, sir, for you may not know it any" more'n I knowed it until
George explained it to me, that there's three different kinds of
electricity. There's the kind you make with a steam engine, and the
kind you make with acid, and the kind you make with friction. Well, sir,
would you believe--or, let me say first, have you ever rubbed a black
cat on the back in a dark room and seen the sparks fly? Of course, and,
sir, I know it's almost beyond belief, but, positive, they told George
Watkins, my mate, up at the Huxley Institute, that them sparks and the
aurora borealis that you see sometimes a-lighting up the heavens is
one and the same thing! Wonderful, isn't it, sir, that Science should
discover that a black cat is some kind of kin to the aurora borealis?
But George says that's what they said, for the aurora borealis is caused
by the earth a-rolling around and rubbing the air just as the sparks is
caused by stroking the cat's back.

"And George he says that this here frictional electricity is the only
kind that'll cure pain. The steam-engine kind won't do it, and the acid
kind won't do it, but the frictional kind'll do it every time if you
only know how to apply it.

"Well, sir, now I pass to the sorrerful part of my story. There is a
girl named Bella Dougherty that does housework for a man named Muffitt,
and a mighty nice girl she is; or, I used to think her nice. Maybe you
know where Mr. Muffitt lives, on 149th Street, just above Parvin Street,
the third house on the left with white shutters.

"Anyhow, I got to be fond of Bella and often used to set and talk with
her in the evenings in Mr. Muffitt's kitchen, and maybe have two or
three other girls come in sometimes, with a few men; though I never
cared, sir, for much flocking together at such times, for Bella
Dougherty she was good enough company for me, just her and I by
ourselves.

"Howsomdever, there was another man that had a kind of fancy for Bella
Dougherty, although in my opinion he isn't fit to wipe her feet on, and
his name is William Jones.

"This yer William Jones used to come intruding around there in Mr.
Muffitt's kitchen when he wasn't wanted and when he seen that me and
Bella would rather be a-setting there by ourselves. And so, sir, one
night, just to kill the time till he'd quit and go, I begun to tell them
what George Watkins said to me about the Huxley Institute and frictional
electricity being a sure cure for pain.

"And William Jones, a-winking at Bella Dougherty, as much as to say,
sir, that he'd be having the laugh on me, said he had a pain that minute
in his head from neuralgia and he'd bet me a quarter no frictional
electricity would drive it out. I know now what was the matter with the
head of William Jones. Not neuralgia, nor nothing of the sort, sir. It
was vacuum. My mate, George Watkins, tells me that at the Institute they
say that vacuum always produces pain, and that was the only thing the
matter with this William Jones I'm a-telling you about.

"I never take no dare, not from no man of that kind, anyways, sir, so
I bet him a quarter I'd cure him, and cure him with frictional
electricity, too. So he set down on the chair a-laughing and a-winking
at Bella Dougherty, who set over by the range holding the quarters;
and I begun to rub William Jones's eye-brows with my two thumbs;
just gently, but right along just like stroking a cat; keeping it up,
a-rubbing and a-rubbing, until at last I asked him how he felt now; and,
you can imagine my supprise, sir, when I seen that William Jones was
fast asleep! I was skeered at first; but in a minute I seen that I had
hypnertized him unbeknown to myself, and there set William Jones 's if
he was froze stiff.

"I wa'n't so very sorry, sir, when I found out how things was a-going,
although if I could have seen what was the consequences of this strange
occurrence I'd 'a' seized my hat and bid Bella Dougherty good-by and
started straight for home.

"But, sir, of course I acted like a fool, for I'd read in the papers how
a man who hypnertizes another man can make him believe anything and
do anything, and so I thought I'd have some fun with William Jones and
enjoy a lovely, quiet evening with Bella Dougherty.

"So I says to William Jones:

"'Now, William, you're a little school-scholar oncet again and you've
missed your lesson, and so you just go over there in that corner by the
china closet and stand with your face to the wall and say over and over
your multiplication table till you know it right.'

"And so, to the supprise of Bella Dougherty, William Jones went right
over in the corner, like I told him, and there he stood, saying: 'Six
sixes is thirty-six, six sevens is forty-two,' and so on, whilst I set
over with Bella Dougherty peacefully enjoying ourselves just exactly 's
if William Jones wasn't anywheres about.

"And so, sir, it went on until Mrs. Muffitt she come down and said to
Bella Dougherty it was time to shut the house up, and then I bid her
good-night and told William to go home and go straight to bed, which he
did, and a-saying the multiplication table all the way down the street.
He would have said it all night, sir, I do believe, if I hadn't ordered
him to stop and to begin saying his prayers when I passed him in at his
front door.

"You may believe me, sir, that I had William Jones on my mind all night
and was a-worrying a little about him too, for fear maybe he'd never
come to. So around I goes the first thing in the morning to his
boarding-house, and his landlady tells me he had been a-saying his
prayers all mixed up like with the multiplication table ever since he
come home the night before. She was a bit troubled about it, sir, as
you may imagine, for William Jones was a good boarder and it 'd 'a' been
money out of her pocket if he had lost his mind.

"So, then, I seen William Jones and knowed at oncet that the
hypnertizing still had hold of him. Very well; I had no idea how to get
him out of it and it didn't hurt him nohow, so I just commanded William
Jones to drop the multiplication table and his prayers and to fix all
his intellect in the regular way on plumbing; and William Jones at oncet
calmed down and seemed his old self again.

"Then a wicked thought flashed into my mind. You know how it is
yourself, sir; you are tempted and you are weak and you fall, and then
the first thing you know, to be sure your sin'll find you out and there
you are! Here I am, a shattered hulk. It suddenly occurred to me, sir,
that if I could control William Jones, why not turn his affections away
from Bella Dougherty, who might take a fancy to him? who knows? women
are so queer! and direct his thoughts toward my own Aunt Maggie, who is
a middle-aged widder and not so bad-looking, and far too good for such
a man as William Jones, although to speak the plain truth I had no
objections to having him for an uncle by marriage.

"Therefore I did so, sir, and before the week was out I heard that
William Jones was plumbing in the most supprising manner, plumbing here
and plumbing there, and paying attentions vigorously, so to speak, to
Aunt Maggie every evening.

"In the meantime, sir, believe me, I did not lose time in my suit with
Bella Dougherty, who seemed real mad at William Jones when people began
to talk about his courting Aunt Maggie, so that in less than two weeks,
when Bella Dougherty heard that William Jones and Aunt Maggie had agreed
to marry, I got Bella Dougherty about as good as to say, although she
never quite said it square, that she would have me.

"I never knowed how it happened, sir, whether somebody waked William
Jones up or he just come to by himself, but, sir, anyhow, William Jones
about that time dropped hypner-tism and was himself again. Imagine, sir,
how things stood! There never was a man as mad as William Jones; mad
with me, and mad with Aunt Maggie, to whom he sent a cruel message that
he wa'n't marrying no grandmas, and that made Aunt Maggie mad; and then
William Jones sat down and wrote me a letter to the general effect that
whenever he met me my course in this life would be short.

"Naturally, sir, as you may believe, I kept out of William Jones's way,
for I am not fond of quarreling, and besides, William Jones is forty
pounds heavier, sir, than I am.

"But one night while I was setting in the kitchen at Muffitt's, having
some uplifting conversation with Bella Dougherty, there was a sudden
knock on the side door, and up she jumps, pale and skeered, and says:
'I do believe that is William Jones. He said he might call, maybe, this
evening!' So, of course, as I never hunt trouble, I raised the window
sash over by the kitchen table at the back and went out just as William
Jones come in the side door. He kept the door open a-watching for me,
and so as I couldn't get to the gate I climbed over the high fence into
the next yard.

"I ought to have gone right home, sir, without stopping, but I hated to
leave William Jones there with Bella Dougherty, and me just driven out;
so, as it was raining hard and I had on my Sunday suit, what does I
do but try the latch on the kitchen door of the house next to Mr.
Muffitt's, and finding the door opened, in I walked and set down in a
chair to await what was going to happen. That was a bad job for me, sir!
It isn't safe to take one false step.

"For the next minute the inside door from the dining-room springs open
and a man jumps out and grabs me and says: 'I've got thee at last, have
I!' He was a Quaker, sir; a big man and with a grip like iron. I never
knowed a man with a grip like that. Did you ever, sir, have your fingers
in the crack of a door and somebody a-leaning hard on the door? That was
the way this Quaker held me. Then he calls out 'Amelia! Amelia!' and in
a minute a sweet old Quaker lady comes out with a candle, and he says to
her: I've caught that burglar, Amelia; thee get the clothes line.'"

"So the lady she gets the clothes line and that man he ties my hands and
my arms behind my back, good and tight, and then he made me set down
and he ties me to the chair, and at last he gives the rope two or three
turns around the leg of the kitchen table and says to me: 'Friend, thee
can just set there while I go to get an officer!' Gave me no chance to
explain. Took it all for granted; whereas if he would have listened to
me I could have cleared up the whole mystery in two minutes.

"So then, sir, out he goes for a policeman, and the old lady sets down
in a chair not far from me and said she was sorry I was so wicked and
asked me about my mother, and if I ever went to First-Day school, and
a whole lot of things. Then a thought seemed to strike her and she went
into the next room and came back with a book in her hand, and she said
she would read a good book to me while we waited for justice to take its
course.

"She was lovely to look at, sir, with her tidy brown frock and the crape
handkerchief folded acrost her bosom and her cap and the smile on her
face; a sweet face, sir; an angel face; yes, sir, but sweet faces often
has cruel dispositions behind them. For then she told me that the book
was called Barclay's Apology for the People called Quakers, or something
like that, and she begun to read it to me.

"Have you ever read that book, sir? It is dedicated, I think, to Charles
the Second, and it begins with Fifteen Propositions, and she read every
one of them Propositions from first to last. Then she turned to the
section, sir, about Salutations and Recreations, and she read and read
and read until, sir, actually it made my head swim.

"Do you know, sir, is Barclay still alive--the man who wrote that book?
Is there no way of getting even with him?

"I couldn't get away. I might have walked out somehow with the chair
fastened to me; but I couldn't go, could I, sir, with the table tied to
my leg, and particularly if I had to climb the fence? So I had to set
there and be regarded as a burglar.

"But at last I _would_ be heard, and I told her I was no burglar but an
innercent man; and then she looked in the index to find if Barclay had
anything interesting to say about the wickedness of telling falsehoods.
And then I said I was a member of the Baptist Society, and she said at
once she would read Barclay on the errors of that sect; but I insisted
on being heard, and I explained to her that I got into this trouble by
trying to cure William Jones by frictional electricity, and she said:
'Thee has an ingenious and fruitful mind to invent such a story. Oh,
that it had been turned to better devices than following a life of
evil!'

"'And it seems hard, too,' I said, 'that a perfectly respectable Baptist
plumber should be arrested as a burglar simply because he tried to
relieve the pain of William Jones by a scientific method invented by the
Huxley Institute.'

"Where is thy friend William Jones?' she asked.

"Do you know, sir, at that very moment you could hear through the
partition William Jones and Bella Dougherty laughing next door! It
seemed like mockery to me, a-setting there in chains, so to speak.

"'He is next door, ma'am,' I said, 'a-courting the hired girl.'

"'I will prove if thee is telling the truth,' she said, and she got up
and moved toward the door.

"'No, ma'am, no!' I said; 'please don't do that! William mustn't know
that I am here'; and so she comes back and sets down again, and picks up
Barclay, and looks sorrerful at me, and says:

"'It is wicked for thee to have such vain imaginations. Why does thee
persist in pretending that there is a William Jones?' And then she
started to look through Barclay to find if he had anything that would
fit the William Jones part of the case.

"What could I do? I daresn't call in William Jones to prove my
innercence; he was mad all over at me and a bigger man, too, and here
I was tied; and I couldn't call Bella Dougherty without William Jones
knowing it. It was hard, sir, for a man as innercent as a little babe
to set there with that sweet and smooth old lady considering him a
shameless story-teller and firing Barclay at him, now wasn't it,
sir? Would you have called William Jones, sir, under them there
circumstances, and his laughter and Bella Dougherty's still a-resounding
through the partition?

"Well, sir, that policeman was a long time a-coming with the old Quaker.
I never knowed why; but Friend Amelia she set down again and turned over
the leaves of Barclay and begun oncet more to read about Salutations and
Recreations while, strange as it may seem to you, sir, I felt that I'd
rather see the policeman and be locked up in a dungeon than to hear more
of it.

"But, howsomdever, after a while in comes the Quaker and the officer
with him, and the very first minute the officer seen me he says:

"'I reckernize him as an old offender.'

"'No you don't!' says I; 'I'm no old offender nor a young offender. I'm
a perfeckly honest Baptist plumber, and I kin prove it, too.'

"'How kin you prove it?' says the officer.

"'By William Jones,' says I, 'who is a-setting in that kitchen right
next door, a-wooing the hired girl.'

"I was bold about it, sir, because I knowed William Jones daresn't
strike at me while the officer was there.

"'We'll see about that,' says the officer, and in he goes to Mr.
Muffitt's yard next door and comes back with William Jones. I have no
use for a man like William Jones. What do you think he does, sir? Why,
he looks me over, from head to foot, in a blank sort of a way, and then,
turning to the policeman, he says: 'I don't know the man, officer; never
seen him before'; then that low-down plumber walks out and leaves me
there and goes back, and in a minute I hear him and Bella Dougherty
a-laughing worse than ever.

"'I thought not,' says the officer, slipping the handcuffs on me, 'and
so now you come right along.' And Friend Amelia looked mournful at me
and says to me she would come around regular and read Barclay to me in
my cell after I was convicted.

"And so, sir, to make a long story short, I was took up before the
magistrate and held for burglary, and my mate, George Watkins, went my
bail and so I was let go.

"I might stop here, sir, but I must tell you that the following Thursday
I met William Jones up a kind of a blind alley where I was working,
while he was working in a house on the opposite side. He had me in a
corner where there was no chance to run, so I put on a bold face and
went right up to him and says:

"'William, there's been some differences betwixt us, but I'm not the man
to bear grudges and I forgive you."

"'What's that?' says he, savage.

"'Why,' says I, 'the whole thing is just one of them unpleasant
misunderstandings'; and then I started to explain to him about the
Huxley Institute theory of frictional electricity and the aurora
borealis.

"I can't tell what he said, sir, in reply, with reference to the aurora
borealis, because I'm a decent man and never use no low language; but
suddenly he jumped on me, and the first thing I knowed I was being
lifted in the ambulance and fetched to this yer hospital. Was it right,
sir, do you think, for William Jones to strike me foul, like that, while
I was trying to state my case to him? No, sir. But that's not the worst
of it. Last Tuesday word came to me that Bella Dougherty had throwed
me over and is going to marry William Jones on Decoration Day! Think
of that, sir!" and Mordecai Barnes turned his head upon his pillow and
moaned.

Turning again toward me, he was about to resume his statement, when
suddenly he exclaimed: "Why, there's Aunt Maggie."

A woman of fifty years, nicely clad, came to the bedside and said to him
coldly:

"Is that you, Mordecai Barnes?"

"Yes, Aunt Maggie."

"I'm ashamed of you, Mordecai Barnes," said she; "ashamed of you. It
served you right. You got just what was comin' to you. I wish William
had banged you worse."

Mordecai Barnes groaned.

"And more than that," continued Aunt Maggie, glaring at him through her
spectacles, "I've torn up my old will which named you my sole heir and
made a new one and left all my property to this yer very hospital."

With these words Aunt Maggie walked away and left the room.

Mordecai Barnes could not speak for a few minutes. He looked as if death
would be welcome. Then, pulling the bedclothes up under his chin and
closing his eyes wearily, he said:

"Curse the day, say I, when George Watkins first went to the Huxley
Institute and heard about frictional electricity."