GOAT- FEATHERS PS ELLIS PARKER BUTLER Class J£S_AS_01 CopyiiglitN?. COPYRIGHT DEPOSm ^QoU 6p eiltfii |3atlter Sutler PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY GOAT-FEATHERS. PHILO GUBB, CORRESPONDENCE- SCHOOL DETECTIVE. With illus- trations. Goat-Yeathers GOAT- FEATHERS BY eilis Tarker "Butler BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Tke Riverside Press Cambridge 1919 <^t.*^°G^^ A).* \ <\\ ^ COPYRIGHT, I918, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, I919, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED .^^ MAR 22 I9iy ©CLA5i5o01 Goat'Yeathers GOAT- FEATHERS NO human being ever tells the whole truth about him- self. We seem to be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different. I 'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something aw- ful! A man can tell only so much truth; then he begins to wabble. The truth is, I ought to be mak- ing as much money as Robert W. Chambers, and winning prizes of honor like Ernest Poole, and I 'm page 3 Goat-Yeathers not. I ought to be better known as a humorist than George Ade and Mark Twain rolled into one, and I 'm not. The trouble with me is that I am always too ready and ea- ger to break away and go gather- ing goat- feathers. If it had not been for that I might be a millionaire or the President of the United States or the leading American Author, bound in RedRussialeather. Imight have been a Set of Books, like Sir Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, and when people passed my house the natives would say, "No, that isn'tthecityhallorthe court-house; that 's where Butler lives." Of course some strangers would say, "Butler, the grocer?" but that would be the ignorant few. The page A^ Goat 'Y eathers real people would whisper, " But- ler, the Author! " in a sort of sub- dued awe and remove their hats. Some of them would pick a blade of grass from my lawn and take it home to hand down to their chil- dren's children as the most treas- ured family possession. As it is, I have gathered so many goat- feath- ers that half the people introduce me as Ellis Butler Parker and the other half as Butler Parker Ellis, and if there is a ton of hay growing on my lawn nobody bothers to pick a pint. My father has to cut it and rake it away. Goat-feathers, you understand, are the feathers a man picks and sticks all over his hide to make him- self look like the village goat. It page 5 Goat 'Feathers often takes six days, three hours and eighteen minutes to gather one goat-feather, and when a man has it and takes it home it is about as useful and valuable to him as a stone-bruise on the back of his neck. I have recently spent several days over a month gathering one goat- feather, and as a reward I was grabbed and chased after another that ate up two weeks and three days of my time. Goat- feathers are the distractions, side lines and de- flections that take a man's atten- tion from his own business and keep him from getting ahead. They are the Greatest Thing in the World — to make a man look like a goat. I think I can claim, without fear of dispute, to have gathered more page e Goat-Yeathers goat-feathers in a fifty-year career, and to look more like a goat, than any other man living, and not ex- cepting Pooh Bah, who added such a pleasing, goat-like character to Gilbert-and-SuUivan's " Mikado." Pooh Bah, poor amateur! could boast only that he was First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Jus- tice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buck Hounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop ofTitipu,Lord Mayor, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-Gen- eral, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse, Private Secretary, Lord High Auditor, First Commis- sioner of Police, Paymaster Gen- eral, Judge Ordinary, Master of the Rolls, Secretary of State for the page 7 Goat 'Feathers Home Department, Groom of the Second Floor Front, and Registrar. I can beat that all to pieces. When I wake in the morning as President of the Authors' League Fund I can give some attention to my work as Publicity Manager of the Liberty Loan Committee while preparing to devote an hour or two to the Secretaryship of the Arme- nian Relief and the Treasurership of the Volunteer Committee for the Fatherless Children of France, be- fore I consider my duties as Vice- President of the Flushing Savings and Loan and as Vice-President, Director and Member of the Dis- count Committee of the Flushing National Bank. As a Councillor and Member of the Executive Commit- page 8 Goat^Yeathers tee of the Authors' League, and one of the Membership Committee of the City Club, Governor of the Tus- caroraClub and Pubhcity Manager for the Flushing Red Cross, Flush- ing Red Cross Drive and Queens- boro Red Cross Drive I can put in a few hours of goat- feather gather- ing. Night may come without my having to do any real work, but if not I can avoid it and accumulate a few more goat-feathers as Member of the Book Committee and Execu- tive Committee of the Queensboro Public Library, Member of the Queensboro Committee on Train- ing Camp Activities, Executive Committeeman of the Vigilantes, Authors' Committeeman of the American Defense Society, and so page 9 Goat -leathers on for hours and hours and hours. I am a member of everything but the Mothers' Club of Pubhc School 20, and everything takes time from my legitimate work. I estimate that in the last twenty years I have gath- ered twenty thousand pounds of goat-feathers at a cost of about five dollars a pound, and the whole lot is worth about twenty cents. What I marvel at is that I make a living at all. My telephone rings seven thousand eight hundred and six times a day, and only once in the last eight years has it been rung by any one who wanted to buy a story from me. The other eighty- two million times it was rung by people who wanted me to gather a new crop of goat- feathers. page 10 Goat -Y eathers At one time I moved out to the barn to get away from the tele- phone. The result was that I had to come down out of the second story of the barn, walk across my prop- erty, enter the house, and go up- stairs every time the telephone rang. I did this eighty-two times a day, and then moved back to the house and had an extension telephone put in my workroom so close to my desk that every time I flexed a muscle I knocked the 'phone off its table. This made it much handier for the goat-feather distributers, so they called me up oftener. They call me before I am out of bed, when I am in the bathtub, and after I go to bed. Usually they call me to the 'phone and then tell me to wait a minute page II Qoat -Y eathers until Mr. Jonesky comes. The fav- orite times for calling me are when I am in the bathtub, when I am at meals, and when I am trying to con- centrate on my writing. I am not blaming any one for this. I did not have to rent a telephone. I could have let people come to the house. A great many do come to the house. On the average, it takes the person who comes to the house just . one hour to state a proposition that could be put in a six- word telegram or 'phoned in one minute. The visi- tor always begins with a few neat remarks about "Pigs and Pigs," which is not the name of the story, tells how his grandmother laughed over it until she sw^allowed her false teeth, explains that his grand- page 12 Goat "¥ eathers mother was one of the Tootlecoms of Worcester, but married into the Blahblah family. About half an hour later the visitor remarks, " I know you are very busy and I hate to ask you, but — " Then he asks me to do some little trifle hke raising $80,- 000,000 in Flushing for the War Fund of the One-Legged Garden- ers' League, which has a plan for planting sweet peas in the trenches in Mesopotamia. " We know you can do it,'' he says pleasantly. I know I can do it, too. I feel the great urge of ability rise within me. I don't care a hang for Mesopotamia, or for sweet peas in the trenches there ; but it is something I can do, and I go ahead and do it. I gather two quarts of red, white, and blue page 13 Goat "leathers goat-feathers, give eighteen maga- zine editors a chance to forget I am alive, and find at the end of the month that I am three hundred and forty dollars deeper in debt than I vv^as before. It has come about that people are actually offended if I don't jump into every mad goat- feather quest that is proposed. I am firmly convinced that there is now extant an Associa- tion to Prevent Butler Doing a Full Day's Work. I don't v^ant to seem egotistical, but I am nov^ of the opinion that the Kaiser started the war in order to make it seem neces- sary for me to make Four-Minute speeches on Food Conservation, Give Your Binoculars, and Buy a Thrift Stamp. page 14 Goat ^Feathers Of course, all our patriotic, Lib- erty Loan, Red Cross, Thrift Stamp side-lining is n't goat-feathering. The genuine variety is eagle-feather gathering, and I am as proud of my eagle-feathers as I am sour on my goat-feathers. Now it is a fine thing to be treas- urer of the Flushing Hospital, and it is a fine thing to be president of the Flushing Country Club, but the goat- feathers pall when you know that the reason you were given those glories was because nobody else would take them. It 's a " grand and glorious feelin' '' to know you can take some affair and make it a success, or a near-success ; but it is not business. A man may make a success of a Flushing Public Play- page 15 Goat'Yeathers ground and not be making a suc- cess of himself. He may be making a goat of himself. The chances are ten to one that he is making a goat of himself. I '11 never get the Pulitzer prize for the best novel or for the best play, but if there was a Pulitzer prize for the greatest human goat nobody else w^ould be in the run- ning. I have not got goat-feathers by the dozen or by the pound — I have them by the bale. I estimate that if all my goat-feathers were placed end to end they would reach from the bread line to the poor- house. It is just possible that by this time you may gather that I have a grouch on myself. If so, you are right. To- page 1 6 Goat-Yeathers day I am forty-nine years and six months old, and as a bright and shining hterary Hght I am exactly where I was twelve years ago. I am twelve years older and have that much less time in which to complete the joy of making good as one of the great American au- thors. Presently the infirmities of age will begin to gnaw at me, the moths will ruin my flossy collec- tion of goat- feathers, all those who now pat me on the back because they can make use of me free of charge will forget that I am alive, and my executors will shake their heads and say, "Ain't it too bad he left so little!" Distraction is n't really good for a man if he wants to reach a goal. page 17 Goat 'Y eathers No salesman ever got very far by carrying too many side lines. The poorest sort of monopoly for any man to undertake is a monopoly of goat- feathers. No man in the world had a bet- ter chance to make himself the Great American Humorist than I had when I v^ote " Pigs is Pigs.'' I had a good, solid foundation of fairly good humorous work under it and the little story had a wonder- ful success. The thing for me to have done then was to stick to hu- mor, regardless of anything. I have written dainty stories, sympathetic stories, serious stories, all kinds of stories, but not many humorous stories. It is surprising how often editors have had to announce " A page 1 8 Goat-Yeathers story that shows this famous hu- morist in an entirely new vein.'' Taking literature as a business, I can say that a humorist should have no " new vein." Neither does a plumber succeed as a plumber by spending a large share of his work- ing hours making violins. No one ever succeeds by allowing himself to be deflected from the most im- portant business of life, which is making the most of the best that is in him. Even a cow does better if she sticks close to the business of eating grass and chewing the cud. When she starts in to learn to whis- tle like a catbird and to flit from field to field like a butterfly it is safe to say she is no longer a success in life. When a cow strays from plain page 19 Goat 'Y eathers milk-producing methods and be- gins climbing trees and turning somersaults, she may be more pic- turesque, but she is gathering noth- ing but goat- feathers. Seven farm- ers, a school-teacher and a tin peddler may line up along the fence and applaud her all afternoon until she is swelled with pride, but when she gets back to the barn at sun- down she will not give much milk. She will not be known as a milch cow long ; she will be a low grade of corned beef, a couple of flank steaks and a few pairs of three-dol- lar shoes. I can sit down to write a story about a man who fell off a bridge and landed in a kettle of tar on a canal boat and, before I have com- page 20 Goat -Y eathers pleted a full paragraph, I can have stopped to clean the small o, small e, and small a of my typewriter with a toothpick, stopped to think about the pearl buttons on a vest I owned in 1 894, the Spanish- Amer- ican War, what the French word for "illumination" is, and whether I paid my last Liberty Loan install- ment. Before I have finished that first paragraph I may have stopped to fill my fountain pen, gone down- town to attend a meeting of the Red Cross Committee, started to recat- alogue my published stories, and taken a trip to Chicago. Before I have got to the first period in the first sentence I may have decided that I would not have a man fall off the bridge but have a woman fall page 21 Goat^Yeathers off it, that I would not have her fall off a bridge but off the Wool worth Building, that I would not have her fall into a kettle of tar but into a wagonload of feather beds, that I would not have her fall at all, that I would not write a humorous story at all, that I would not write at all, and that I would, instead, get an empty cigar box and make a toy circus wagon for my young son. I once made an entire doll' s house, two stories, four rooms, kitchen and bath, with hand-carved stairways and electric lighting throughout, the walls entirely weatherboarded, putinthecarpets, papered the walls, hung lace curtains at the windows and painted the exterior, and all be- tween two paragraphs of a story. I page 22 Goat "¥ eathers spent three months on that little trip after goat-feathers, and in the meantime Arnold Bennett prob- ably wrote three novels of several hundred thousand words each, gained an international reputation, and passed me on the road to fame like an airplane passing a snail. George Ade kept pegging away at his «« Fables" with the regularity of a day laborer, and Peter Finley Dunne ground out his "Mister Dooley" like an unwearied sau- sage-grinder. On my wall, alongside my desk, I have a calendar, and the sheet that faces me is that for the first week in March, 1916. It says "Concentra- tion. Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun's page 23 Goat-Yeathers rays do not burn until brought to a focus. Alexander G. Bell." That is the whole matter in a nutshell, but the only use the motto has been to me has been to permit me to look at it and think about it when I ought to be thinking of the story I was try- ing to write. So far as I am concerned, the most important person in the world is myself. The most important suc- cess in the world is my success. The most important money in the world is my money. A whole lot of the most important debts in the world are my debts. The same is true of you and your success and your money and your debts. I hope you are not near-fifty years old. I hope you are nearer page 24 Goat-Yeathers twenty, but whatever your age I can tell you that chasing after goat- feathers is mighty poor business. The time to investigate interesting by-paths is when you are on a va- cation, but the New York-Chicago Express gets there by staying on the track. The minute it starts climbing some interesting country lane after daisies and buttercups the coroners begin to gather and the claim agents flock together, and some slow but sure old freight train, plugging along on the next track but sticking to it, toots a couple of times and passes by. If I am ever the boss of a school board I shall insist that no child graduate until he can foot correctly a pile of numbers four deep and page 25 Goat -Y eathers forty high, and do it the first time. I have been a bookkeeper in my day, and I have footed a column of figures twenty times and got ten different results. L can go up a col- umn of figures, starting like a race horse — "Seven and six are thir- teen, and five are eighteen, and two are twenty, and — and I wonder if I put a stamp on the letter I mailed this morning — I wonder if Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays — I won- der if a bomb from an airplane would go through from the roof of my house to the cellar — cellar — cellar — well, I'm glad I've got eight tons of coal in, but I '11 have to get more in as soon as I can — and six — " Then I have to begin at the beginning again with " Seven page 26 Goat "leathers and six are thirteen, and five are eighteen — " The reason children don't get their examples right in school is because they don't concentrate on the matter in hand, and the reason men don't get their lives right is be- cause they don't concentrate on the matter of making good at what they know is the business of their lives — success. If you stop a mo- ment and think of the men you know who are not successes, but who might be successes, you will find they are goat-feather gather- ers. Anything that leads a man aside from the straight path to his goal is a goat-feather. Every use- less side line is a goat- feather. Ev- ery unnecessary distraction is a page 27 Goat "Y eathers goat-feather. Nine tenths of the things I do are goat-feathers. I don't mind telling you that I consider myself a very, very v^on- derfulman. Nobody but a most re- markable man could spend so much time in the goat-feather groves gathering goat-feathers and still keep his family from starvation. I actually gasp when I think what a great man I should have been if I had stuck to business instead of be- ing drawn aside by every sweet odor and pleasant sound. Then I actually swear when I think how many hours and days and weeks I have given to making myself look like a cross between a llama and a stuffed owl, when I might have been writing things the editors page 28 Goat-Yeathers never have enough of, and buy as soon as they read the first para- graph. It is all right! I 'm not jealous ! I '11 sit in the front rov^ every time Ade or Tarkington or Chambers pulls a success, and 1 11 applaud as w^hole-heartedly as any one, but I reserve the right to kick myself v^hen I get outside. This article is one of the kicks, and I hope it will have a good effect on me. I hope it will teach me a lesson. I doubt it; I'm too old; I'm too accus- tomed to chasing goat-feathers to give it up now. So there you have the story of what is the matter with me. You know now why, when you think of me, you think of a story I wrote page 29 Goat-Yeathers twelve years ago. I had a main goal, but I liked too well to investigate all the cross-roads instead of keep- ing straight on. That's bad; that's gathering goat- feathers. It has been bad for me, and bad for my success as an author, and bad for my suc- cess in the only life I have to live, but it is apt to be much worse for you to gather goat-feathers than for me to gather them, because I can, occasionally, weave some of them into a stor}^', while you can't do any- thing at all with those you acquire. The time we waste in excursions off the main line of our road to our goal is the difference between suc- cess and half-success; often it is the difference between success and failure. page 30 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Sept. 2009 Preservationlechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724) 779-2111 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 012 243 546 5