This is the story that the desolate man told to me on the lonely
Highland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stags
roaring.
The saddening twilight, the mountain already black, the dreadful
melancholy of the stags' voices, his friendless mournful face, all
seemed to be of some most sorrowful play staged in that valley by an
outcast god, a lonely play of which the hills were part and he the
only actor.
For long we watched each other drawing out of the solitudes of those
forsaken spaces. Then when we met he spoke.
"I will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter. I will
keep it to myself no longer. But first I must tell you how I came by
it."
I do not give the story in his words with all his woeful interjections
and the misery of his frantic self-reproaches for I would not convey
unnecessarily to my readers that atmosphere of sadness that was about
all he said and that seemed to go with him where-ever he moved.
It seems that he had been a member of a club, a West-end club he
called it, a respectable but quite inferior affair, probably in the
City: agents belonged to it, fire insurance mostly, but life insurance
and motor-agents too, it was in fact a touts' club. It seems that a
few of them one evening, forgetting for a moment their encyclopedias
and non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over a card-table when the
game had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little man
with waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boasting
heartily of his temperance. It was then that he who told this mournful
story, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little over
the green baize into the light of the two guttering candles and
revealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. One
woman was to him as ugly as another.
And the silenced boasters rose and went home to bed leaving him all
alone, as he supposed, with his unequalled virtue. And yet he was not
alone, for when the rest had gone there arose a member out of a deep
arm-chair at the dark end of the room and walked across to him, a man
whose occupation he did not know and only now suspects.
"You have," said the stranger, "a surpassing virtue."
"I have no possible use for it," my poor friend replied.
"Then doubtless you would sell it cheap," said the stranger.
Something in the man's manner or appearance made the desolate teller
of this mournful tale feel his own inferiority, which probably made
him feel acutely shy, so that his mind abased itself as an Oriental
does his body in the presence of a superior, or perhaps he was sleepy,
or merely a little drunk. Whatever it was he only mumbled, "O yes,"
instead of contradicting so mad a remark. And the stranger led the way
to the room where the telephone was.
"I think you will find my firm will give a good price for it," he
said: and without more ado he began with a pair of pincers to cut the
wire of the telephone and the receiver. The old waiter who looked
after the club they had left shuffling round the other room putting
things away for the night.
"Whatever are you doing of?" said my friend.
"This way," said the stranger. Along a passage they went and away to
the back of the club and there the stranger leaned out of a window and
fastened the severed wires to the lightning conductor. My friend has
no doubt of that, a broad ribbon of copper, half an inch wide, perhaps
wider, running down from the roof to the earth.
"Hell," said the stranger with his mouth to the telephone; then
silence for a while with his ear to the receiver, leaning out of the
window. And then my friend heard his poor virtue being several times
repeated, and then words like Yes and No.
"They offer you three jokes," said the stranger, "which shall make all
who hear them simply die of laughter."
I think my friend was reluctant then to have anything more to do with
it, he wanted to go home; he said he didn't want jokes.
"They think very highly of your virtue," I said the stranger. And at
that, odd as it seems, my friend wavered, for logically if they
thought highly of the goods they should have paid a higher price.
"O all right," he said. The extraordinary document that the agent drew
from his pocket ran something like this:
"I . . . . . in consideration of three new jokes received from Mr.
Montagu-Montague, hereinafter to be called the agent, and warranted to
be as by him stated and described, do assign to him, yield, abrogate
and give up all recognitions, emoluments, perquisites or rewards due
to me Here or Elsewhere on account of the following virtue, to wit and
that is to say . . . . . that all women are to me equally ugly." The
last eight words being filled in in ink by Mr. Montagu-Montague.
My poor friend duly signed it. "These are the jokes," said the agent.
They were boldly written on three slips of paper. "They don't seem
very funny," said the other when he had read them. "You are immune,"
said Mr. Montagu-Montague, "but anyone else who hears them will simply
die of laughter: that we guarantee."
An American firm had bought at the price of waste paper a hundred
thousand copies of The Dictionary of Electricity written when
electricity was new,--and it had turned out that even at the time its
author had not rightly grasped his subject,--the firm had paid
£10,000 to a respectable English paper (no other in fact than
the Briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain orders for The
Briton Dictionary of Electricity was the occupation of my unfortunate
friend. He seems to have had a way with him. Apparently he knew by a
glance at a man, or a look round at his garden, whether to recommend
the book as "an absolutely up-to-date achievement, the finest thing of
its kind in the world of modern science" or as "at once quaint and
imperfect, a thing to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear old
times that are gone." So he went on with this quaint though usual
business, putting aside the memory of that night as an occasion on
which he had "somewhat exceeded" as they say in circles where a spade
is called neither a spade nor an agricultural implement but is never
mentioned at all, being altogether too vulgar. And then one night he
put on his suit of dress clothes and found the three jokes in the
pocket. That was perhaps a shock. He seems to have thought it over
carefully then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner at the club to
twenty of the members. The dinner would do no harm he thought--might
even help the business, and if the joke came off he would be a witty
fellow, and two jokes still up his sleeve.
Whom he invited or how the dinner went I do not know for he began to
speak rapidly and came straight to the point, as a stick that nears a
cataract suddenly goes faster and faster. The dinner was duly served,
the port went round, the twenty men were smoking, two waiters
loitered, when he after carefully reading the best of the jokes told
it down the table. They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled his
cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered
behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite
clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in
trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke had
succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little
deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not
stop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waited
wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and
the waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minutes
when this frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: _it was
forced laughter!_ However could anything have induced him to tell so
foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity as in revelation; and the more he
thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too,
the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother
touts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. He
was very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought,
if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. And
then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away,
and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and
slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, he
scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but
you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that
day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared
at you; and the headlines said:--Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.
Yes, he saw it then: the laughter had not stopped, some had probably
burst blood vessels, some must have choked, some succumbed to nausea,
heart-failure must have mercifully taken some, and they were his
friends after all, and none had escaped, not I even the waiters. It
was that infernal joke.
He thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the drive
to Victoria Station, the boat-train to Dover and going disguised to
the boat: and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, two
constables that wished to speak for a moment with Mr. Watkyn-Jones.
That was his name.
In a third-class carriage with handcuffs on his wrists, with forced
conversation when any, he returned between his captors to Victoria to
be tried for murder at the High Court of Bow.
At the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerable
ability who had gone into the Cabinet in order to enhance his forensic
reputation. And he was ably defended. It is no exaggeration to say
that the speech for the defence showed it to be usual, even natural
and right, to give a dinner to twenty men and to slip away without
ever saying a word, leaving all, with the waiters, dead. That was the
impression left in the minds of the jury. And Mr. Watkyn-Jones felt
himself practically free, with all the advantages of his awful
experience, and his two jokes intact. But lawyers are still
experimenting with the new act which allows a prisoner to give
evidence. They do not like to make no use of it for fear they may be
thought not to know of the act, and a lawyer who is not in touch with
the very latest laws is soon regarded as not being up to date and he
may drop as much as £50,000 a year in fees. And therefore though
it always hangs their clients they hardly like to neglect it.
Mr. Watkyn-Jones was put in the witness box. There he told the simple
truth, and a very poor affair it seemed after the impassioned and
beautiful things that were uttered by the counsel for the defence. Men
and women had wept when they heard that. They did not weep when they
heard Watkyn-Jones. Some tittered. It no longer seemed a right and
natural thing to leave one's guests all dead and to fly the country.
Where was Justice, they asked, if anyone could do that? And when his
story was told the judge rather happily asked if he could make him die
of laughter too. And what was the joke? For in so grave a place as a
Court of Justice no fatal effects need be feared. And hesitatingly the
prisoner pulled from his pocket the three slips of paper: and
perceived for the first time that the one on which the first and best
joke had been written had become quite blank. Yet he could remember
it, and only too clearly. And he told it from memory to the Court.
"An Irishman once on being asked by his master to buy a morning paper
said in his usual witty way, 'Arrah and begorrah and I will be after
wishing you the top of the morning.'"
No joke sounds quite so good the second time it is told, it seems to
lose something of its essence, but Watkyn-Jones was not prepared for
the awful stillness with which this one was received; nobody smiled;
and it had killed twenty-two men. The joke was bad, devilish bad;
counsel for the defence was frowning, and an usher was looking in a
little bag for something the judge wanted. And at this moment, as
though from far away, without his wishing it, there entered the
prisoner's head, and shone there and would not go, this old bad
proverb: "As well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb." The jury seemed
to be just about to retire. "I have another joke," said Watkyn-Jones,
and then and there he read from the second slip of paper. He watched
the paper curiously to see if it would go blank, occupying his mind
with so slight a thing as men in dire distress very often do, and the
words were almost immediately expunged, swept swiftly as if by a hand,
and he saw the paper before him as blank as the first. And they were
laughing this time, judge, jury, counsel for the prosecution, audience
and all, and the grim men that watched him upon either side. There was
no mistake about this joke.
He did not stay to see the end, and walked out with his eyes fixed on
the ground, unable to bear a glance to the right or left. And since
then he has wandered, avoiding ports and roaming lonely places. Two
years have known him on the Highland roads, often hungry, always
friendless, always changing his district, wandering lonely on with his
deadly joke.
Sometimes for a moment he will enter inns, driven by cold and hunger,
and hear men in the evening telling jokes and even challenging him;
but he sits desolate and silent, lest his only weapon should escape
from him and his last joke spread mourning in a hundred cots. His
beard has grown and turned grey and is mixed with moss and weeds, so
that no one, I think, not even the police, would recognise him now for
that dapper tout that sold The Briton Dictionary of Electricity in
such a different land.
He paused, his story told, and then his lip quivered as though he
would say more, and I believe he intended then and there to yield up
his deadly joke on that Highland road and to go forth then with his
three blank slips of paper, perhaps to a felon's cell, with one more
murder added to his crimes, but harmless at last to man. I therefore
hurried on, and only heard him mumbling sadly behind me, standing
bowed and broken, all alone in the twilight, perhaps telling over and
over even then the last infernal joke.