perfect prose.
And here is a Japanese jewel, which the London office of a Tokio
engineering house received not long since:
Regarding the matter of escaping penalty for non-delivery of
the machine, there is a way to creep round same by diplomat.
We must make a statement of big strike occur in our factory
(of course, big untrue). Please address my firm in enclosed
form of letter and believe this will avoid penalty of case.
As Mr. B. is a most religeous and competent man and also
heavily upright and godly it fears me that useless apply for
his signature. Please attach name by Yokahama office making
forge, but no cause to fear prison happening as this is
often operated by other merchants of highest integrity.
It is highest unfortunate Mr. B. so god-like and excessive
awkward for business purpose. I think much better add little
serpentlike wisdom to upright manhood and so found a good
business edifice.
From broken English to broken-hearted English is but a step, and I have
before me as pretty an example of that piteous tongue as--short of a
great and tragic poignancy--could be wished. It is a letter written by a
little American boy named Arthur Severn Mead to his parents from his
first school.
MY MOST DEAREST FATHER AND MOTHER,--I am very sick and I
want to come home.
O dearest father and mother I know that you wont refuse me.
I have a very bad headache. I dont eat anything nor I dont
sleep any. I lay awake every night thinking of home and you
dearest father and mother.
O dearest father and mother wilt thou father let me come
home.
I cannot live here. I am crying all the time.
I will take it out of my money and will work for you all the
time.
My most dearest mother I was opening my trunk today and I
found those candys you put in and O dearest mother how I
thank you.
O dearest Father and Mother I pray for you every night and
morning and I pray to Him that you will let me come home and
I know that thou wilt say "yes."
I cannot go to school because I am so sick. O dearest father
and mother I will love you so much and I will never worry
you any more and I will be a better boy if you will only say
yes.
Dearest father and mother I cannot live here. O do let me
come home.
Write now dearest father and mother and say yes.
I send my love to all.
Good bye.--From your loving son,
ARTHUR.
Say yes dearest Father and Mother.
ENTHUSIASTS
In turning over the pages of "Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack," best of
year-books, for 1919, I came upon the obituary notice of a monarch new
to me, who died in April of the preceding year at the age of
six-and-forty: George Tubow the Second, who reigned over Tonga and was
the last of the independent kings of the Pacific. As to the qualities of
head and heart displayed by the deceased ruler, _Wisden_ is silent; to
inquire into such matters is not that annalist's province. George Tubow
the Second won his place in _Wisden's_ pages because he was a cricket
fan and the head of a nation of cricket fans. "His subjects became so
devoted to the game that it was necessary to prohibit it on six days of
the week in order to avert famine, the plantation being entirely
neglected for the cricket-field."
To what lengths of passion for his game a baseball fan can go, I am not
sufficiently Americanised to be able even to guess; but there is
certainly something about a ball, whatever its size and consistency,
that leads to extremes of devotion. For the wildest enthusiasts we must
always go to games. But among collectors enthusiasts are numerous, too.
The courts not long since were occupied with the case of a gentleman of
leisure who had fallen into the moneylenders' hands very heavily through
a passion for adding dead butterfly to dead butterfly; while every one
knows the story of one of the Rothschilds fitting out an Arctic
expedition in the hope that it would bring back, alive, even a single
specimen of a certain boreal flea. All other fleas he possessed, but
this was lacking. On making inquiries among friends I find that the
classic example of enthusiasm is, however, not a cricketer nor a
collector, but the actor who, when cast for Othello, blacked himself all
over. Every one, of course, has heard the story, but its origin may not
be generally known, and I am wondering if it occurred anywhere in print
before Mr. Crummles confided it to Nicholas Nickleby. Was it a
commonplace of the green-room or did Dickens (who was capable of doing
so) invent it? Joseph Knight being no more, to lighten the small hours
with gossip and erudition, who shall tell?
Meanwhile I am reminded of an incident in modern stage history which
supplies a pendant to the great Othello feat. It occurred in the days
when the gramophone was in its infancy and the late Herbert Campbell
was approaching his end. That massive comedian, who was then engaged in
his annual task of personating a dame or a queen, or whatever was
monumentally feminine, in the Drury Lane pantomime--as a matter of fact,
he was at the moment a dame--had been invited by one of the gramophone
companies to visit their office in the City and make a record of one or
more of his songs and one or more of his dialogues with the other funny
man, whoever that might be. The name escapes me; all that I feel certain
of is that it was long after the golden age when Herbert Campbell served
as a foil to the irresponsible vivacity of Dan Leno--who in association
with him was like quicksilver running over the surface and about the
crevices of a rock--and still longer after those regular Christmas
partnerships with Harry Nicholls which were liberal educations in
worldly sagacity tempered by nonsense. The name of the other actor is,
however, unimportant, for Herbert Campbell is the hero of this tale, and
it was for Herbert Campbell's songs and patter that the operator was
waiting and the waxen discs had been prepared and the orchestra was in
attendance and the manager had taken his cheque book from his desk--for
"money down" is the honourable rule of the gramophone industry. The
occasion was furthermore exceptional because it was the first time that
this popular performer had been "recorded." Hitherto he had refused all
Edisonian blandishments, but to-day he was to come into line with the
other favourites.
And yet he did not come. Normally a punctual man, he was late.
Everything was ready--more than ready--and there was no dame.
Suddenly above the ground swell of the traffic was heard, amid the
strenuousness of the City Road, the unaccustomed sound of cheers and
laughter. "Hurray! Hurray!" floated up to the recording-room from the
distant street below, and every head was stretched out to see what
untoward thing could be happening. "Hurray! Hurray!" and more laughter.
And there was discerned an immense crowd, chiefly errand-boys,
surrounding a four-wheeler, from which with the greatest difficulty an
old lady of immense proportions, dressed, or rather upholstered, in the
gaily-coloured clothes of the century before last, was endeavouring to
alight, backwards. "Hurray! Hurray!" cried the boys at every new
struggle. At last the emergence was complete, when the old lady,
standing upright and shaking down her garments, revealed herself as no
other than Herbert Campbell, the idol of "The Lane," who in order to
speak a few words into the funnel of a gramophone had thought it
needful to put on every detail of his costume and to make up that
acreage of honest, genial physiognomy.
[Illustration: LAURA VISITS THE SICK. _See "The Innocent's
Progress"--Plate 11_]
TELEPHONICS
After fighting against bondage for years I am now a slave: I have a
telephone.
Although the advantages are many, it means that I have lost the purest
and rarest of life's pleasures--which was to ring up from a
three-pence-in-the-slot call-office (as I continually had to do) and not
be asked for the money. This, in many years, has happened to me twice;
and only last week I met a very rich man who is normally of a gloomy
cast, across whose features played a smile brilliant with triumph, for
it also had just happened to him.
On the other hand, through having a telephone of my own I now escape one
of the commonest and most tiresome of life's irritations--which is to
wait outside one of these call-offices while the person inside is
carrying on a conversation that is not only unnecessary and frivolous,
but unending. In London these offices are used both by men and women;
but in the suburbs by women only, who may be thought to be romantically
engaged but really are reminding their husbands not to forget the fish.
The possession of a telephone of one's own, however, does not, in an
imperfect world, put an end to the ordeal of waiting. If ever a fairy
godmother appeared to me (but after all these years of postponement I
can hardly hope for her) with the usual offer of a granted wish, I
should think long before I hit upon anything better to ask for than the
restoration of all the time I had spent with my own telephone at my ear
waiting to be answered. The ordinary delays can be long enough, but for
true foretastes of eternity you must sit at the instrument while some
one is being fetched from a distant part of the building. This is a
foretaste not only of eternity but of perdition, for there is nothing to
do; and to have nothing to do is to be damned. If you had a book by you,
you could not read it, for your thoughts are not free to wander; all
that you are mentally capable of is to speculate on the progress of the
messenger to the person who is wanted, upstairs or down, the present
occupation of the person who is wanted, and the probable stages of his
journey to the receiver. In this employment, minutes, hours, days, weeks
even, seem to drag their reluctant length along.
You can imagine also the attitude of the person who is sent for. For the
telephone, common as it now is, is still associated with ceremonial. At
any rate, I notice that men called to it by page boys in restaurants
and hotels have a special gait of importance proper to the occasion.
The possession of a telephone no doubt now and then simplifies life; but
its complications are too many, even if you adopt the sound rule to be
more rung against than ringing. One of them is the perplexity incident
to delays and misunderstandings, and, above all, as to the constitution
of Exchanges. We all, I suppose, have our own idea as to what they are
like; there must at one time or other have been photographs in the more
informing of the magazines; but I missed them, and, therefore, decline
on a vague vision of machinery and wire-eared ladies. A friend is more
definite: "A large building," he describes it, "like Olympia, the roof
lost in darkness, and pallid women moving about, spinning tops and
blowing penny trumpets." To me, as I have suggested, there is more of
Tartarus than Olympus about it. A sufficient hell, indeed, for any
misspent life, to be continually calling up numbers, and continually
being met with the saddest words that are known to men: "Number
engaged."
I want to understand the whole telephone system. I want to know how the
operators all get to speak exactly alike. Women can be very imitative, I
am aware: the chorus girl's transition from Brixton to the Savoy
restaurant can be as natural as the passage of dusk to dawn, and a
change of accent is usually a part of it; but it is astonishing how the
operators of the different Exchanges resemble each other. They cannot
all be one and the same. Miraculous as is everything connected with the
telephone--talking quietly over wires that thread the earth beneath the
busiest and noisiest of pavements in the world is sufficiently
magical--it would be a shade too marvellous for one operator to be
everywhere at once. Therefore, there must be many. Is there, then, a
school of elocution, where instruction in the most refined form of
speech ever known is imparted, together with lessons in the trilling of
the letter R? Why should they all say "No replay," when they mean "No
reply"? And how do they talk at home? It must be terrible for their
relations if they don't come down a peg or two there. The joy with which
we recognise a male voice at the Exchange is another proof that woman
does not really represent the gentler sex.
But these are by no means all the mysteries as to which I crave
enlightenment. I want to know how the odd and alarming noises are made.
There is a tapping, as of a woodpecker with delirium tremens, which at
once stuns and electrifies the ear. How do they do that, and do they
know what its effect is? And why does one sometimes hear other
conversations over other wires, and sometimes not? Rarely are they
interesting; but now and then.... My pen falters as I record the
humiliating want of perspicacity--the tragic inability to recognise a
tip--which befell me on the morning of June 4th, 1919--in other words,
on Derby Day: the day when the art or science of vaticination
experienced in England its darkest hour, for every prophet selected The
Panther. To my annoyance I had to listen to a long conversation between
what seemed to be a bookmaker and his client with regard to money to be
placed on Grand Parade. This at the time only irritated me, but
afterwards, when Grand Parade had won at 33 to 1, and I recognised the
interruption as an effort of the gods on my behalf (had I but ears to
hear), how against my folly did I rail!
Telephony, it is clear, both from one's own experience and from reading
the letters in the papers, is not yet an exact science. Not, that is, in
real life; although on the stage and in American detective novels it
seems to be perfect. The actor lifts the receiver, mentions the number,
and begins instantly to talk. If he is on the film his lips move like
burning rubber and his mouth becomes a shifting cavern. Do the rank and
file of us, I wonder, when telephoning, thus grimace? I must fix up a
mirror and see.
There are many good telephone stories. The best that I know is told of a
journalist with a somewhat hypertrophied bump of reverence for worldly
success, whose employer is a peer. We will call the employer Lord
Forthestait and the journalist Mr. Blank. A number of the staff were
talking together, in one of the rooms of the newspaper, when the
telephone rang.
"You're wanted at the 'phone, Mr. Blank," said the clerk.
Blank, who was just going out to lunch, came back impatiently and
snatched at the instrument.
"Yes, what is it?" he snapped out.
"Is that Blank?" came back the reply. "Lord Forthestait speaking."
"Yes, my lord," said Blank, with the meekest deference, removing his
hat.
THE WORLD REMEDIAL
John Stuart Mill's fear that the notes of the piano might be used up and
tunes give out is as nothing to mine that a time must come when there
will be no more whimsical literature in the old book shops for these
eyes to alight upon. Meanwhile, to renew my confidence, a friend sends
me "The Compleat English Physician, or The Druggist's Shop Opened (the
like not hitherto extant)" by William Salmon, who dates his preface
"From my house at the Blew Ball by the Ditch-side near Holborn Bridge,
London, May 5, 1693." In this exhaustive work the whole of creation,
animal, vegetable, and mineral, is levied upon for cures for human ills,
any of which are, in the dedication, offered by the author to the Most
Serene and Illustrious Princess Mary II., if she feels herself to be in
need of physic and will lay her commands upon him.
According to "The Dictionary of National Biography," which, however,
does not mention this particular book, William Salmon was born in 1644,
and was educated by a mountebank. After a certain amount of travel, he
settled in London as an irregular practitioner, with pills for
everything and horoscopes to boot. The suggestion, made in his lifetime,
that he himself did not amass the lore that is found in his many and
copious volumes, but was merely an amanuensis, has the "Dictionary's"
support; but in the preface to "The Compleat English Physician," Salmon
is very tart and coarse and emphatic about it with one of his detractors
("the nasty author of an impertinent and scurrilous pamphlet"), claiming
to have had thirty years' experience of practical pharmacy. But he must
have borrowed too, for thirty years, even with a ten-hours' day, could
not have sufficed to gather a tenth of the mysteries contained in this
astonishing work.
Although it is exclusively medical, Salmon incidentally hits upon as
deadly a formula for anti-social satire as could be imagined, beyond
even Swift. Not all the malignity of "Gulliver's Travels" is so powerful
to remove the divine from man as this empiric's simple inclusion of him
among the animals. Book V. is entitled "Of Man and Beasts," and it
begins thus: "Chapter 1. Homo, Man & Woman.... They are the general
inhabitants of the Universal Globe of the Earth and their food is made
of Grain, Pulse, Fruits, Flowers, Roots, Herbs, and the flesh of
Beasts, Fowl, Fishes, Insects, etc." Salmon then goes on to enumerate
the maladies that the various parts of man (and woman) are good for. His
hair, converted to ashes and powdered, will cure the Green Sickness and
other disorders too elementary to name. Made into an oil it will ease
pains caused by a cold and cause new hair to grow on bald places. The
rest of him and of her (I could not possibly go into details--this being
not a medical journal and the date being 1920 instead of 1693) is also,
either as powder, volatile oil, spirit, essence, salt, magistry, or
balsam, beneficial in a vast number of troubles. It is an ironical and
exasperating thought that we carry about in our bodies the cures for all
the ills that those bodies suffer from.
In most of the sciences the professors of the day know more than their
predecessors of yesterday. Knowledge accumulates. But, after dipping
into Salmon's twelve-hundred pages, one sighs with relief that the
healing art has, since 1693, become comparatively so simple; and when
next sending for a doctor we shall thank God for his modern
incompleatness. For in Salmon's day, in the pride of compleation, the
medical man might have dosed us with our nearest dead neighbour.
Having finished the examination of man as a treasury of restoratives,
Salmon passes on to Alces, the Elk; Antilopus, the Antelope; and Asinus,
the Ass. All the beasts are therapeutically useful to man, but few more
so than Asinus, the Ass. Howsoever valuable a living donkey may be, he
cannot compare with the versatility of a donkey defunct when resolved
into drugs. Equus, the Horse; Capra, the Goat; and Cercopithecus, the
Monkey, are also each a well-stocked chemist's shop. In fact, nothing
that moves, whether on four legs or two, fails to yield up a potent
elixir; but to find man among them is the shock. Right and proper enough
that the Lord of Creation should extract lotions and potions for his
ailments from his soulless inferiors; but not from himself. That is a
lowering thought.
The birds of the air too. Thus: the flesh of Alauda, the Lark, will ease
the cholick: a thing to remember at Ye Old Cheshire Cheese. Alcedo, the
Kingfisher, reduced to powder and mixed with powder made from a man's
skull, and a little salt of amber, is excellent against the epilepsy. A
number of swallows beaten to pieces in a mortar (terrible thought!)
produce a residuum that will prevent the falling sickness. For restoring
a lost memory the heart of Hirundo, the Swallow, to which the filings of
a man's skull (Mr. Pelman's for choice?) and dried peony roots are
added, is sovran. Even the nest of Hirundo, the Swallow, is of use; made
into a cataplasm it not only eases a quinsie, but will cure the bite of
a serpent. Nor are the fragile systems of Rubecula, the Robin
Red-breast, and Regulus, the Wren (shade of Blake!), without medicinal
utility. The flesh of Lucinia, the Nightingale, cures consumptives,
while its gall mixed with honey makes an excellent collyrium for the
eyes; but singing-birds surely should be exempted from active service
under druggists. "Yet" (you say) "if the nightingale cures consumption,
it might have cured Keats." True, but had Keats accepted that remedy he
would not have been Keats.
It is when writing of Lucinia, the Nightingale, that Salmon interpolates
a remark--wholly gratuitous--which gives him a place apart among
authors. He perpetrates a curiosity of literature: the most unpoetical
thing ever written. "A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman," is merely the least
poetical line in poetry; but to say that Lucinia, the Nightingale,
"grows fat in autumn," is positively to undo magic.
WHAT THE SUN DID NOT SEE--FOR FAR TOO LONG
"Once upon a time," said the Sun, "there was a meadow surrounded by a
flint walk, where I caused the buttercups to shine like burnished gold,
and where the grass was high and green and as long as the pony and the
donkey who inhabited the meadow would allow it to be. Here and there was
a cowslip; while near the house were hen-coops with old hens in them
whose anxious heads protruded through the bars querulously shouting
instructions to their fluffy children.
"Such," said the Sun, "was the meadow, which was interesting to me
chiefly because it was the playground of a small but very vigorous and
restless boy named Nobby, whose merry inquiring face it gave me peculiar
pleasure to tan and to freckle.
"A small boy can do," said the Sun, "a thousand things in a meadow like
this, even without the company of a donkey and a pony, and Nobby did
them all; while his collection of performing wood-lice was unique.
"But a morning came when he was absent. I was shining at my best, the
buttercups were glowing, there was even an aeroplane manoeuvring in
the blue--which is still, I notice, a certain lure to both young and
old--but no Nobby. The wood-lice crept about or rolled themselves into
balls, all unnoticed and immune.
"'This is very odd,' I heard the pony say; 'he's never neglected us
before.'
"'Passing strange,' said the donkey, who affected archaic speech. 'And
on so blithe and jocund a morn too.'
"So saying they resumed their everlasting meal, but continually turned
their eyes to the garden-gate through which Nobby would have to pass. I
also kept my eyes wide for him; but all in vain; and what made it more
perplexing was that Nobby's mother came in and fed the chickens, and
Nobby's aunt came in with a rug and a book and settled down to be
comfortable; and that meant that the boy was not absent on a visit to
the town, because one of them would have gone too.
"'That settles it,' said the donkey, who had, for an ass, quite a lot of
sense: 'Nobby is ill.'
"The donkey was right--or approximately so, as I afterwards found out.
Nobby was ill. That is to say, he was in bed, because that morning he
had sneezed--not through looking up at me, but for no reason at
all--and his mother, who was a very careful mother, had at once fetched
the clinical thermometer and taken his temperature, and behold it was a
hundred. So Nobby was not allowed to get up, but now lay there watching
my rays pouring into the room, and listening to the buzz of the
aeroplane, and longing to be out in the meadow with the donkey and the
pony and the wood-lice.
"That, however, would never do; for 'It all comes,' his mother had said,
'of sitting about in that long grass so much, and so early in the year
too'--a line of argument hardly likely to appeal to a small and vigorous
boy who does not reckon summer by dates and to whom prudence is as
remote as one-pound Treasury notes.
"Anyway," said the Sun, "he was paying for it now, for was he not in bed
and utterly sick of it, while the rest of the world was out and about
and, warmed and cheered by me, completely jolly? Moreover, he didn't
feel ill. No self-respecting boy would, of course, admit to feeling ill
ever; but Nobby was genuinely unconscious of anything wrong at all. Not,
however, until his temperature went down would he be allowed to get up;
that was the verdict. But that was not all. Until it came down he would
be allowed nothing but slops to eat.
"His mother took his temperature again before lunch, and it was still a
hundred; and then at about half-past four, when human beings, I
understand, get a little extra feverish, and it was still a hundred; and
then at last came the night, and Nobby went to sleep confident that
to-morrow would re-establish his erratic blood.