When he was a child his baby brother came to him one day and said that
their elder brother, who was grown up, had got a beautiful small ship in
his room. Should he ask him for it? The child who gave good advice said:
“No, if you ask him for it he will say you are a spoilt child; but go
and play in his room with it before he gets up in the morning, and he
will give it to you.” The baby brother followed this advice, and sure
enough two days afterwards he appeared triumphant in the nursery with
the ship in his hands, saying: “He said I might choose, the ship or
the picture-book.” Now the picture-book was a coloured edition of Baron
Munchausen’s adventures; the boy who gave good advice had seen it and
hankered for it. As the baby brother had refused it there could be no
harm in asking for it, so the next time his elder brother sent him on an
errand (it was to fetch a pin-cushion from his room) judging the moment
to be propitious, he said to him: “May I have the picture-book that baby
wouldn’t have?” “I don’t like little boys who ask,” answered the big
brother, and there the matter ended.
The child who gave good advice went to school. There was a rage for stag
beetles at the school; the boys painted them and made them run races on
a chessboard. They imagined--rightly or wrongly--that some stag beetles
were much faster than others. A little boy called Bell possessed the
stag beetle which was the favourite for the coming races. Another boy
called Mason was consumed with longing for this stag beetle; and Bell
had said he would give it to him in exchange for Mason’s catapult, which
was famous in the school for the unique straightness of its two prongs.
Mason went to the boy who gave good advice and asked him for his
opinion. “Don’t swap it for your catty,” said the boy who gave good
advice, “because Bell’s stag beetle may not win after all; and even if
it does stag beetles won’t be the rage for very long; but a catty is
always a catty, and yours is the best in the school.” Mason took the
advice. When the races came off, the stag beetles were so erratic that
no prize was awarded, and they immediately ceased to be the rage. The
rage for stag beetles was succeeded by a rage for secret alphabets. One
boy invented a secret alphabet made of simple hieroglyphics, which
was imparted only to a select few, who spent their spare time in
corresponding with each other by these cryptic signs. The boy who gave
good advice was not of those initiated into the mystery of the cypher,
and he longed to be. He made several overtures, but they were all
rejected, the reason being that boys of the second division could not
let a “third division squit” into their secret. At last the boy who
gave good advice offered to one of the initiated the whole of his stamp
collection in return for the secret of the alphabet. This offer was
accepted. The boy took the stamp collection, but the boy who gave
good advice received in return not the true alphabet but a sham
one especially manufactured for him. This he found out later; but
recriminations were useless; besides which the rage for secret alphabets
soon died out and was replaced by a rage for aquariums, newts, and
natterjack toads.
The boy went to a public school. He was a fag. His fag-master had two
fags. One morning the other fag came to the boy who gave good advice and
said: “Clarke (he was the fag-master) told me three days ago to clean
his football boots. He’s been ‘staying out’ and hasn’t used them, and
I forgot. He’ll want them to-day, and now there isn’t time. I shall
pretend I did clean them.”
“No, don’t do that,” said the boy who gave good advice, “because if
you say you have cleaned them he will lick you twice as much for having
cleaned them badly--say you forgot.” The advice was taken, and the
fag-master merely said: “Don’t forget again.” A little later the
fag-master had some friends to tea, and told the boy who gave good
advice to boil him six eggs for not more than three minutes and a half.
The boy who gave good advice, while they were on the fire, took part in
a rag that which was going on in the passage; the result was that the
eggs remained seven minutes in boiling water. They were hard. When the
fag-master pointed this out and asked his fag what he meant by it, the
boy who gave good advice persisted in his statement that they had been
exactly three minutes and a half in the saucepan, and that he had timed
them by his watch. So the fag-master caned him for telling lies.
The boy who gave good advice grew into a man and went to the university.
There he made friends with a man called Crawley, who went to a
neighbouring race meeting one day and lost two or three hundred pounds.
“I must raise the money from a money-lender somehow,” said Crawley to
the man who gave good advice, “and on no account must the Master hear of
it or he would send me down; or write home, which would be worse.”
“On the contrary,” said the man who gave good advice, “you must go
straight to the Master and tell him all about it. He will like you twice
as much for ever afterwards; he never minds people getting into scrapes
when he happens to like them, and he likes you and believes you have a
great career before you.”
Crawley went to the Master of the college and made a clean breast of it.
The Master told him he had been foolish--very foolish; but he arranged
the whole matter in such a manner that it never came to the ears of
Crawley’s extremely violent-tempered and puritanical father.
The man who gave good advice got a “First” in Mods, and everyone felt
confident he would get a first in Greats; he did brilliantly in nearly
all his papers; but during the Latin unseen a temporary and sudden lapse
of memory came over him and he forgot the English for _manubioe_, which
the day before he had known quite well means prize-money. In fact the
word was written on the first page of his note-book. The word was in his
brain, but a small shutter had closed on it for the moment and he could
not recall it. He looked over his neighbour’s shoulder. His neighbour
had translated it “booty.” He copied the word mechanically, knowing
it was wrong. As he did so he was detected and accused of cribbing.
He denied the charge, the matter was investigated, the papers were
compared, and the man who gave good advice was disqualified. In all his
other papers he had done incomparably better than anyone else.
When he left Oxford the man who gave good advice went into a Government
office. He had not been in it long before he perceived that by certain
simple reforms the work of the office could be done twice as effectually
and half as expensively. He embodied these reforms in a memorandum and
they were not long afterwards adopted. He became private secretary to
Snipe, a rising politician and persuaded him to change his party and his
politics. Snipe, owing to this advice, became a Cabinet Minister, and
the man who gave good advice, having inherited some money, stood for
Parliament himself. He stood as a Conservative at a General Election and
spoke eloquently to enthusiastic meetings. The wire-pullers prophecied
an overwhelming majority, when shortly before the poll, at one of his
meetings, he suddenly declared himself to be an Independent, and made a
speech violently in favour of Home Rule and conscription. The result was
that the Liberal Imperialist got in by a huge majority, and the man who
gave good advice was pelted with rotten eggs.
After this the man who gave good advice abandoned politics and took to
finance; in this branch of human affairs he made the fortune of several
of his friends, preventing some from putting their money in alluring
South African schemes, and advising others to risk theirs on events
which seemed to him certain, such as the election of a President or
the short-lived nature of a revolution; events which he foresaw with
intuition amounting to second-sight. At the same time he lost nearly
all his own money by investing it in a company which professed to
have discovered a manner--cheap and rapid--of transforming copper
into platinum. He made the fortune of a publisher by insisting on the
publication of a novel which six intelligent men had declared to be
unreadable. It was called “The Conscience of John Digby,” and when
published it sold by thousands and tens of thousands. But he lost the
handsome reward he received for this service by publishing at his own
expense, on magnificent paper, an edition of Rabelais’ works in their
original tongue. He frequently spotted winners for his friends and for
himself, but any money that he won at a race meeting he invariably lost
coming home in the train on the Three Card Trick.
Nor did he lose touch with politicians, and this brought about the final
catastrophe. A great friend of his, the eminent John Brooke, had the
chance of becoming Prime Minister. Parties were at that time in a state
of confusion. The question was, should his friend ally himself with or
sever himself for ever from Mr. Capax Nissy, the leader of the Liberal
Aristocracy Party, who seemed to have a large following? His friend,
John Brooke, gave a small dinner to his most intimate friends in order
to talk over the matter. The man who gave good advice was so eloquent,
so cogent in his reasoning, so acute in his perception, that he
persuaded Brooke to sever himself for ever from Capax Nissy. He
persuaded all who were present, with the exception of Mr. Short-Sight,
a pig-headed man who reasoned falsely. So annoyed did the man who gave
good advice become with Short-Sight, and so excited in his vexation,
that he finally lost his self-control, and hit him as hard as he could
on the head--after Short-Sight had repeated a groundless assertion for
the seventh time--with the poker.
Short-Sight died, and the man who gave good advice was convicted of
wilful murder. He gave admirable advice to his counsel, but threw away
his own case as soon as he entered the box himself, which he insisted
on doing. He was hanged in gaol at Reading. Many people whom he had
benefited in various ways visited him in prison, among others John
Brooke, the Prime Minister. It is said that he would certainly have been
reprieved but for the intemperate and inexcusable letters he wrote to
the Home Secretary from prison.
“It’s a great tragedy--he was a clever man,” said Brooke after dinner
when they were discussing the misfortune at Downing Street; “a very
clever man, but he had no judgment.”
“No,” said Snipe, the man whose private secretary the man who gave
good advice had been, “That’s it. It’s an awful thing--but he had no
judgment.”