Chapter II: Dr. Sullivan (1)

It had been decided that there never was such a resemblance as is to be traced between my homely features and those of a visitor to the same hotel the previous year--Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street. This had become an established fact, irrefutable like a proposition of Euclid, and one of my new friends, and a friend also of the Harley Street physician who had so satisfyingly and minutely anticipated my countenance, made it the staple of his conversation. "Isn't this gentleman," he would say to this and that habitue of the smoking-room as they dropped in from the neighbouring farms at night, "the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was here last year?" And they would subject my physiognomy to a searching study and agree that I was. Perhaps the nose--a little bigger, don't you think? or a shade of dissimilarity between the chins (he having, I suppose, only two, confound him!), but, taking it all around, the likeness was extraordinary.

This had been going on for some time, until I was accustomed, if not exactly inured, to it, and was really rather looking forward to the time when, on returning to London, I could trump up a sufficient ailment to justify me in calling upon my double in Harley Street and scrutinising him with my own eyes. But last night my friend had something of a set-back, which may possibly, by deflecting his conversation to other topics, give me relief. I hope so.

It happened like this. We were as usual sitting in the smoking-room, he and I, when another local acquaintance entered--one who, I gathered, had been away for a few weeks and whom I had therefore not yet seen, and who (for this was the really important thing to my friend) consequently had not yet seen me.

In course of time the inevitable occurred. "Don't you think," my friend asked, "that this gentleman is the very image of Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was here last summer?"

"What Dr. Sullivan's that?" the new-comer inquired.

"Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, who was fishing here last summer. Don't you remember him? The very image of this gentleman."

"The only Dr. Sullivan I know," replied the new-comer, "is Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle. He's a very old man by now. A very learned man too. He has a wonderful private museum. He----"

"No, no, the Dr. Sullivan I mean was from Harley Street--a specialist--who took the Manor fishing last summer and stayed in the hotel."

"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle is a very old man--much older than this gentleman," replied the stranger, "and not a bit like him. He's a most interesting personality. He is the great authority on the South Sea Islanders. You should see his collection of Fiji war clubs."

"But that's not the Dr. Sullivan I mean. You must remember him," said my impresario; "we all used to meet evening after evening, just as we're doing now--Dr. Sullivan of Harley Street, the specialist, a clean-shaven man, exactly like this gentleman here. Every one has noticed the likeness."

"Dr. Sullivan of Newcastle has a beard," said the new-comer. "And he's a very old man by now. A great receptacle of miscellaneous learning. He showed me once his collection of coins and medals. He's got coins back to the Roman Emperors and stories about every one of them. His collection----"

"Yes, but----"

"--of idols is amazing. You never saw such comic figures as those natives worship. There's nothing he doesn't collect. He's got a mummy covered with blue beads. He's got skulls from all over the world, showing different formations. It's some years----"

"Yes, but----"

"--since I saw him last, and of course he may be----"

"Yes, but----"

"--dead. But if not, he's a man worth knowing. If ever you go to Newcastle, sir,"--this was to me,--"don't forget about him. But he must be very old by now. He----"

At this point I finished my glass and slipped away to bed. Consulting the mirror as I undressed, I smiled at the reflection that confronted me. "You can sleep more comfortably to-night," I said, "for there are signs that you are about to have a rest."

THE WORLD'S DESIRE

Reading the terms of the agreement which Charlie Chaplin refused in New York early in 1916 I had a kind of nervous collapse. For we English are not so accustomed to great sums of money as the Americans are. Then I bound a wet towel round my head and studied the figures as dispassionately as it is possible to study figures when they run into kings' ransoms. Charlie was offered ten thousand dollars a week for a year: which came then to L104,000 and is now (1920) much more. He was offered one hundred thousand dollars as a bonus for signing the agreement. He was also offered 50 per cent. of any profits made by his films after his salary had been paid. But it did not satisfy him. He refused it.

Now here is a most remarkable state of affairs--that the popular demand for laughter is such that a little acrobatic man with splay feet and a funny way with a cigarette, a hat, and a cane could be offered and could repudiate such colossal wealth as that, and for no other services than to clown it for the cinematoscope. Nor is the oddity of the matter decreased by the reflection that these figures which make an ordinary person dizzy, belonged to war-time. Charlie Chaplin's rise to affluence and power coincided with the bloodiest struggle in history.

If it is needful for so many people to hold their sides, Charlie's career is justified. He is also the first droll to conquer the whole world. I suppose that it is no exaggeration to say that at any moment of the day and night--allowing for divergences of time--it would be safe to maintain that ten million people are laughing at the Chaplin antics somewhere or other on this planet of ours. For wherever there is a township of more than two thousand inhabitants, there, I imagine, is a cinema; and wherever there is a cinema there is Charlie; not always quite up to date, of course, for managers are wily birds, but in some film, even though an ancient one. Does the Funniest Man on Earth, as he is called, I should like to know, realise what a role he fills? Does he stand before the glass and search the recesses of his countenance--which is now far more familiar to the world than any other--and marvel?

Charlie, by the way, has his private uses too. During a recent visit from a young friend, I found that the ordinary gulf that is fixed between a boy in the neighbourhood of ten and a man in the neighbourhood of five times that number was for once easily bridgeable. We found common ground, and very wisely stuck to it, in the circumstance that each of us had seen Charlie, and, by great good fortune, we had each seen him in his latest sketch. Whenever, therefore, a _longueur_ threatened, I had but to mention another aspect of Charlie's genius, and in the discussion that followed all was well.

That Charlie is funny is beyond question. I will swear to that. His humour is of such elemental variety that he could, and probably does, make a Tierra del Fuegan or a Bushman of Central Australia laugh not much less than our sophistical selves. One needs no civilised culture to appreciate the fun of the harlequinade, and to that has Charlie, with true instinct, returned. But it is the harlequinade accelerated, intensified, toned up for the exacting taste of the great and growing "picture" public. It is also farce at its busiest, most furious. Charlie brought back that admirable form of humour which does not disdain the co-operation of fisticuffs, and in which, by way of variety, one man is aimed at, and another, too intrusive, is hit. However long the world may last, it is safe to say that the spectacle of one man receiving a blow meant for another will be popular.

What strikes one quickly is the realisation of how much harder Charlie works than many of the more illustrious filmers. He is rarely out of the picture, he is rarely still, and he gives full measure. There is no physical indignity that he does not suffer--and inflict. Such impartiality is rare in drama, where usually men are either on top or underneath. In the ordinary way our pet comedians must be on top and untouched. Even the clown, though he receives punishment _en route_, eventually triumphs. But Charlie seldom wins. He remains a butt, or, at any rate, a victim of circumstances whom nothing can discourage or deter. His very essence is resiliency under difficulties, an unabashed and undefeatable front. His especial fascination to me is that life finds him always ready for it--not because he is armed by sagacity, but because he is even better armed by folly. He is first cousin to the village idiot, a natural child of nonsense, licensed up to the hilt, and (like Antaeus) every time he rises from a knockdown blow he is the stronger.

It is a proof of the charter which the world has handed to this irresistible humourist that he has been permitted to introduce such an innovation in stage manners as the hitting of women. We only laugh the more when, having had his ears boxed by the fair, he retaliates with double strength. And there is one of his plays in which every audience becomes practically helpless, as after, with great difficulty, extricating a lady in evening dress from a fountain, he deliberately pushes her in again. It required a Charlie Chaplin to make this tolerable; but such is his radiant unworldliness that we accept it as quite legitimate fun.

One of the chief causes--after the personality of the protagonist--of the popularity of the Chaplin films is probably that in them certain things happen which cannot happen in real life without the intervention of the law, and which are almost always withheld from the real stage. I mean that men so freely assault each other; physical violence has the fullest and most abundant play. Every one longs to see kicks and blows administered, but is usually defrauded, and Charlie is a spendthrift with both. And so cheerfully and victoriously does he distribute them that I wonder an epidemic of such attentions has not broken out in both hemispheres. I know this--that a fat policeman with his back towards the exit of a cinema at the time a Chaplin film had ended would be in great danger from my foot were I then leaving. I should hope for enough self-control; but I could promise nothing, and I should feel that Charlie's example, behind the action, sanctified it. Film life and real life would merge into each other so naturally that if the policeman repaid me--or attempted to--in any other way but kind, I should feel outraged. To be arrested for it would be like a stab in the back from a friend.

How long Charlie will remain the darling of two hemispheres we must wait to see. But of one thing I am certain, and that is that if at any time the "The Funniest Man on Earth" ceases to compel laughter, he might by slightly changing his methods draw tears. For while he can be as diverting as the greatest glutton for mirth desires, he has all the machinery of dejection too. One of his melancholy smiles is really beautiful.

A CONQUEROR

It is proverbial that a child may lead a horse to the water, but that not even Mr. Lloyd George, with all his persuasive gifts, can make him drink. An even more difficult task is to induce a horse in the pink of robust health to convey a suggestion of being seriously ill--as I chance just to have discovered. It is not the kind of discovery that one can anticipate; indeed, when I woke on the morning of the day on which it happened and, as is my habit, lay for a while forecasting the possible or probable course of events during the next four-and-twenty hours, this example of equine limitation had no place whatever in my thoughts. To the receptive and adventurous observer many curious things may, however, occur; and no sooner was lunch finished than out of a clear sky fell a friend and a taxi (the god and the machine, if you will), and jointly they conveyed me to as odd a building as I have ever thought to find any horse in, where, under a too searching blue glare, was an assemblage of people as strange as their environment.

There were men in evening dress, toying with cigarettes and bending over women in evening dress; there was an adventuress or two, one with hair in such fluffed-out abundance as can only be a perquisite of notable wickedness; there was a stockman, who was, I fancy, too fond of her; there was a lady in riding boots; there was a comely youth in pyjamas; and there were footmen and page-boys. And all seemed to me made-up to a point of excess. Who could they be? a stranger to the marvel of science might well ask. Strayed revellers? A lost party of masqueraders being held here on bail and photographed for identification purposes?--for there was no doubt about the photography, because the benignant, masterful gentleman with a manuscript, who gave them instructions, every now and then stood aside in order that the camera-operator might direct his machine-gun and turn the handle; but what was said I could not hear, such was the crackling and fizzling of the blue lights.

I cannot pretend to have learned much about the cinema on such a brief visit, but I acquired a few facts. One is that there is no need for any continuity to be observed by the photographer, because the various scenes, taken in any order, can, in some wonderful way, be joined up afterwards, in their true order, and made consecutive and natural. Indeed, I should say that the superficially casual and piecemeal manner in which a moving drama can be built up is the dominant impression which I brought away from this abode of mystery. The contrast between the magically fluid narrative as unreeled on the screen and the broken, zigzag, and apparently negligent preparation of it in the studio is the sharpest I can imagine. And it increases one's admiration of the man with the scissors and the thread (or however it is done) who unites the bits and makes them smoothly run.

Another fact which I acquired is that unless the face of the cinema performer is painted yellow it comes out an impossible hue, so that to see a company in broad daylight is to have the impression that one has stumbled upon a house party in the Canary Isles. And a third fact is that the actors, while free to say what they like to each other at many times, must, when in a situation illustrated by words thrown on the screen, use those identical words. One reason for this rule is, I am told, that some time ago, in an American film, the producer of which was rather lax, one of the characters spoke to another with an impossible licence, and a school of deaf mutes visiting the picture palace "lip-read" the awful result. The consequence (America being a wonderful country, with a sufficiency of deaf-and-dumb to warrant protective measures) was the withdrawal of the film and the punishment of the offenders.

Meanwhile, what of the horse? I will tell you.

The camera-operator having taken as much of the fast life in the swell hotel (with the hollow columns without backs to them) as was necessary, including a "still" (as it is called in the movie world--meaning a photograph in the ordinary sense of the term) of the fluffiest of the adventuresses in an expression signifying a blend of depravity and triumph, turned his attention to the loose-box which some attendants had been rapidly constructing, chiefly with the assistance of a truss of straw. Into this apartment was led (through the hotel lounge, and at enormous risk to its plaster masonry) a horse--the horse, in fact, which was to defeat Edison. Of the plot of the play I know nothing. (How could I, having seen it in preparation?) But this I can tell you: that the hero's horse had to be ill; and this also: that the horse in question refused to be ill. In vain for the groom to shake his head, in vain for the hero to say that it had the shivers; never was a horse so far removed from malady, so little in need of the vet. Nor could any device produce the desired effect. If, then, in the days to come you see on the films a very attractive story with a horse in it, and the horse shivers only in the words on the screen, you will know why. It is because the movies for once met their master.

THE NEWNESS OF THE OLD

In an American paper I find this anecdote: "An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. 'I don't wonder,' she replied. 'It's so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'"

Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the _Victory_. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new.

It is a problem why we tend to be so resentful when an editor or a comedian offers us a jest that has done service before. It is, I suppose, in part at any rate, because we have paid our money, either for the paper or the seat, and we experience the sense of having been defrauded. We have been done, we feel, because the bargain, as we understood it, was that we were purchasing novelty. So that when suddenly an old, old jape, which perhaps we have ourselves related--and that of course is an aggravation of the grievance--confronts us, we are indignant. But what, one wonders, would a comic paper or a revue that had nothing old in it be like. We can never know.

The odd thing is that we not only resent the age of the joke, even though it is in our own repertory, but we resent the laughter of those to whom it is new--perhaps three-quarters of the audience. How dare they also not have heard it before? is our unspoken question. Not long ago, seated in a theatre next a candid and normally benignant and tolerant friend, I found myself laughing at what struck me as a distinctly humorous remark made by one of London's nonsensical funny men. Engaged in a competition with another as to which had the longer memory, he clinched the discussion by saying that he personally could remember London Bridge when it was a cornfield. To me that was as new as it was idiotic, and I behaved accordingly; but my friend was furious with me. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed with the click of the tongue that usually accompanies such criticism, "fancy digging that up again! It's as old as the hills." And his face grew dark and stern.

What we have to remember, and what might have softened my friend's granite anger had he remembered it, is that a new audience is always coming along to whom nothing is a chestnut. It is not the most reassuring of thoughts to those who are a little fastidious about ancientry in humour; but it is nature and therefore a fact. Just as every moment (so I used to be told by a solemn nurse) a child is born (she added also that every moment some one dies, and she used to hold up her finger and hush! for me to realise that happy thought), so nearly every moment (allowing for a certain amount of infant mortality) an older child attains an age when it can understand and relish a funny story. To those children every story is original. With this new public, clamorous and appreciative, why do humourists try so hard to be novel? (But perhaps they don't).

I suppose that there are theories as to what is the oldest story, but I am not acquainted with them. That people are, however, quite prepared for every story to be old is proved by the readiness with which, when Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" was translated into Greek for a School Reader, a number of persons remarked upon the circumstance that the humourist had gone to ancient literature for his jest. For by a curious twist we are all anxious that stories should not be new. Much as we like a new story, we like better to be able to say that to us it was familiar.

Many stories come rhythmically round again. Such, for example, during the Great War, as those with a martial background. I remember during the Boer War hearing of a young man who was endeavouring to enlist, and was rejected because his teeth were defective. "But I want to fight the Boers," he said, "not eat them." Between 1914 and 1918 this excellent retort turned up again, only this time the young man said that he did not want to eat the Germans. I have no doubt that in the Crimean War a similar applicant declared that he did not want to eat the Russians, and a hundred years ago another was vowing that he did not want to eat the French. Probably one could trace it through every war that ever was. Probably a young Hittite with indifferent teeth proclaimed that his desire was to fight the Amalekites and not to eat them. The story was equally good each time; and there has always been a vast new audience for it. And so long as war continues and teeth exist in the human head, which I am told will not be for ever, so long will this anecdote enjoy popularity. After that it will enter upon a new phase of existence based upon defects in the applicant's ratelier, and so on until universal peace descends upon the world, or, the sun turning cold, life ceases.

AUNTS

The story is told that an English soldier, questioned as to his belief in the angels of Mons, replied how could he doubt it, when they came so close to him that he recognised his aunt among them? People, hearing this, laugh; but had the soldier said that among the heavenly visitants he had recognised his mother or his sister, it would not be funny at all. Suggestions of beautiful affection and touching deathbeds would then have been evoked, and our sentimental chords played upon. But the word aunt at once turns it all to comedy. Why is this?

I cannot answer this question. The reasons go back too far for me; but the fact remains that it has been decided that when not tragic, and even sometimes when tragic, aunts are comic. Not so comic as mothers-in-law, of course; not invariably and irremediably comic; but provocative of mirth and irreverence. Again I say, why? For taken one by one, aunts are sensible, affectionate creatures; and our own experience of them is usually serious enough; they are often very like their sisters our mothers, or their brothers our fathers, and often, too, they are mothers themselves. Yet the status of aunt is always fair game to the humourist; and especially so when she is the aunt of somebody else.

That the word uncle has frivolous associations is natural, for slang has employed it to comic ends. But an aunt advances nothing on personal property, an aunt is not the public resort of the temporarily financially embarrassed. No nephew Tommy was ever exhorted to make room for his aunt, a lady, indeed, who figures in comic songs far more rarely than grandparents do, and is not prominent on the farcical stage. One cannot, therefore, blame the dramatists for the great aunt joke, nor does it seem, on recalling what novels I can with aunts prominently in them, to be the creation of the novelists. Dickens has very few aunts, and these are not notorious. Betsy Trotwood, David Copperfield's aunt, though brusque and eccentric, was otherwise eminently sane and practical. Mr. F.'s aunt was more according to pattern and Miss Rachel Wardle even more so; but the comic aunt idea did not commend itself to Dickens whole-heartedly. Fiction as a rule has supported the theory that aunts are sinister. Usually they adopt the children of their dead sisters and are merciless to them. Often they tyrannise over a household. The weight of the novelists is in favour of aunts as anything but comic. There are exceptions, of course, and that fine vivid figure, the "Aunt Anne" of Mrs. W. K. Clifford, stands forth triumphant among the charming; while Sir Willoughby Patterne's twittering choruses are nearer the aunts of daily life. But even they were nigher pathos than ridicule.

I believe that that wicked military wag, Captain Harry Graham, has done more than most to keep the poor lady the aunt in the pillory. This kind of thing from his "Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes" does a lot of mischief:

In the drinking well,
Which the plumber built her,
Aunt Eliza fell--
We must buy a filter.

How can aunts possibly survive such subtle attacks as that? And again:--

I had written to Aunt Maud,
Who was travelling abroad,
When I heard she'd died from cramp:
Just too late to save the stamp.

Supposing that the verse had begun

I had written Cousin Maud

it would have lost enormously. There must be something comic in aunts after all.

No child ever quite gets over the feeling of strangeness at hearing his mother called aunt by his cousins. A mother is so completely his own possession, and she so obviously exists for no other purpose than to be his mother, that for her also to be an aunt is preposterous. And then there is the shock of hearing her name, for most children never realise their mother's name at all, their father, the only person in the house who knows it intimately and has the right to use it, usually preferring "Hi" or any loud cry. To Hamlet the situation must have been peculiarly strange, for his mother, after the little trouble with his father's ear, became his aunt too. If it were not that, since our aunts are of an older generation than ourselves, proper respect compels us to address them as aunts, they would not be comic. The prefix aunt does it. If we could call Aunt Eliza, Eliza, without ceremony, as if she were a contemporary, she would be no more joke to us than to her contemporaries, even though she did fall in the well and necessitate that sanitary outlay. Just plain Eliza falling in a well is nothing; but for Aunt Eliza to do so is a scream. It is having to say Aunt Eliza that causes the trouble, for it takes her from the realms of fact and deposits her in those of humour. If aunts really want to acquire a new character they must forbid the prefix.

ON RECITATIONS

Although none of us know what, when the time comes, we can do, to what unsuspected heights we can rise, we are fairly well acquainted with what we cannot do. We may not know, for example, what kind of figure we should cut in a burning house, and even less in a burning ship: to what extent the suddenness and dreadfulness of the danger would paralyse our best impulses, or even so bring out our worst as to make us wild beasts for self-protection. Terrible emotional emergencies are rare, and, since rehearsals are of no use, all that is possible is to hope that one would behave rightly in them. But most of us know with certainty what our limitations are. I, for instance, know that I cannot recite in public and that no circumstances could make me. There is no peril I would not more cheerfully face than an audience, even of friends, met together to hear me, and, worse, see me, on such an occasion. And by recite I do not mean the placid repetition of an epigram, but the downright translation of dramatic verse into gesture and grimace. The bare idea of such a performance fills me with creeping terror.

The spectacle of any real reciter, however self-possessed and decent, at his work, suffuses me with shame. I myself have in my brief experience of them blushed more for reciters than the whole army of them could ever have blushed for themselves. Even the great humane Brandram when he adopted the falsetto which he deemed appropriate to Shakespeare's women sent the hot tide of misery to my face, while over his squeaking in "Boots at the Holly Tree Inn" I had to close my eyes. Brandram, however, was not strictly a reciter in the way that I mean: rather was he an actor who chose to do a whole play by himself without costumes or scenery. The reciters that I mean are addicted to single pieces, and are often amateurs (undeterred and undismayed by the grape-shot of Mr. Anstey's "Burglar Bill") who oblige at parties or smoking concerts. Their leading poet when I was younger was the versatile Dagonet, who had a humble but terribly effective derivative in the late Mr. Eaton, the author of "The Fireman's Wedding," and their leading humourist was the writer of a book called "T Leaves." Then came "Kissing Cup's Race" (which Mr. Lewis Sydney on the stage and "Q" in literature toiled so manfully to render impossible), and now I have no notion what the favourite recitations are, for I have heard none for a long time.

But from those old days when escape was more difficult comes the memory of the worst and the best that I ever heard. The worst was "Papa's Letter," a popular poem of sickly and irresistible sentimentality, which used to call out the handkerchiefs in battalions. The nominal narrator is a young widow whose golden-haired boy wishes to join her in writing a letter to his father. This was at a time before Sir Oliver Lodge had established wireless telephony between heaven and earth. Since the child cannot write she turns him into a letter himself by fancifully sticking a stamp on his forehead. He then (as I remember it) runs out to play, is knocked down by a runaway horse, and--

"Papa's letter is with God."

Who wrote this saccharine tragedy I cannot say, but I once found the name of W. S. Gilbert against it on a programme. Could he possibly have been the author? The psychology of humour is so curious....

So much for the worst recitations. The best that I can recall I heard twenty-five years ago, and have only just succeeded in tracking to print. It was recited at a Bohemian gathering of which I made one in a Fleet Street tavern, the reciter being a huge Scottish painter with a Falstaffian head. His face was red and truculently jovial, his hair and beard were white and vigorous. I had never seen him before, nor did I see him after; but I can see him now, through much tobacco smoke, and hear him too. Called upon to oblige the company, this giant unfolded himself and said he would give us James Boswell's real opinion of Dr. Johnson. A thrill of expectation ran through the room, for it appeared that the artist was famous for this effort. For me, who knew nothing, the title was good enough. With profundities of humour, such as it is almost necessary to cross the border to find, he performed the piece; sitting tipsily on the side of an imaginary bed as he did so. Every word told, and at the end the greatness of the Great Cham was a myth. For years I tried to find this poem; but no one could tell me anything about it. Here and there was a man who had heard it, but as to authorship he knew nothing. The Scotsman was no more, I discovered. Then last year appeared one who actually knew the author's name: Godfrey Turner, a famous Fleet Street figure in the 'sixties and 'seventies, and in time I met his son, and through him was piloted to certain humorous anthologies, in one of which, H. S. Leigh's "Jeux d'Esprit," I found the poem. Like many of the best recitations, it does not read famously in cold blood, but as delivered by my Scottish painter it carried big guns. Here it is; but there seems to be an error in the beginning of the third stanza, unless Bozzy's muzziness is being indicated:--

"Bid the ruddy nectar flow!"
I say, old fellow, don't you go.
You know me--Boswell--and you know
I wrote a life of Johnson.

Punch they've here, a splendid brew;
Let's order up a bowl for two,
And then I'll tell you something new
Concerning Doctor Johnson.

A great man that, and no mistake,
To ev'ry subject wide awake;
A toughish job you'd have, to make
A fool of Doctor Johnson;
But everybody worth a straw
Has got some little kind of flaw
(My own's a tendency to jaw
About my poor friend Johnson).

And even that immortal man,
When he to speechify began,
No greater nuisance could be than
The late lamented Johnson.
Enough he was to drive you mad,
Such endless length of tongue he had,
Which caused in me a habit bad
Of cursing Doctor Johnson.

We once were at the famous "Gate"
In Clerkenwell; 'twas getting late;
Between ourselves I ought to state
That Doctor Samuel Johnson
Had stowed away six pints of port,
The strong, full-bodied, fruity sort,
And I had had my whack--in short
As much as Doctor Johnson.

Just as I'd made a brilliant joke
The doctor gave a grunt and woke;
He looked all round, and then he spoke
These words, did Doctor Johnson:
"The man who'd make a pun," said he,
"Would perpetrate a larceny,
And punished equally should be,
Or my name isn't Johnson!"

I on the instant did reply
To that old humbug (by the bye,
You'll understand, of course, that I
Refer to Doctor Johnson),
"You've made the same remark before.
It's perfect bosh; and, what is more,
I look on you, sir, as a bore!"
Says I to Doctor Johnson.

My much-respected friend, alas!
Was only flesh, and flesh is grass.
At certain times the greatest ass
Alive was Doctor Johnson.
I shan't go home until I choose,
Let's all lie down and take a snooze.
I always sleep best in my shoes,
All right! I'm--Doctor Johnson.

Good as that piece was as done by the Scotch artist, I should not care to hear it again. Nor, indeed, do I want to hear any recitation again, unless it is given in mimicry of some one else. Under those conditions I could listen to anything, so powerful is the attraction of the mimic's art. Possibly part of this fascination may be due to one's own inability to imitate too; be that as it may, no mimic who is at all capable ever bores me, and all fill me with wonder. Of course I am conscious that many of the imitators who throng the stage are nothing but pickpockets: too lazy and too mean to acquire novelties of their own, they annex snatches of the best songs of the moment under the plea of burlesquing the original singers. But even so, I often find myself immorally glad that they figure in the programme.

Not the least remarkable thing about good mimics is their capacity not only to reproduce the tones of a voice but the actual style of conversation. I remember hearing someone thus qualified giving a spontaneous impression of a famous scholar whom he had just met, and the curious part of it was that the imitator, though a man of little education, for the moment, under the influence of the concentration which possessed him, employed words proper to his victim which I am certain he had no knowledge of in cold blood and had never used before. It was almost as if, for a brief interval, the mimic was the scholar, though always with the drop of ridicule or mischief added. It would be interesting to know if, when anyone is being impersonated as intensely as this, any virtue departs from him--whether he is, for the moment, by so much the less himself.

CLICQUOT WELL WON

My hostess and her daughter met me at the station in the little pony-cart and we set off at a gentle trot, conversing as we went. That is to say, they asked questions about London and the great wicked world, and I endeavoured to answer them.

It was high if premature summer; the sky was blue, the hedges and the grass were growing almost audibly, the birds sang, the sun blazed, and, to lighten the burden, I walked up two or three hills without the faintest enthusiasm.

Just after the top of the last hill, when I had again resumed my seat (at the risk once more of lifting the pony into the zenith), the ladies simultaneously uttered a shrill cry of dismay.

"Look!" they exclaimed; "there's Bunty!"

I looked, and beheld in the road before us a small West Highland terrier, as white as a recent ratting foray in a wet ditch would allow.

"Bunty! Bunty! you wicked dog!" they cried; "how dare you go hunting?"

To this question Bunty made no other reply than to subside under the hedge, where a little shade was to be had, in an attitude of exhaustion tempered by wariness.

"How very naughty!" said my hostess. "I left her in the house."

"Yes," said the daughter, "and if she's going to go off hunting like this what on earth shall we do? There'll be complaints from every one. She's never done it before."

"Come, Bunty!" said my hostess, in the wheedling tones of dog-owners whose dogs notoriously obey their slightest word. But Bunty sat tight.

"If we drive on perhaps she'll follow," said the daughter, and we drove on a few yards; but Bunty did not move.

We stopped again, while coaxing noises were made, calculated to soften the hearts of rocks; but Bunty refused to stir.

"She'll come on later," I suggested.

"Oh, no," said her elderly mistress, "we couldn't risk leaving her here, when she's never gone off alone before. Bunty! Bunty! don't be so naughty. Come along, there's a dear little Bunty."

But Bunty merely glittered at us through her white-hair entanglement and remained perfectly still.

Strange dogs are not much in my line; but since my hostess was no longer very active, and the daughter was driving, and no one else was present, there seemed to be a certain inevitableness about the proposition which I then made that I should get out and bring the miscreant in.

"Oh, would you mind?" my hostess said. "She won't bite, I promise you. She's a perfect dear."

Trying hard to forget how painful to legs or hands can be the smart closing of the snappy jaws of dogs that won't bite, I advanced stealthily towards Bunty, murmuring ingratiating words.

When I was quite close she turned over on her back, lifted her paws, and obviously commended her soul to Heaven; and I had therefore no difficulty in lifting her up and carrying her to the trap.

Her mistresses received her with rapture, disguised, but by no means successfully, by reproach and reproof, and we were beginning to drive on again when an excited voice called upon us to stop, and a strange lady, of the formidable unmarried kind, with a very red face beneath a purple parasol, confronted us.

"What," she panted, "is the meaning of this outrage? How dare you steal my dog?"

"Your dog, madam?" I began.

"It's no use denying it," she burst in, "I saw you do it. I saw you pick it up and carry it to the trap. It's--it's monstrous. I shall go to the police about it."

Meanwhile, it cannot be denied, the dog was showing signs of delight and recognition such as had previously been lacking.

"But----" began my hostess, who is anything but quarrelsome.

"We ought to know our own dog when we see it," said the daughter, who does not disdain a fight.

"Certainly," said the angry lady, "if you _have_ a dog of your own."

"Of course we have," said the daughter; "we have a West Highland named Bunty."

"This happens to be my West Highland, named Wendy," said the lady, "as you will see if you look on the collar. My name is there too--Miss Morrison, 14 Park Terrace, W. I am staying at Well House Farm."

And it was so.

It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that collars, being easily exchangeable, are not evidence; but I thought it better that any such suggestion should come from elsewhere.

"It is certainly very curious," said the daughter, submitting the features of the dog to the minutest scrutiny; "if it is not Bunty it is her absolute double."

"It is not Bunty, but Wendy," said Miss Morrison coldly; "and I shall be glad if you will give her to me."

"But----" the daughter began.

"Yes, give the lady the dog," said the mother.

In the regrettable absence of Solomon, who would, of course, have cut the little devil in two, there was nothing for it but to surrender; and the couple went off together, the dog exhibiting every sign of pleasure.

Meanwhile the daughter whipped up the pony, and we soon entered the gates.

In the drive, awaiting us, was a West Highland terrier named Bunty.

"There!" cried the ladies, as they scrambled out and flung themselves on her.

"Of course she's not a bit like that Wendy thing really," said the mother.

"Now that I come to look at her I can see heaps of difference," said the daughter.

"None the less," I interjected, "you turned a very honest man into a thief, and a dog-thief at that; and he insists on reparation."

"Yes, indeed," said the mother, "it is really too bad. What reparation can we make?"

I don't pretend that my feelings are completely soothed, but the Clicquot 1904 which took the place of claret at dinner that evening was certainly very good.

THE SUFFERER

Having engaged a sleeping-berth I naturally hurried, coin in hand, to the conductor, as all wise travellers do (usually to their discomfiture) to see if I could be accommodated with a compartment to myself and be guaranteed against invasion.

I couldn't.

I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position, whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my companion.

He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit.

When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each other--renunciations of hatpegs, racks, and so forth, and charming mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below--so that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of his Great Paris Grievance.

This grievance, which he considered that every one should know about, bore upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called Gay City and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he said, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in Paris should be treated as guests, the English especially. But it is the English who are the first victims of the possessor of francs that are out of date, five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver, and ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.

He had been in Paris but an hour or so when--but let me tell the story as my travelling companion told it to me.

"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I have been victimised right and left."

He was now getting up, while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and watched his difficulties in the congested room and disliked his under vest.

"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down outside a cafe to try and remember where I had received the change in which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much of my time was spent in that way."

He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.

"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to nudity, there is no theme so certain to provoke Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of every one to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."

I agreed with him.

"The waiter," he continued, "went through my money and pointed out what was good and what either bad or out of currency. He called other waiters to enjoy the joke. It seemed that in about four hours I had acquired three bad francs, one bad two-franc piece and two bad five-franc pieces. I put them away in another pocket and got fresh change from him, which, as I subsequently discovered, contained one obsolete five-franc piece and two discredited francs. And so it went on. I was a continual target for them."

Here he began to wash, and the story was interrupted.

When he re-emerged I asked him why he didn't always examine his change.

"It's very difficult to remember to do so," he said, "and, besides, I am not an expert. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and when a bad gold piece came along I realised that I must do something; so I wrote to the Chief of the Police."

"In French?" I asked.

"No, in English--the language of honesty. I told him my own experiences. I said that other English people whom I had met had testified to similar trouble; and I put it to him that as a matter of civic pride--_esprit de pays_--he should do his utmost to cleanse Paris of this evil. I added that in my opinion the waiters were the worst offenders."

"Have you had a reply?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said, and having completed his toilet he made room for me.

Later, meeting him in the restaurant-car, I asked him to show me his store of bad money. I wanted to see for myself what these coins were like.

"I haven't got them," he said.

"You sent them to the Chief of the Police with your letter, I suppose?" I said.

"No, I didn't," he replied. "The fact is--well--as a matter of fact I managed to work them all off again."

A SOUTH SEA BUBBLE

"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is charming. All through the War she has been with her husband in the South Seas. London is a new place to her."

Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her way--"elegant" an American would have called her--but she lacked animation. However, the South Seas...! Any one fresh from the Pacific must have enough to tell to see soup, fish, and _entree_ safely through.

I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change after the sun and serenity that she had come from.

"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."

"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a denial and relapsed into silence.

She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the economy of her utterances the more unfair.

Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinating region--the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries--would be familiar with the literature of it, I went boldy to work.

"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."

"Indeed!" she replied.

I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she said no. She did not even know his name.

"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.

"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.

"But surely you know Stevenson's 'Island Nights' Entertainments'?" I said.

No, she did not. Was it nice?

"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere of the South Seas than any other work. And Louis Becke--you must have read him?" I continued.

No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was on spiritualism.

"Not even Conrad?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and storms of the Pacific."

No, she remembered no story called Conrad.

I was about to explain that Conrad was the writer, not the written; but it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken only by the sound of knife and fork.

"I wonder," I ventured next, "if you came across anyone who had met Ganguin."

"Go--what?" she asked.

"That amazing Peruvian-Frenchman," I went on, with a certain foolish desperation. "Ganguin. He Lived in Tahiti."

"How comically geographical you are!" was all she replied, and again a silence brooded over our plates.

"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows, what it looks like, what it is for."

"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with very wide eyes. "I never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a cobra is--it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."

I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas deal in."

"I never heard of it," she said, "but then why should I? I know nothing about the South Seas."

My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully set in. My partner on the other side turned to me suavely and asked if I thought the verses in "Abraham Lincoln" were a beauty or a blemish; and with the assistance of the Russian ballet, some new novels, and the universal unrest I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.

As I said good night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.

ON FINDING THINGS

After the passage of several years since I had picked up anything, last week I found successively a carriage key (in Royal Hospital Road), a brooch (in Church Street, Kensington), and sixpence in a third-class compartment. It was as I stooped to pick up the sixpence, which had suddenly gleamed at me under the seat of the now empty carriage, that I said to myself that finding things is one of the purest of earthly joys.

And how rare!

I have, in a lifetime that now and then appals me by its length, found almost nothing. These three things this week; a brown-paper packet when I was about seven, containing eight pennies and one halfpenny; on the grass in the New Forest, when I was about twenty, a half-dollar piece; and at Brighton, not long after, a gold brooch of just sufficient value to make it decent to take it to the police station, from which, a year later, no one having claimed it, it was returned to me: these constitute nearly half a century's haul. I might add--now and then, perhaps, a safety-pin, pencil, some other trifle, which, however well supplied with such articles one may be, cannot be acquired from a clear sky without a thrill. Even Mr. Rockefeller, I take it, would not have been unmoved had he, instead of myself, stumbled on that treasure between Stony Cross and Boldrewood.