McClure's Magazine/Volume 32/Number 1/The Persistence of the Uninspired

by John Fleming Wilson

 

THE Oldest Journalist in the South Seas had just come into the hot reporters’ room of the Honolulu Advertiser. The screen door, outside which the night mosquitos hummed, slammed on the flying tail of his linen jacket, and the librarian came forth from his dusty den to see what stirred. His voice—he was incredibly old—met the Oldest Journalist as he crossed the cramped room to his desk. “Has the Mauna Loa got in?”

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE
UNINSPIRED

BY

JOHN FLEMING WILSON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY

The newcomer nodded his head, tucked his rescued coat-tail into his breeches pocket, scowled at the electric light, and addressed the librarian. “Yes. Beastly trip. Have you got a cut of old Simpkins in that graveyard of yours?”

“Simpkins? Simpkins?” repeated the keeper of our Colonial exchanges, London Times, and copper “cuts” of the famous and infamous. “You mean Simpkins of Lanai?”

“I do not,” replied the Oldest Journalist, throwing a raffle of papers to the floor and squaring his elbows to write. “I mean Phineas Simpkins.”

It was truthfully said that our librarian, whose life was a tissue of memories of the tropics, could, if given time, remember anything about any person who ever impinged on the sphere that contains the three social circles of the Missionary, the Trader, and the Native. So now he paused, his hand on the screen door that separated his closet from ours. His dim eyes sought the skylight, through whose wired squares the stars peered in. “Simpkins, Simpkins,” he whispered gently.

God knows the name is nothing to conjure up thoughts; and yet, as that unbelievably old gentleman stood there murmuring that pair of ridiculous syllables, his face marked the course of the backward tide of remembrance. I dare say he saw odd figures of whalersmen, gaunt missionaries, sallow traders, pompous attachés to forgotten envoys from big powers to petty princes—a long procession of Simpkinses; at any rate, he stood there a full five minutes, while the Oldest Journalist growled over his pencil and vociferated about the drying up of his paste-pot. Suddenly the librarian gave vent to a queer sound. It was half chuckle of glee at finding what he sought, half grunt of incredulity. “There’s only one Simpkins on the Islands now,” he said, tapping his nose with his eyeglasses. “Ha, ha!”

The Chinese copyholder, awaiting a correction on some proof, reminded us of his presence by a feeble, tittering “Hee, hee!” a shrill echo of the librarian’s laugh. At its sound the Oldest Journalist suddenly flung himself upon a Marine Register, hurled it at the Chinaman, picked up his empty paste-pot, and slammed it on his table, bellowing: “Simpkins! Simpkins of Molokai!”

The copyholder fled. The librarian chuckled again and withdrew to gaze through his screen door at the Oldest Journalist. “My dear fellow,” he said calmly, “of course I haven’t got any cut of Simpkins of Molokai. I have the pictures of many villains and some fools in here, but this paper is not spending money in buying copper half-tones of buffoons.”

“Buffoon!” thundered the other to our intense amazement. “Why, you senile old scrapbook maker, how dare you?” And the Oldest Journalist flung out of the office. He did not return for fifteen minutes, and we heard the librarian pottering over his files, muttering continually and scornfully, “Simpkins of Molokai!”

The next quarter of an hour saw the staff vanish, except myself, who had to see the paper to press after deciphering and expanding the cablegram from San Francisco. It was very warm, and the mosquitoes hummed under the lights, while I sought refuge in tobacco. The Oldest Journalist came back quietly and resumed his pencil. The librarian slipped out of his sanctum, looked at the Oldest Journalist (they were thirty-year friends) with a glance of mild pity, and vanished, as the extremely old and emaciated do, with a delicate and paperish sound. The “late watch” had begun.

“‘HAVE YOU GOT A CUT OF OLD SIMPKINS IN THAT GRAVEYARD OF YOURS?’”

I picked up the last number of the Shanghai Bund to read of the doings of a Council in which I had no possible interest and puzzle at the initials of scandalous personages of whom I had never heard. The Oldest Journalist’s pencil scraped on. The Chinese copyholder emerged from time to time and inquired in his shrill English as to the spelling of ponderous words in the “old man’s” leader; the foreman came in to inquire about the “cable,” and its probable lateness, and to anathematize, as he had done nightly since we had been united to the Coast by a “wire,” the slowness, ignorance, and presumable inebriety of the man in San Francisco whose duty it was to summarize the diary of the world in seventy-five words. The proof-reader, gentlest of souls, whose wife in Denver was his sole thought—apart from the mosquitoes—dropped in to inquire when the next steamer with mail from the States might reasonably be expected. The telephone rang to announce that a Japanese on trial for his life at Hilo had been acquitted per wireless. Still the Oldest Journalist wrote on.

“You'd better rush if you’re going to get your last car for Kaimuki,” suggested finally,

He threw down his pencil and bit savagely at the end of a woe-begone cigar. “Did that imbecile librarian find a cut of Simpkins?” he demanded.

“HE CAME TO SAY GOODBY”

“He scorned you,” I said tranquilly. “He pooh-poohed you and Simpkins for a quarter of an hour and faded.”

“I’ve got to have a picture to run with this story,” said the Oldest Journalist decidedly.

“Is it a good yarn?” I asked, professionally interested.

“Not so you would see it in print,” curt answer.

“Who is this Simpkins?” continued.

“He was the great example of the Persistence of the Uninspired,” the Oldest Journalist responded, pushing the shade back from his eyes and lighting his cigar. “He is dead.”

“Funny I never heard of him,” I mused, “in view of the fact that you are writing columns about him and asking for a picture to embellish the obituary. Was he a prince or potentate?”

“Of course you never heard of him,” was the tart rejoinder. “That’s why I’m writing all this. This is news.”

He resumed his pencil for a moment and then paused, looked over at me, and slowly leaned back in his chair. “I wish you'd go into old Scrapbook’s sanctum and go through all the cuts to see if there isn’t one of a fat man with a chin whisker and bald head,” he remarked. “An old picture of Napoleon III. might pass. Nobody here will know the difference.”

It happened that we did have a dusty copper engraving of the lamented Emperor of the French. The Oldest Journalist blew the dust off it, gazed at the lineaments depicted on the metal, and nodded. “That'll do all right. Just write a caption to run under it: ‘Phineas Simpkins, who died widely mourned by the community in which he lived and bore a prominent part.’ Get that?”

He took off his jacket and returned to his writing. A little later he glanced up to remark, “I’m not as crazy as people will think I am to-morrow.”

“You evidently ignore my opinion of to-night,” replied.

The Oldest Journalist stopped, picked out of the mass of papers on his table a small clipping, and tossed it over to me. “Read that,” he said.

I read the item, apparently cut many years before out of some country weekly in the interior of the United States. “This is the obituary of Thomas F. Adams,” I said. “He died on April 14th, 1879, in Libertyville, Iowa, on his farm, after a long illness. He was much lamented, a good father and a careful business man, and was a deacon in the Methodist Church. That’s all I see in this. What has it to do with Simpkins of Molokai?”

“The late Thomas F. Adams,” the Oldest Journalist replied, “never knew Phineas Simpkins, nor was Simpkins in any way related to him, nor did Simpkins know Adams or ever see him alive, nor had he any earthly interest in his death, burial, or obituary, that you or I could ravel out. But that eulogy, printed in that little weekly, is the reason I’m writing this eulogy in the tropics, and the whole affair is the direct result and outcome of the Persistence of the Uninspired.”

The speaker was not a man used to talking riddles. Indeed, his language was usually not only plain, but bald. I pinned him down. “Who is this Simpkins you’re talking about, anyway?”

“Did you ever see a man who never could say an interesting thing? Who never had a glance of the eye that betokened anything behind it? Who invariably did the most commonplace act possible under the circumstances? Who bored you in a crowd and staggered you with his vacuity when you were alone with him? Did you ever know a man whose circle of thought would pinch the waist of a peanut, and who incessantly attempted to converse by using the worn phrases of any fool who had been with him previously? Did you ever, my son, have to spend three days on a rolling inter-island steamer with a man incapable of anything but exasperating dumbness or maddening loquacity?” The Oldest Journalist’s vigor was extreme, and he thumped his paste-pot on the table resoundingly.

“What did Simpkins do to you?” pursued, assuming his interrogations to be rhetorical.

“Everything!” was the response. “He achieved the impossible, and I’m going to give him a column in to-morrow’s paper. Listen. You won't get this in the Advertiser of to-morrow’s date. . .

“1 can only approach this thing chronologically. Simpkins was born, apparently of commonplace parents, in a small town in the domestic part of Illinois—or what was, in his day. I spent a year of my young life in the Middle West, as they call it now, and tell you that no people under the sun have more virtues or less curiosity about vice than those folk who live back there where we never know what’s going on. And Simpkins came from there; with his little religion, his neglected education, and his dullness. God knows what brought him to the South Seas. He had no romance in his make-up, and you couldn’t have explained the word ‘adventure’ to him. He just came. It happened to be the utterly commonplace thing to do. And down here he merely ‘stayed,’ as they say of people whose movements are directed by no visible emotions or desires.

“ONE OF THE FIRST MEN I SAW IN THAT TOWN OF PESTILENCE WAS HE”

“I made his acquaintance years ago. You couldn’t use the expression ‘got to know him.’ One never can know a fence-post. I laughed at him, just as that librarian laughed to-night. But he took a terrible revenge. He made me a victim of the Persistence of the Uninspired!”

It was comical to see the Oldest Journalist’s disconcertment. He was tremendously put out, and tore at his cigar savagely.

“Time has nothing to do with such people as Simpkins, except to record their movements and decay. But still, there was a chronological sequence to this history. First Simpkins came to Hawaii. He stayed. He worked in an utterly uninspired way at a most prosaic trade. He made money. Then he went back to the States. Didn’t go back ‘home’, as everybody else does. He merely ‘returned.’ Then he came back here, and in due course was shut up in the same cabin on the Likelike with him for three days with nobody to talk to.

“He was speechless for three hours, and then dug up from memory a sentence about the weather. He talked weather—and there is no such article this thousand miles either way—till I was almost insane. Then he maundered about something alse. In a thousand sentences he couldn’t wake a single idea. His voice, his tone, his manner were uninspired. He was incapable of anything like human variety of thought. I loathed him as I would a street piano I had heard for an eternity.

“The third day came, and the gale that was piling the surf up on Molokai moderated. Simpkins came to me. ‘If the wind goes down awhile, the sea will be smoother,’ he said.

“‘Are you going ashore along here?’ I demanded.

“‘At Kalaupapa,’ he returned.

“Now you don’t always feel like asking a man why he’s going ashore at a leper colony. In those days you could get a permit to go to Kalaupapa almost any time. It’s stricter now. So we lay off that amphitheater of polyglot misery, and Simpkins got his baggage together. As we waited for the boat, he came to say goodby. ‘I’m going to live there,’ he said. ‘I think the climate is good.’

“For an instant I thought Simpkims had really a brain working in his head. It was a ghastly joke he had just cracked. But I actually liked him the better for it. Then I found out that it was no joke. He hadn’t the leprosy. He had nothing but his poor witless head and money. Do you know what he had done? Listen:

“He had gone to the Health Officer here and announced that he wanted to go to Molokai. ‘Sure,’ said the doctor, thinking he was urged by curiosity, and gave him his pass. In due time he landed through the surf and walked into the strangest town in the world. The steamer sent the last boat ashore, and the mate yelled for Simpkins. He didn’t appear. The steamer left, and a couple of weeks later the Health Officer got a letter from one of the lunas of Molokai that made him tear his hair. Simpkins had actually settled in the leper colony, spite of the laws of the kingdom and of society.

“Now, my son, you’re thinking of Father Damien, the missioners, and such. Forget all that. Simpkins was uninspired. He told me why he did this thing, and you will probably laugh when you hear it. Fancy this dull chap fixing his eternal abode in an accursed vale where one hears only the cracked voice of the leper and sees only the hopeless living dead. It makes your heart beat a bit faster, doesn’t it? But look at that obituary of that obscure late lamented in Iowa. It was scribbled one afternoon in Libertyville when the willows were budding along the muddy creek banks, and the children were making whistles—children who have whistled many tunes since and gone their ways apart. The editor probably thought when he wrote those words that he would attend the auction of the deceased’s livestock and maybe buy a horse or a cow. But Simpkins is dead in Molokai because of that paragraph.”

The Oldest Journalist made an extraordinary grimace at the ceiling and flung his cigar butt against the screen door. “Laugh!” he cried. “But must get it off my mind. have moiled over Simpkins till am fair crazy. I am a victim, and my only hope of release is this column article in the paper tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t get worked up over it,” remonstrated. “It is too hot. Out with your story.”

“There isn’t any story,” he wailed. “It’s positively the dullest affair you ever heard of. There isn’t any inspiration in years of it.

“When Simpkins had got pretty much a fixture on Molokai, and his reputation was hopelessly compromised, and various claimants of his wealth were agitating having him declared incompetent and a guardian appointed, I went down on the annual trip of inspection. You know the sort: officials, some reporters, and a few friends of the Kalaupapans go over for a day’s riding through the settlement, auditing of accounts and visiting.

“It was my fate to go, a few years back. I had not seen Simpkins nor heard much of him, but one of the first men I saw in that town of pestilence was he. He waddled along under a ridiculous sunshade, his fat arms bulging from a thin jacket, his whiskers blowing in the breeze, his bald head shining with perspiration. It was the most incongruous sight I ever saw. The maimed shuffled by with bound feet; the wind brought odors of antiseptic and balm. Chinese chattered along the way, flat of voice, shriveled of limb. Kanakas barked out greetings and smiled miserably. White men, carrying themselves with a final jauntiness, waved their dry arms. Babies played under the papayas, played silently. And through this throng waddled Simpkins, obtrusively healthy, his full face flushed with clean blood.

“‘SOMETHING LIKE THIS MIGHT BE APPROPRIATE,’ HE TOLD ME”

“He insisted on talking. I don’t remember what he said. He bored me intensely. The visitors scattered, and by some mischance I fell into the hands of Simpkins, alone. ‘You must come up to my house for dinner,’ he insisted. ‘I'll have had some good chickens killed. We must hurry, because don’t know whether you like them stewed or baked.’ And he talked chicken all the way to his gaudy house.

“It was a queer mansion to rise among those groves of pain. It was painted a vile red, with yellow trimmings. No vine grew over its nakedness. It sat in a bare yard through which a gravel walk ran as straight as a string. He took me in and immediately sat down on a porch. ‘How do you like our town?’ he demanded.

“I could have struck him for the sleek tone of those outrageous words. But he wiped his forehead and went on: ‘We have made many improvements the past year. We have built a theater with a ball room over it. We had a wedding there two months ago. A fine young couple, too. I think they enjoyed our little festivities.’

“Travesty of mercy! I got up. I could not eat the bread of such a man. It suddenly occurred to me that he had a most devilish rancour against his race. He was the Satan of this unspeakable hell. But he was warmly hospitable when I rose, and called for a drink of beer. The servant—a leper—shuffled out with it, and we drank. Simpkins nodded over his beer and sighed. ‘I understand they say in Honolulu I am crazy,’ he remarked abruptly.

“They don’t see why a well man should bury himself in this asylum without any object,’ I paltered.

“‘Hum!’ he ejaculated, with an indescribable ponderousness. ‘Hum!’

“‘Personally,’ I continued, ‘I fail to see what you came here for. You came for no charitable purpose. No one but a brute could enjoy the sight of this organized misery.’

“Simpkins looked at me with a puzzled face. ‘I don’t catch your meaning,’ he said.

“‘I mean,’ I recollect saying, ‘that your coming here is offensive.’

“His flat face became drawn in a violent effort to disengage my intention from my words. I rather enjoyed it. He squirmed in his chair, and the sunshade (which he had deposited by his side) rolled away and off the porch. He waddled over and with prodigious exertions recovered it. Then he sat down again and stared at me. ‘I have no intention of being offensive to you,” he said. ‘You are a friend of mine. Why, my dear fellow, I had no intention whatever of being offensive, none whatever!’

“What could say? I retreated. I enlarged on the fact that personally I had nothing against him. I mentioned that outside, in Honolulu, the people who had known him did not understand his sudden departure and voluntary descent into a living death. Then it came out. I don’t know whether you will understand it at all. But I shall try to be plain. Frankly, I am not sure of all this myself—that is, I sometimes think I fail to catch some vital point, some point in the Persistence of the Uninspired.

“Simpkins drew closer to me, hitching his chair up the porch, with various expressions of regard. He finally came to rest and gazed at me with a look of importance. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I have a place in the community here. Really, my dear fellow, am one of the principal men of Kalaupapa! I was the head of the committee on the new theater, and was chairman of the floor committee of the first ball. The paper mentioned me here in flattering terms.’

“T am not going to bother you with the details of his talk, except to state that I firmly believe Simpkins had never in his life had a home. No, he didn’t come from Libertyville, Iowa. He came from Illinois. From that village in which he had first lived, to the boisterous streets of San Francisco and the dissipations of Honolulu, he had been Simpkins, plain Simpkins, waddling on his uninspired way, meeting men whom he bored, viewing other men honored, liked, loved; the universal word of praise had never fallen to his lot. You would never have suspected it. He was lonely.”

The Oldest Journalist lit another cigar and smoked in silence a moment. Then he repeated his last word: “Lonely. You are young and can occasionally catch a friendly eye in the crowd. We both have our profession, our work. But sometimes in these warm seas, under these gleaming stars, I pause an instant and know what loneliness is. Maybe it’s bred in our bones, this Anglo-Saxon feeling, in the dumbest of us, for our social life. Anyway, I think I understand Simpkins. He wanted a place in a community, to be somebody—to be chairman of the floor committee at the ball of a leper settlement.

“Don’t imagine he said all this. He was an unutterable bore that afternoon. Only I was convinced that Simpkins, in his childish and unreasoning desire to have a place, a social position, a funeral with mourners, an obituary, had picked out, of all places in the world, Kalaupapa on Molokai!

“You saw old Scrapbook giggle when I said ‘Simpkins of Molokai’? That is the attitude. That seeker after a place was incredibly dull and offensive. I believe he never did the right thing in his life. He did not even catch the leprosy, but lived blatantly healthy among the dying, waddling around that afflicted city, pursing up his lips importantly over his petty affairs, purposely content. ‘Really, my dear fellow, I am one of the principal men of Kalaupapa!’”

The foreman looked in to ask whether the cable had come. The Oldest Journalist resumed his pencil. “How about the obituary notice you showed me?” I demanded.

“Simpkins saw it in a paper and cut it out,” was the response. “In a moment of confidence yesterday, when he was dying, he showed it to me. He was infelicitous to the last. ‘Something like this might be appropriate,’ he told me. Thrust it into my hands, you know, with an anxiety worthy of a little politician crazy to have his name in the paper. I suppose he had nursed the hope for twenty years that some day he would have an obituary like that. But imagine the audacity of his insisting that I write it so. Pah!”

I mused over this, and the foreman came in again. “Look here,” he said angrily. “Is this the best picture you've got for the front page tomorrow? Simpkins of Molokai! Why, he was crazy! People will laugh at the paper.”

The Oldest Journalist looked up. “I’ve got a column story to go with that,” he said severely. “What business is it of yours, anyway?”

The foreman shuffled his feet, grumbled something about the insanity of all newspaper men, and departed. As editor in charge, felt justified in a question. “What are you writing about Simpkins?”

He threw the sheets together and tossed them over to me. “Just what Simpkins asked for,” he said. “There is a first-class, stereotyped obituary, with everything in it, from ‘the lamented citizen in our community’ to ‘widely mourned by a large circle of friends.’ I have described the theater, the ‘ball-room, and the festivities he fathered, in the best journalese. It is a final example, my son, of the Persistence of the Uninspired.”

“But a column! And a picture of Napoleon III.!” I protested.

The Oldest Journalist turned on me with a snarl. “He earned it, did Simpkins of Molokai! He had no inspirations, I grant you, and he was a bore such as heaven spare us another. But his life was harmonious, and his end came fittingly. By the Lord, if he wanted all through his dull life a word of friendliness said over his grave, it’s not your business.”

“It is my business,” remonstrated. “I’m here to see that the public get the news and nothing but news. I’m not here to give a column to the death of a crazy fool who was the laughing-stock of five islands. You're indeed the victim of his persistency in the uninspired if you try this scheme.”

The snarl melted into a chuckle. “You're the victim, too,” said the Oldest Journalist, putting on his jacket. “Simpkins left all his money to the lepers, and that’s news worth a column any day, with a full-sized picture. I have the will in my pocket.”

So Simpkins of Molokai got the reward of his perseverance on the first page of the Advertiser, graced by a picture that I am informed looked strangely like him. And the final paragraph of the Oldest Journalist’s article ran thus:

With the passing of Mr. Simpkins there passed away the single citizen of the unfortunate colony on Molokai who pursued the avocations of a friendly life without any reference to the misery and despair about him. Mr. Simpkins did not make many close friends, but the streets of Kalaupapa will be the sadder for lack of his untroubled countenance, and the pale festivities of the settlement will move less joyously for want of one participant who never by word or act or glance gave any reminder to his fellow citizens of their infirmity or their separation from the world of the active and healthy. Without making protestations of charity, single-hearted in his desire to bear an honorable part in the life of his chosen home, he did more, it is possible, than he will be given credit for.