Chapter XIV: My Friend Flora 325 (4)

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.

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.

"On the morrow he woke long before any one else," said the Sun, "and sat up and saw that I was shining again, without the vestige of a cloud to bother me, and he felt his little body to see how hot it was, and was quite sure that at last he was normal again, but he couldn't tell until his mother was up and about. The weary hours went by, and at last she came in just before breakfast with the thermometer in her hand.

"'I'm certain I'm all right to-day,' I heard Nobby say. 'I feel quite cool everywhere.'

"But, alas and alack," said the Sun, "he was a hundred still.

"'My poor mite!' his mother exclaimed, and Nobby burst into tears.

"'Mayn't I get up? Mayn't I get up?' he moaned; 'I feel so frightfully fit,' But his mother said no, not till the temperature had gone down. You see," added the Orb of Day, "when Nobbies are only-sons and those only-sons' fathers are fighting the enemy, mothers have to be more than commonly cautious and particular. You will wonder perhaps why she didn't send for the doctor, but it was for two reasons, both womanly ones, and these were that (_a_) she didn't like the _locum_, her own doctor being also at the War, and (_b_) she believed in bed and nursing as the best cure for everything.

"And so all through another long day--and when you are vigorous and robust, like Nobby, and accustomed to every kind of impulsive and adventurous activity, day can be, in bed, appallingly long--Nobby was kept a prisoner, always with his temperature at a hundred, and always with nothing to bite, and growing steadily more and more peevish and difficult, so much so that his mother became quite happy again, because it is very well known that when human invalids are testy and impatient with their nurses they are getting better.

"But when on the third morning, although Nobby's temper had become too terrible for words, his temperature was still a hundred, his mother began to be alarmed again. 'It's very strange,' she said to her sister, 'but he seems perfectly well and cool, and yet the thermometer makes him still a hundred. What do you think we ought to do?'

"Nobby's aunt, who was a wise woman, although unmarried, went up and examined her nephew for herself. 'He certainly looks all right to me,' she said, 'and he feels all right too. Do you think that the thermometer might he faulty? Let me try it'; and with these words Nobby's aunt shook the thermometer down and then put it under her tongue and gave it a good two minutes, and behold it said a hundred; and then Nobby's mother shook it down and tried it and gave it a good two minutes, and behold it said a hundred; and the cook was a hundred too, and the gardener was a hundred, and the girl who came in to help was a hundred, and probably the donkey would have been a hundred, and the pony a hundred, if they had been tested, because a hundred was the thermometer's humorous idea of normal; and so," added the Sun, "Nobby's mother and aunt rushed upstairs two or three at a time, having a great sense of justice, and pulled him out of bed and dressed him and hugged him and told him to be happy once more.

"And a couple of seconds after this," said the Sun, bringing the story to a close, "I saw him again."

TWO OF MARTHA'S SONS

Mr. Kipling, dividing, in that fine poem, men into the Sons of Martha and the Sons of Mary--the Sons of Martha being the servants and the Sons of Mary the served--characteristically lays his emphasis on those who make machinery to move. Thus:

The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part,
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and
the troubled heart;
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to
the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve or rest.

It is their care, in all the ages, to take the buffet
and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages--it is their care that
the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly--it is their care
to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

Mr. Kipling, as I say, is thinking more of highly trained and efficient operatives than of the quieter ministrants; but, after all, some of Mary's Sons--possibly the majority of them--stay at home and refrain from running the Empire, and these too count upon their cousins for assistance.

A very large number of Martha's Sons, for example, become waiters; and waiters are a race to whom insufficient justice has been done by men of letters. There should be a Book of Waiters, as there was a Book of Doctors and a Book of Lawyers by the late Cordy Jeaffreson, and a Book of the Table by the late Dr. Doran. Old waiters for choice: men who have mellowed in their calling; men who have tasted wines for themselves and studied human nature when it eats and is vulnerable. I wish somebody would compile it. It should be a cosmopolitan work: England's old waiters must be there, and France's, upon whom most clubmen of any age ought to be able to enlarge fruitily. In fact, all well-stored Bohemian memories in London and Paris should yield much. And Ireland's old waiters most conspicuously must be there; but whoever is to write this book must hasten to collect the material, for in Ireland, I am told, the old waiter is vanishing. An elderly Irish gentleman with whom I was talking recently--or, rather, to whom I was listening as he searched his memory for drolleries of the past--said that the disappearance, under modern conditions, of the old humorous independent waiters of his earlier day is the one which he personally most regretted. No longer, said he, are to be found, except very occasionally, these worthy friends of the traveller--Martha's Sons at their best, or, at any rate, at their most needed. Slow they may have been, not always strictly sober, and often despotic; but they were to be counted upon as landmarks: they extended a welcome, they fed the hungry (in time), they slaked the thirsty (more quickly), and they made remarks amusing enough to fortify their good points and palliate their bad. "There was an old fellow named Terence at Limerick," said my friend, and there followed two or three characteristic anecdotes of old Terence at Limerick. "There was old Tim at Tralee," and he painted old Tim for me in a few swift strokes--red nose, creaking legs, and all. What though his nose was red and his legs creaked, Tralee is no longer worth visiting, because Tim is not there. That was the burden of the lament. These old fellows have passed, and the new waiters, most of whom are foreigners or girls, can never mature into anything comparable with them.

Two of my friend's stories I may tell. One is of old Dennis at Mallow, who on being asked if the light in the coffee-room could not be made brighter, said, in that charming definitive Irish way, that it could not. "Is it always like this?" my friend then inquired. "It is not, sorr," said old Dennis; "it is often worse." Not a great anecdote, but you must brave the horrors of St. George's Channel to meet with these alluring unexpectednesses of speech. Imagine an English waiter thus surprising one! The other story is of old Florence, head waiter at a certain Irish yacht club. Some sojourners in the neighbourhood, having been elected honorary members for the period of their visit, asked a few American friends to dine there, and then, even while in the boat on their way to dinner, suddenly realised that honorary members are entitled to no such privileges. It was decided to put the case to old Florence. "Have you a rule against honorary members inviting guests?" "We have, sorr," said he. "Is it very strictly enforced? I mean, would there be any risk in breaking it?" "There would not, sorr. The only rule in this club that is never broken, sorr, is the one which forbids gratuities to be given to the waiters."

For those Sons of Martha who make their living--and not a bad one--by ministering to their hungry fellow-creatures there is no call to feel sorry. They are often not only richer but happier than their customers, and when the time comes they retire to snug little houses (of which they not infrequently own a row) with a competence, and pass the evening of life with their pipe and glass, their friends and grandchildren, moving serenely, if perhaps with a shade too plantigrade a step (the waiters' heritage), to the grave. No call, as I say, to feel sorry for them; but what of those other Sons of Martha, the railway porters, who while helping us to travel and get away from home never travel or get away from home themselves, and for ever are carrying or wheeling heavy trunks or searching for visionary cabs?

The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing. Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their ravages. Men who take no holidays must not, therefore, necessarily become objects of our pity. But I confess to feeling sorry for those servants of the public who apparently not only never take a holiday themselves, but who spend all their lives in assisting others to get away.

It is probably no privation to a bathing-machine man never to enter the sea; uproariously happy in that element as his clients can be, their pleasure, in which he has no share, does not, I imagine, embitter his existence. Similarly, since a waiter either has eaten or is soon to eat, we need not waste sympathy on his unending task of setting seductive dishes before others. But it is conceivable that some of those weary and dejected men whom one sees at Victoria Station, for example, in the summer, eternally making an effort, however unsuccessful, to cope with the exodus of Londoners to the south coast, really would like also to repose on Brighton beach. But they may not. Their destiny is for ever to help others to that paradise, and remain at Victoria themselves. Just as Moses was denied the Children of Israel's Promised Land, so are the porters. The engine-driver can go, the stoker can go, the guard can go,--indeed, they must go,--but the porters get no nearer than the carriage doors and then wheel back again. And if the plight of the porters at Victoria is unenviable, think of that of the porters at the big termini on the other side of London and elsewhere when they read the labels on the luggage which they handle!--labels for the west, for the land of King Arthur; labels for the north, for delectable Highland retreats; labels for Northumberland and Yorkshire; labels for the east coast; labels for Kerry and Galway and Connemara.

FREAKS OF MEMORY

It was my fortune not long since to meet again, in the flesh, the most famous of our prophets--Old Moore, whose cautious vaticination is on sale even in the streets. To my dismay he did not recognise me. Not that a want of recognition is so rare--very far from it--but the surprise is that a being gifted with such preternatural vision should thus fail, when I, who am only an ordinary person, knew him again instantly. Long habits of fixing his penetrating gaze on the murky future have no doubt rendered the backward look less simple to him. Anyway, there we stood, I challenging him to remember me and he failing to do so. This momentary superiority of my own poor wits over those of a man who (undismayed by the refusal of events always to fall into line) foretells so much, uplifted me; but the untrustworthiness of memory is so constant and lands one in such embarrassments that it is foolish for anyone to boast.

Among the marvels of the human machine, memory is, indeed, strangest. The great bewildering fact of memory at all--of the miracle of the brain--is, of course, as far beyond our finite apprehension as the starry heavens. Of this? I never dare to think. But the minor caprices of memory may, fittingly enough, engage our wonder. The lawlessness of our prehensile apparatus, for example--the absurdly unreasoning system of selection of such things as are to be permanent--how explain these? And why should memory be subject also to that downward tendency in life which forces us always to fight if we would save the best? It would have been just as easy, at the start, when the whole affair was in the making, to have given an upward impulse. That was not done, but the memory, at any rate, being all spirit, might have been exempted from the general law. But no; as we grow older, not only do we remember with less and less accuracy, but of what we retain much is inferior to that which once we had but now have lost.

I, for example, who once had long passages not only from the great poets, but also from the less great but often more intimate poets,--such as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, to mention two favourites,--at the tip of the tongue, now have to recite myself to sleep with a Bab Ballad. That piece of nonsense never fails me, but I cannot at this moment give the right sequence of any two of the quatrains of the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, although once, and for years, I had the whole poem complete too. I would rather have been left the wistful Persian than Gilbert's "Etiquette," but the jade Memory had other views.

Any prose that I might once have learned naturally faded first, because there was no rhyme or metre to assist retention; but why is it that there is one sentence which, never wholly mine, flits so often before the inward eye? It is in that story of Mr. Kipling's of the mutinous elephant who refused to work because his master was too long absent. This master, one Dheesa (you will remember), having obtained leave for a jaunt, exceeded his term; and the sentence which recurs to me, hazily and hauntingly, often twice a day and usually once, with no apparent reason or provocation, is this: "Dheesa had vagabonded along the roads till he met a marriage procession of his own caste, and drinking, dancing, and tippling, had drifted past all knowledge of the lapse of time." Now, surely, out of all the thousands of books which I have read and more or less dimly remember, it is very strange that this should be almost the only sentence that is photographed on the mind.

Once I knew many psalms: I know them no longer, but I have never forgotten a ridiculous piece of dialogue in a book called "The World of Wit and Humour," which I was studying, on weekdays, at the same time, how many years ago:

"Father, I have spilt the butter. What shall I do?"

"Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric."

"Why?"

"Because friction generates caloric, which volatises the
oleaginous particles of the stearine matter."

--And once I knew many psalms.

One of the odd things about what we call loss of memory is that it is catching. How often when one person forgets a name well known to him does his companion, to whom it is equally well known, forget it too. Why is that? The other day I had an excellent example of this curious epidemic. It was necessary for the name of a certain actor--not a star, but a versatile repertory actor of distinction--to be recalled in order that a letter to him might quickly be despatched. I had forgotten his name, but I described him and his methods with sufficient accuracy for every one (there were about six of us) to recognise him. Some of us could even say in what parts we had seen him and compare notes as to his excellence, and yet his name absolutely eluded one and all. Why? We all knew it; why did we unanimously fail to know it then?

We parted intent upon obtaining this necessary information, my last sapient words being that to the best of my belief his first name was Joseph and his second began with P. On meeting again the next day, each of us had it pat enough, and it had broken upon each, more or less suddenly, during the night. Since the name was Michael Sherbrooke, you will understand why, in my case, its arrival was peculiarly gratifying. If I am not now known to those others as Mrs. Nickleby, it is only because they are so kind-hearted.

The great mystery is, Where, while one is forgetting them, are the things one forgets, but suddenly will remember again? Where are they lurking? This problem of their whereabouts, their capacity to hide and elude, distresses me far more than one's inability to call them from the vasty deep of the brain. Or are they, perhaps, not there at all? Do they not, perhaps, have evenings out, times off for lunch and so forth, and thus we sometimes miss them? Or can there perhaps be some vast extra-mural territory of the brain from which facts have to be fetched--as, if one would consult old newspapers at the British Museum, one must wait until the volumes can be brought from Hendon? The fact that they always, or nearly always, return, sooner or later, rather supports these theories.

THE MORAL DRESSING-TABLE

The prettiest little book that ever I saw lies before me. It is called "The Toilet," and was published by the author in 1821 and sold by Mr. Sams, bookseller to H.R.H. the Duke of York, at No. 1 St. James's Street; for princes in those days had their own booksellers no less than their own wine-cellars. Times have changed, and to-day No. 1 St. James's Street is a block of flats, and the Duke surveys London from the top of a column of stone.

The author of "The Toilet" was "S. G." (standing for Stacey Grimaldi), and the purpose of his book--so laudable then and how unnecessary now!--was to make young women better. This task was to be performed by means of a preface and a number of verses, but chiefly by a series of copperplate engravings with movable covers. I have seen old gardening books on this principle, by Capability Brown and others, in which the potentialities of gentlemen's places are made evident by the same mechanical means. Thus, by lifting up one clump of trees you see where the house could most advantageously stand, and by lifting up another you gaze along the lovely avenue that ought to be planted there, and so forth; but I never saw good manners and high ideals inculcated in this way. That they can be "The Toilet" proves.

But let me explain. The articles illustrated are those that are found in ladies' boudoirs, such as mirrors, and jewel case, and bottles of essence--all very charmingly designed as though by a Chippendale. Indeed, the copy which lies before me--as pretty a little book, did I say? as ever I saw--is known by its owner as "The Chippendale Book"; and never could the effort to get gentleness and the best manners into an impressionable female nature be more ingeniously or ingratiatingly made. Imagine, now, the fair one opening at the preface, where she reads at once these words: "I request your acceptance of a few appendages to your toilet, of extreme beauty and value, though some of them may be at variance with modern fashions." She then turns on and finds that the appendages consist of an Enchanting Mirror, a Wash to Smooth Wrinkles, some Superior Rouge, some Matchless Ear Rings, a Fine Lip Salve, a Mixture to Sweeten the Voice, and so forth--each delicately drawn.

Before lifting the cover of the mirror she reads that it is long since many of the gay inhabitants of the town have decorated themselves before it, and then, lifting the cover, discovers the word "Humility" on the glass. Fancy the shock to the frivolous and vain! But humility is not all; Uriah Heep had that and still was a most undesirable person, and so she must read on, all recipiency. Doing so she learns that it is singular that although we do generally wear ear-rings similar to those in the jewel case in the presence of a superior, we are apt to cast them off in the company of our inferiors; and, lifting the lid of the case, she finds the word "Attention" within. And so on through the book. The Wash to Smooth Wrinkles turns out to be Contentment; the Universal Beautifier is Good Humour; the Best White Paint is Innocence; the Superior Rouge is Modesty; the Mixture giving Sweetness to the Voice is Mildness and Truth (where is the young woman who any longer wants mildness?), and the Finest Lip Salve is Cheerfulness.

Finally we come to a very beautiful flowered pot--I wish you could see it--containing "The Late King's Eye Water"--the late King being George III, the father of the Prince whose own particular bookseller put forth this little volume. All the time, from the first moment of opening it, I had the feeling that somewhere hovering around or over "The Toilet" was the spirit of the courtier. Its blend of discretion and elegance is such as a palace mentor could hardly be without, and the description of the Late King's Eye Water settled it. "You are perhaps aware that our late much-beloved King possessed bad sight, and, doubtless, many different eye waters were prescribed for his use; but I can assure you, that whatever else the good Monarch might have used, he invariably possessed some of the accompanying description; it was by him recommended to our present Sovereign [George the Fourth], as also to his own beloved and illustrious Daughters; it has been by them constantly used, and their example has diffused it throughout the British Empire." On lifting the cover of the pot containing the Late King's Eye Water (which he recommended to his eldest son) we find it to contain "Benevolence"; but a certain poem by Moore, addressed to George IV after the death of Sheridan, would suggest that the collyrium was not at any rate "constantly" used.

THACKERAY'S SCHOOLFELLOW

If the measure of an artist is the accuracy with which the life of his times is reflected in his work, and the width of his range, then John Leech, the centenary of whose birth was August 29, 1917, is the greatest artist that England has produced. But since such a claim as that would submerge us in controversial waters, let it rather be said that Leech is the most representative artist that England has produced. The circumstances that he worked in black and white and was chiefly concerned with the humorous aspect of men and manners do not affect the position.

The outlines of Leech's life are very simple. He was born in London on August 29, 1817, the son of John Leech, proprietor of the once very prosperous London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, who was said to be something of a draughtsman and was also a Shakespeare enthusiast. The child took early to the pencil; and it is recorded that Flaxman, a friend of the family, found him at a tender age, on his mother's knee, drawing well enough to be encouraged. The great sculptor's advice was that the boy, whom he thought to be clearly destined for an artist, should be permitted to follow his own bent. Three years later Flaxman seems to have repeated this counsel. At seven, Leech was sent to school at Charterhouse, then in its old London quarters; and the story is told that Mrs. Leech, who probably thought seven far too young, took a room which over-looked the playground in order secretly to watch her little son, thus displaying a sympathetic solicitude which that son inherited and carried through life. At Charterhouse Leech remained until he was sixteen, among his school-fellows being Thackeray; but as Thackeray was six years his senior it is unlikely that they saw much of each other as boys, although they were always glad later in life, when they became very intimate colleagues on _Punch_, to recall their schooldays and extol their school.

On leaving, Leech went to Bart.'s to learn to be a surgeon, and there by curious and fortunate chance fell in with a congenial fellow-student named Percival Leigh, whose interest in comic journalism was to play a very important part in Leech's career. Leigh had two friends who shared his literary tastes and ambitions--Albert Smith, a medical student at the Middlesex Hospital, and Gilbert Abbott a Beckett, a young barrister, these forming a humorous band of brothers to which Leech made a very welcome addition. Leigh was seriously concerned also with medicine, but there is no evidence that Leech burnt any midnight oil in its pursuit, although he made some excellent anatomical drawings. The popularity of the London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill meanwhile declining, a less expensive instructor than St. Bartholomew became necessary; and Leech was placed with the ingenious Mr. Whittle of Hoxton, who, under the guise of a healer, devoted most of his attention to pigeons and boxing. Mr. Whittle of Hoxton (who is to be found under the name of Rawkins in Albert Smith's novel, "The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury," which Leech illustrated) may not appreciably have extended his pupil's knowledge of therapeutics, but he is our benefactor in quickening his interest in sport. Leech's next mentor was Dr. John Cockle, son of the Cockle of the pills; and then, the paternal purse being really empty, he, at the age of eighteen, flung physic to the dogs and trusted for a living to his pencil, which, since Charterhouse had the most indifferent of drawing-masters, was still untrained.

In those days there were many ephemeral satirical sheets, in addition to the magazines, to offer employment to the comic draughtsman, and Leech did not starve; his two experiences of the inside of a sponging-house being due to his good nature rather than to financial foolishness of his own. His first publication was a slender collection of street types entitled "Etchings and Sketchings," by A Pen, 1835. He tried also political caricatures and drew bruisers for "Bell's Life in London." In 1836 he was among those draughtsmen (Thackeray was another) who competed without success for Seymour's post as illustrator of a series of humorous papers describing the proceedings of the Pickwick Club. In 1840 appeared his parody of the Mulready envelope, which was very popular and a real foundation-stone for the young artist, and Percival Leigh's "Comic Latin Grammar" and "Comic English Grammar," the illustrations to which fortified the impression which the Mulready skit had made, and established the fact that a new pictorial humorist of resource and vigour had appeared.

In 1841 _Punch_ was founded, with Mark Lemon as its editor and Leigh on its staff; and for Leech to join up was merely a matter of time. His first efforts were tentative, but by 1844, when Thackeray was also a power on the staff, he had become the paper's strong man, and its strong man he remained until his death twenty years after. _Punch_ had a great personnel, courage, and sound ideas, but without Leech's sunny humanity week after week it is unlikely to have won its way to such complete popularity and trust. It was he, more than any other contributor, who drove it home to the heart of the nation.

Leech's cartoons were for the most part suggested to him, the outcome of discussion round the Mahogany Tree (which is made of pine); but to a larger extent probably than with any of his colleagues or successors the social drawings, by which he is now best known and by which he will live, were the fruits of his own observation, visual and aural. That is to say, he provided words as well as drawings. He also followed the line of least resistance. It was enough for him to think an incident funny, to set it down, and by the time it had passed through that filter--a blend of humane understanding and humane fun--which he kept in his brain, it was assured of a welcome by _Punch's_ readers too. To-day the paper is a little more exacting, a little more complex: a consequence possibly, in some measure, of the fertility and universality of its earlier giant, who anticipated so many jokes. To-day, as it happens, there is more of the Leech spirit in _Life_, where absurdity for its own sake is to a greater extent cultivated. But for twenty years that spirit permeated and dominated _Punch_. Leech had a great chance and he rose to it. Never before had things been made so easy for a satirical artist with alert eyes. Hogarth had had to plan and struggle to get his engravings before the public; Gillray and Rowlandson had only the print-sellers as a medium; but Leech had an editor who appreciated him and gave him his head, and employers who paid handsomely, while his work appeared in a paper which increased its circulation with every number. That is to say, he knew that he had an audience: no small incentive. The result is that "Pictures of Life and Character" is the completest survey of the social England of his times that any artist has ever made or is likely to make.

To-day this inexhaustible work in three immense volumes is out of print, but there never was a book that better deserved continuous accessibility. It is Leech's monument, and he has no other. One learns from it, while laughing the honestest of laughter, how inveterate a plagiarist from herself is Dame Fashion. The number of drawings which need only the slightest modernizing change to be telling now is extraordinary. Leech missed nothing; and the world is always coming full circle.

The criticism has too often been made that Leech could not draw. Placed beside Keene or Phil May he is, it is true, wanting in inevitableness; his line is merely efficient, never splendid; yet sometimes he could draw amazingly and get the very breath of life into a figure. In particular was he a master of gesture, and now and then his landscapes are a revelation. But the resplendent fact is that he could draw well enough; he did, as Thackeray said, what he wished to do; that is proved by his triumph. A man who cannot draw does not get all his fellow-countrymen following his pencil in a rapture (as though it were the Pied Piper's whistle) as Leech did for twenty years. Du Maurier, who admired him immensely, hit on a happy comparison when he said that Leech was "a ballad-writer among draughtsmen," or, in other words, he had simplicity, lucidity, movement, and a story. It has to be remembered, too, that Leech did single-handed what ever since his day it has needed a syndicate to accomplish. He, himself and alone, was cartoonist, social draughtsman, low-life draughtsman, and the provider of hunting scenes. If the Volunteers were to be chaffed, Leech's was the hand; if the priceless Mr. Briggs was to be invented and kept busy, Leech was his impresario. And it was he also who drew the prettiest girls in what Thackeray called "Mr. Punch's harem."

All his life, after finding himself, Leech worked too hard, being, although well paid, in some mysterious way continually either in debt or about to be. He was also uniformly behind time; and Mark Lemon used humorously to bemoan half his days misspent in cabs between the _Punch_ office and the artist's various residences collecting his belated drawings. Leech, however, when once he had made up his mind, drew very rapidly, and his productiveness was amazing, for besides his _Punch_ work he illustrated a large number of books, including (which some people would call his masterpiece) the sporting novels of Surtees.

In private life--but all his life was private--Leech was not less simple than that other great Carthusian, Colonel Newcome. He loved his family, rode his horse Red Mullet whenever there was a free moment, and as often as possible had a day's run with the Puckeridge hounds, not only for enjoyment, but in order that that very important section of his work, his hunting scenes, might not languish. He was fond of dinner parties, both as host and guest, and after them preferred conversation to cards. He sang lugubrious songs in a deep, melancholy voice, with his eyes fixed upwards--the favourite being Barry Cornwall's "King Death," the words of which, Dickens averred, were inscribed on the ceiling in mystic characters discernible only by the singer. He told stories well, but the record of good things said by him is meagre, and his letters are singularly free from humorous passages. Once, however, when a liberty had been taken with him by a public man, he threatened "to _draw_ and defend himself"; and there is a pleasant story of his retort to some rowdy inebriated men in Kensington who excused themselves by saying that they were Foresters: "Then, why the devil don't you go to the forest and make a din there?" Noise was, indeed, his bane. He had double windows in his house, but was always in danger of headaches and shattered nerves from street sounds and, in particular, barrel organs. It is even said that street music led to his early death; but that probably was only indirectly. He died of overwork, aged forty-seven.