The Baby Year, Under Expert Advance Examination, Proves to be Only a Chip of the Old Block, and Not, After All, a Child of the Millennium
By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.
AN Unborn Being stood at the gates of Life, waiting to be born.
Along came a Little Old Man with an enormous broom.
“Who are you?” asked the Unborn Being.
“I am the Janitor of the House of Life—do you want an apartment?” replied the Little Old Man, sweeping a pile of halos and angels’ wings into the rubbish heap.
“Yes,” answered the Unborn Being.
“Well,” said the Little Old Man, “I can give you an apartment in the House of Life, if you want to move in; but you know the rent you pay for living in the House of Life?”
“No, I do not,” said the Unborn Being.
“Tears, sickness, disappointlllent, and eviction at any moment without warning—that’s the rent for being a tenant in that House,” said the Janitor, brushing off the fence with his great broom a wraith who was trying to get a free peep at what was going on over the borderland.
“I’ll take an apartment,” replied the Unborn Being without batting an etheric eyelash.
“And—Oh, I forgot to tell you,” continued the Janitor, “I’ll have to have a bonus for getting the apartment for you.”
“What is it?”
“Your ideals.”
“Take anything you want,” concluded the Unborn Being. “What I want is life at any price!”
You see, it takes some courage to be born in the face of these profiteering and bonus-grafting Janitors of the House of Life. Probably there is an absolute Necessity that governs birth. Time and Instinct are not gentlemen. They push years and beings into existence without a “by your leave.” They are not Chesterfields, but cave-men. Time clubs the years into being with the brutal carelessness of a Genghis Khan. Instinct walks blindfolded into the arena and roars “Bring on your lions and leopards!”
The best we mortals can do is ·to lay in a little sugar, pinch a bucket of coal, and begin life.
Now, there’s Baby 1920. It’s going to be born in spite of all the colics that life is heir to. It knows it is going to be a momentous baby. It knows by a sort of prenatal clairvoyance what it is up against.
It has already learned a great many things from its wild father and mother, 1919 and 1918. It may be born with a caul—which is a sign that it is going to be a Big Genius among the gang of years. Or it may be born with a pair of black eyes and a full head of hair, with its fists doubled up for action and a copy of the London Prize Ring rules tucked in its belt.
Anyway you look at the New Year, it’s going to be some baby!
Applying the methods of Freud and the psycho-anlaysts to this youngster before it is born is a rather hazardous task, but the laws of heredity and environment apply to the years as they do to individuals. What’s deep in the blood will show up in the kid. Besides, New Years were invented in order to guess about, and in the presence of the new baby in this old foundling asylum of a star one imaginative gamble is as good as another.
Baby 1920 has got all of the past locked up in its little veins and its snoozing subconsciousness; which is saying that all of the future lies there, for the future is only the probated and duly executed will of the past. The present is nothing but the phantom of both of them. Try to lay your hand on it, and presto! it melts like a five-spot in a lobster palace.
The baby 1920 is a part that is greater than the whole. Not only does it contain all the sins and virtues of its immediate parents, 1919 and 1918—the Mr. and Mrs. Bill Sikes of the Christian era—but it has in its cells all the acts of all the years that have preceded it. It is the next link in the chain of circumstantial evidence that is being wound around the life of Man—if you believe in the freedom of the will; or if you are a solid old fatalist of the Omar Khayyam type, it is one stitch more in the winding-sheet of the gods who are responsible for the blood-soaked planet and the price of eggs and the other ills that walk up and down the planet—even unto New York.
Look well into the freshly ironed eyes of that new baby on the morning of the first day of January. Don’t fall for its innocent baby stare. It is only a veil. Get out your psycho-analyzer, your historical spectroscope, your imaginative miscroscope, [sic] your ear horn, and anything else scientific you may have around your psychic house.
Your psycho-analyzer (if you have the latest style, with cellar door players and cellular lid lifters, &c.) will reveal that in the depths of infant 1920 lie buried all the suppressed desires, the chimeras, the hopes, the Utopias, the red soapbox threats, the cunning, short changing, and dreams of vengeance of the human race.
Don’t get chills if you see yourself there, for metempsychosis is the law of life, and you are what you were—back to Lucifer, Cain & Co. The baby will not bat an eyelash, carrying this slumbering jag of buried dreams, but maybe you will.
The soul is the penitentiary of the ideals and aspirations of the dead; it is a regular ghost-soviet of throttled demons and angels.
That is the mystery and the glory and the terror of Baby New Year.
Your historical spectroscope (with X-ray attachment if you have one) bad better be applied to the kid’s brain. It is a regular moving picture city of the dramas of humanity from the time Caliban I. looked out from his lair in some Silurian forest and wondered at the moon. It is the Weekly Pictorial Magazine of the screen extended into the infinite.
You will see everything there that has happened to Man from the rise of the first nomadic empire to the fall of the last umpire for a mistake in judgment about Babe Ruth’s strike-out.
The actors and actresses in this sublime tragi-comedy of the past are already framing up the next act, in 1920, of the planetary entertainment.
Your imaginative microscope (an old corncob pipe with a pot of tea and rum will do) should be applied to 1920’s heart, for that is really the philosopher’s stone, not the brain, which is only the hand-mirror of the emotions.
The imagination casts its jesters and Medusas before. Probably you can get a bunch on what’s to happen to us all in the coming year if your eye is trained sufficiently. They say a tidal wave is going to slap California on the wrist, that bacon will disappear, that rents will decrease, that Pest and Famine will compete with Bolshevism for the laurel of cypress leaves this Winter, that the Millennium will get started about next June, that the Supreme Court will declare the Constitution unconstitutional, that France will go dry, that an Eskimo General will conquer the equatorial regions, that the Martian canals will disappear, that Bryan will take the oath of silence, that Mexico will annex Texas—all sorts of dire and horrendous things are prophesied for the New Year.
It’s all in the baby’s heart. Give it some milk and listen.
Your magic ear-horn will record strange rumblings in the innards of the Baby New Year. They are the ghosts of the past scrapping over their niches in the Hall of Fame, and many wise guys—billions of them—are giving final instructions to the baby about its deportment in this world—pitfalls to avoid, good hotels (ideal and real) to stop in, admonitions from the famous family of Experiences with their luggage of epigrams, aphorisms, warnings, and the final Watch-your-step, Keep-to-the-right! wheezes.
These are the city editors, night editors and foremen of the spirit getting ready to send the New Year to press—all in deadly fear lest the sporting cells will get a story into the first page.
The only one that seems unconcerned is the baby itself. Entirely surrounded by Bolsheviki, Hunger, Cold (except down in the tropics, where it is threatened with volcanoes, tarantulas, and a Johnstown flood a minute), Strikers, Militarists, Prohibitionists, d’Annunzio, Rocking Thrones, German Socialism and Hylan’s Epigrams, it awaits the midnight hour of Dec. 31, when lobster palaces yawn and bonded warehouses give up their dead, with the serenity of the Year 1, Eden time.
“After all,” we can seem to hear 1920 saying, “what is life?” Isn’t it just one damned year after another? I’m only a chip of the old block—I should worry!”
So a Happy New Year to everybody—except the Drys. May Tantalus catch ’em all!
Publication History
- The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 28, 1919, p. 4