"What is a sardine?" was a question much before the Courts some few
years ago, not unprofitably for certain gentlemen wearing silk, and
the correct solution I never heard; but I can supply, from personal
observation, one answer to the query, and that is, "An essential
ingredient in London humour." For without this small but sapid
fish--whatever he may really be, whether denizen of the Sardinian sea,
immature Cornish pilchard, or mere plebeian sprat well oiled--numbers of
our fellow-men and fellow-women, with all the will in the world, might
never raise a laugh. As it is, thanks to his habit of lying in excessive
compression within his tin tabernacle, and the prevalence in these
congested days of too many passengers on the Tubes, on the Underground
and in the omnibuses, whoever would publicly remove gravity has but to
set up the sardine comparison and be rewarded.
Why creatures so remote from man as fishes--cold-blooded inhabitants of
an element in which man exists only so long as he keeps on the surface;
mute, incredible and incapable of exchanging any intercourse with
him--why these should provide the Cockney, the dweller in the citiest
City of the world, with so much of the material of jocoseness is an
odd problem. But they do. Herrings, when cured either by smoke or sun,
notoriously contribute to the low comedian's success. The mere word
"kipper" has every girl in the gallery in a tittering ecstasy. But
outside the Halls it is the sardine that conquers.
In one day this week I witnessed the triumph of the sardine on three
different occasions, and it was always hearty and complete.
The first time was in a lift at Chancery Lane. It is not normally a very
busy station, but our attendant having, as is now the rule, talked too
long with the attendant of a neighbouring lift, we were more than full
before the descent began. We were also cross and impatient, the rumble,
from below, of trains that we might just us well be in doing nothing to
steady our nerves.
But help came--and came from that strange quarter the mighty ocean, from
Chancery Lane so distant! "Might as well," said a burly labourer (or,
for all I know, burly receiver of unemployment dole)--"might as well be
sardines in a tin!"
Straightway we all laughed and viewed our lost time with more serenity.
Later I was in a 'bus in Victoria Street, on its way to the Strand.
As many persons were inside, seated or standing on their own and on
others' feet, as it should be permitted to hold, but still another two
were let in by the harassed conductress.
"I say, Miss," said the inevitable wag, who was one of the standing
passengers, "steady on. We're more than full up already, you know. Do
you take us for sardines?"
And again mirth rocked us.
Finally, that night I was among the stream of humanity which pours down
Villiers Street from the theatres for half-an-hour or so between 10.40
and 11.10, all in some mysterious way to be absorbed into the trains or
the trams and conveyed home. After some desperate struggles on Charing
Cross platform I found myself a suffering unit in yet another dense
throng in a compartment going West; and again, amid delighted merriment,
some one likened us to sardines.
It is not much of a joke, but you will notice that it so seldom fails
that one wonders why any effort is ever made to invent a better.
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[Illustration: "I DIDN'T KNOW YOU KNEW THE FUNNY MAN, SIS."
"I DIDN'T. BUT BY THE TIME I DISCOVERED THAT I DIDN'T--WELL, I DID."]
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