Part 8 (1/2)
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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion for adding dead b.u.t.terfly to dead b.u.t.terfly; 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 cla.s.sic example of enthusiasm is, however, not a cricketer nor a collector, but the actor who, when cast for Oth.e.l.lo, 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 d.i.c.kens (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 Oth.e.l.lo feat. It occurred in the days when the gramophone was in its infancy and the late Herbert Campbell was approaching his end. That ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sociation with him was like quicksilver running over the surface and about the crevices of a rock--and still longer after those regular Christmas partners.h.i.+ps 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 G.o.dmother 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 d.a.m.ned. 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.