 Section 1 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 1 Chapter 1. James Arrives. Ms. Margaret Goodwin's Narrative. I am Margaret Goodwin. A week from today I shall be Mrs. James Orlbar Cloyster. It is just three years since I first met James. We made each other's acquaintance at half past seven on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July in the middle of Firmaine Bay about fifty yards from the shore. Firmaine Bay is in Guernsey. My home had been with my mother for many years at St. Martins in that island, where we two lived our uneventful lives until fate brought one whom, when first I set my eyes on him, I knew I loved him. Perhaps it is indiscreet of me to write that down, but what does it matter? It is for no one's reading but my own. James, my fiancé, is not peeping slyly over my shoulder as I write. On the contrary, my door is locked, and James is, I believe, in the smoking-room of his hotel at St. Peter's Port. At that time it had become my habit to begin my day by rising before breakfast and taking a swim in Firmaine Bay which lies across the road in front of our cottage. The practice, I have since abandoned it, was good for the complexion and generally healthy. I had kept it up, moreover, because I had somehow cherished an unreasonable but persistent presentiment that some day somebody—James, as it turned out—would cross the pathway of my maiden existence. I told myself that I must be ready for him. It would never do for him to arrive and find no one to meet him. On the twenty-eighth of July I started off as usual. I wore a short tweed-skirt, brown stockings, my ankles were and are good, a calico blouse and a red tamashanter. Ponto barked at my heels. In one hand I carried my blue-twill bathing-gown, in the other a miniature alpin-stock. The sun had risen sufficiently to scatter the slight mist of the summer morning, and a few flecked clouds were edged with a slender frame of red gold. Leisurely, and with my presentiment strong upon me, I descended the steep cliffside to the cave on the left of the bay, where, guarded by the faithful ponto, I was accustomed to disrobe. And soon afterwards I came out, my dark hair over my shoulders and blue twill over a portion of the rest of me, to climb out to the point of the projecting rocks, till that I might dive gracefully and safely into the still blue water. I was a good swimmer. I reached the ridge on the opposite side of the bay without fatigue, not changing from a powerful breaststroke. I then sat for a while at the water's edge to rest and to drink in the thrilling glory of what my heart persisted in telling me was the morning of my life. And then I saw him. Not distinctly, for he was rowing a dinghy in my direction, and consequently had his back to me. In the stress of my emotions and an aggravation of modesty I dived again. With an intensity like that of a captured conger I yearned to be hidden by the water. I could watch him as I swam, for strictly speaking he was in my way, though a little farther out to see than I intended to go. As I drew near I noticed that he wore an odd garment like a dressing gown. He had stopped rowing. I turned upon my back for a moment's rest and, as I did so, heard a cry. I resumed my former attitude and brushed the salt water from my eyes. The dinghy was wobbling unsteadily. The dressing gown was in the boughs, and he, my sea-god, was in the water. Only for a second I saw him, then he sank. How I blessed the muscular development of my arms. I reached him as he came to the surface. That's twice, he remarked contemplatively as I seized him by the shoulders. Be brave, I said excitedly. I can save you. I should be most awfully obliged, he said. Do exactly as I tell you. I say, he remonstrated, you're not going to drag me along with the roots of my hair, are you? The natural timidity of man is, I find, attractive. I helped him to the boat, and he climbed in. I trod water, clinging with one hand to the stern. Allow me, he said, bending down. No, thank you, I replied. Not really? Thank you very much, but I think I will stay where I am. But you may get cramped. By the way, I'm really frightfully obliged to you for saving my life. I mean a perfect stranger. I'm afraid it's quite spoiled, your dip. Not at all, I said politely. Did you get cramped? A twinge. It was awfully kind of you. Not at all. Then there was a rather awkward silence. Is this your first visit to Guernsey, I asked? Yes, I arrived yesterday. That's a delightful place. Do you live here? Yes, that white cottage you can just see through the trees. I suppose I couldn't give you a toe anywhere. No, thank you very much. I will swim back. Another constrained silence. Are you ever in London, Miss Goodwin? Oh yes, we generally go over in the winter, Mr. Cloyster. Really, how jolly. Do you go to the theatre much? Oh yes, we saw nearly everything last time we were over. There was a third silence. I saw a remark about the weather trembling on his lip, and as I was beginning to feel the chill of the water, a little I determined to put a temporary end to the conversation. I think I will be swimming back now, I said. You're quite sure I can't give you a toe? Quite, thanks. Perhaps you would care to come to breakfast with us, Mr. Cloyster. I know my mother would be glad to see you. It is very kind of you. I should be delighted. Shall we meet on the beach? I swam off to my cave to dress. Breakfast was a success, for my mother was a philosopher. She said very little, but what she did say was magnificent. In her youth she had moved in literary circles and now found her daily pleasure in the works of Schopenhauer, Kant, and other Germans. Her lightest reading was Sartorisartus, and occasionally she would drop into Ibsen and Matrilink, the asparagus of her philosophic banquet. Her chosen mode of thought, far from leaving her inhuman or intolerant, gave her a social distinction which I had inherited from her. I could, if I had wished it, have attended with success the tea-drinkings, the tennis-planks, and the eclair and lemonade dances to which I was frequently invited, but I always refused. Nature was my hostess. Nature, which provided me with balmy zephyrs that were more comforting than buttered toast, which set the race of the waves to the ridges of Vermein, where arose no shrill heated voice crying, "'Love, 40,' which decked foliage in more splendid sheen than anything in a local costumee could achieve, and whose poplars swayed more rhythmically than the dancers of the assembly-rooms. The constraint which had been upon us during our former conversation vanished at breakfast. We were both hungry, and we had a common topic. We related our story of the sea in alternate sentences. We ate, and we talked, turn and turn about. My mother listened. To her, the affair, compared with the tremendous subjects to which she was accustomed to direct her mind was broad farce. James took it with an air of restrained amusement. I seriously. Tentatively I diverged from this subject towards other and wider fields. Impressions of Guernsey, which drew from him his address at the St. Peter's Port Hotel. The horrors of the sea passage from Weymouth, which extorted a comment on the limitations of England. England, London, Kensington, South Kensington. The Gunton Creswells? Yes, yes. Extraordinary, curious coincidence. Excurses on smallness of world. Queer old gentleman. Mr. Gunton Creswell? He is indeed quite one of the old school. Oh, quite. Still wears that beaver hat? Does he really? Yes. Ha, ha, yes. Here the humanizing influence of the Teutonic School of Philosophic Analysis was demonstrated by my mother's action. Mr. Cloyster, she said, must reconcile himself to exchanging his comfortable rooms at the St. Peter's Port, a particularly dislike half-filled hotel life, Mrs. Goodwin, for the shelter of our cottage. He accepted. He was then warned that I was chef at the cottage. Mother gave him a chance to change his mind. Something was said about my saving life and destroying digestion. He went to collect his things in an ecstasy of merriment. At this point I committed an indiscretion, which can only be excused by the magnitude of the occasion. My mother had retired to her favorite bow window, where, by a tour de force on the part of the carpenter, a system of low adjustable bookcases had been craftily constructed in such a way that when she sat in her window seat they jutted in a semi-circle towards her hand. James, whom I had escorted down the garden path, had left me at the little wooden gate, and had gone swinging down the road. I, shielded from outside observation, if any, by a line of lilocks, raised rapturously at his retreating form. The sun was high in the sky now. It was a perfect summer's day. Birds were singing. Their notes blended with the gentle murmur of the sea on the beach below. Every fiber of my body was thrilling with the magic of the morning. Through the kindly branches of the lilock I watched him, and then, as though in obedience to the primeval call of that July sunshine, I stood on tiptoe and blew him a kiss. I realized in an instant what I had done, fool that I had been, the bow window. I was rigid with this comforture. My mother's eyes were on the book she held, and yet a faint smile seemed to hover round her lips. I walked in silence to where she sat at the open window. She looked up. Her smile was more pronounced. Margie, she said. Yes, mother. The hedonism of vault hair is the indictment of an honest bore. Yes, mother. She then resumed her book. End of Section 1. Section 2 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Debra Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 1, Chapter 2. James Sets Out. Miss Margaret Goodwin's narrative continued. Those August days, have there been any like them before? I realized with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden. The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat. But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from the moment when he had rode out of the unknown into my life, clad in a dressing gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment, too. But if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal gradually but surely upon him. We were always together, and as the days passed by, he spoke freely of himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him as he did himself. It seemed that a guardian, an impersonal sort of businessman with a small but impossible family, was the most commanding figure in his private life. As for his finances, five and forty sovereigns, the remnant of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood between him and the necessity of offering for hire a sketchy acquaintance with general literature and a third class in the classical tripos. He had come to Guernsey to learn by personal observation what chances tomato growing held out to a young man in a hurry to get rich. Tomato growing, I echoed dubiously, and then to hide a sense of bathos. People have made it pay, of course they work very hard. Yes, James, without much enthusiasm. But if fancy, I added, the life is not at all unpleasant. At this point embarrassment seemed to engulf James. He blushed, swallowed once or twice in a somewhat convulsive manner, and stammered. Then he made his confession guiltily. I was not to suppose that his aim ceased with the attainment of a tomato farm. The nurture of a wholesome vegetable occupied neither the whole of his ambitions nor even the greater part of them. To write, the agony with which he thoughtly confessed it, to be swept into the maelstrom of literary journalism, to be home rapport with the unslumbering forces of Fleet Street, those were the real objectives of James Orlebar Cloyster. Of course, I mean, he said, I suppose it would be a bit of a struggle at first, if you see what I mean. What I mean to say is rejected manuscripts and so on. But still, after a bit, once get a footing, you know, I should like to have a dash at it. I mean, I think I could do something, you know. Of course you could, I said. I mean, lots of men have, don't you know? There's plenty of room at the top, I said. He seemed struck with this remark. It encouraged him. He had had his opportunity of talking thus of himself during our long rambles out of doors. They were a series of excursions which he was accustomed to describe as hunting expeditions for the stocking of our larder. Thus James would announce at breakfast that prawns were the day's quarry and the foreshore round Kobo Bay the hunting ground, and to Kobo, accordingly, we would set out. This prawn-yielding area extends along the coast on the other side of St. Peter's Port where two halts had to be made, one at Madame Garnier's, the confectioners, the other at the library to get fiction, which I never read. Then came a journey on the top of the Antidolubian horse-tramp, a sort of diligence on rails, and then a whole summer's afternoon among the prawns. Kobo was an expanse of shingle dotted with seaweed and rocks, and Guernsey is a place where one can take off one's shoes and stockings on the slightest pretext. We waded hither and thither with the warm brine lapping unchecked over our bare legs. We did not use our nets very industriously, it is true, but our tongues were seldom still. The slow walk home was a thing to be looked forward to. Those memorable homecomings in the quiet solemnity of that hour, when a weary sun stoops, one can fancy with a sigh of pleasure to sink into the bosom of the sea. Prawn hunting was agreeably varied by fish-snaring, muscle stalking, and mushroom trapping. Sports which James, in his capacity of head forester, entered in his vennery. For mushroom trapping an early start had to be made, usually between six and seven. The chase took us inland until, after walking through the fragrant earthy lanes, we turned aside into dewy meadows where each blade of grass sparkled with a gem of purest water, again the necessity of going barefoot. Breakfast was laid on these mornings, my mother wiling away the hours of waiting with a volume of diogenes lairious in the bow-window. She would generally open the meal with a remark that an aximander held the primary cause of all things to be the infinite, or that it was a favorite expression of theofristus, that time was the most valuable thing a man could spend. When breakfast was announced, one of the covers concealed the mushrooms which, under my superintendence, James had done his best to devil. A quiet day followed devoted to sedentary recreation after the labors of the run. The period which I have tried to sketch above may be called the period of good fellowship. Whatever else love does for a woman, it makes her an actress. So we were merely excellent friends till James's eyes were opened. When that happened, he abruptly discarded good fellowship. I, on the other hand, played it the more vigorously. The situation was mine. Our day's run became the merest shadow of a formality. The office of head forester lapsed into an absolute sinister. Love was with us triumphant, and no longer to be skirted round by me, fresh, electric, glorious, and James. We talked. We must have talked. We moved. Our limbs performed their ordinary daily movements. But a golden haze hangs over that second period, when, by the strongest effort of will, I can let my mind stand by those perfect moments, I seem to hear our voices, low and measured. Hear our silences, fond in themselves, and yet more fondly interrupted by unspoken messages from our eyes. What we really said, what we actually did, where precisely we two went, I did not know. We were together, and the blur of love was about us. Always the blur. It is not that memory cannot conjure up the scene again. It is not that the scene is clouded by the ill proportion of a dream. No, it is because the dream is brought to me by will and not by sleep. The blur recurs because the blur was there. A love vast as ours is penalized as it were by this blur, which is the hallmark of infinity. In mighty distances, whether from earth to heaven, whether from fifty-two forty-five Gerard to one thirty-seven Glasgow, there was always that awful, that disintegrating blur. A third period succeeded. I may call it the affectionately practical period. Instantly the blur vanishes. We were at our proper distance from the essence of things. And though infinity is something one yearns for passionately, one's normal condition has its meat of comfort. I remember once hearing a man in a government office say that the pleasantest moment of his annual holiday was when his train rolled back into Paddington Station, and he was a man, too, of a naturally lazy disposition. It was about the middle of this third period, during a mushroom-trapping ramble, that the idea occurred to us, first to me, then, after reflection to James, that mother ought to be informed how matters stood between us. We went into the house, hand in hand, and interviewed her. She was in the bow-window, reading a translation of the de-hypno-sophists of Atheneus. Good morning, she said, looking at her watch. It is a little past our usual breakfast time, Margie, I think. We have been looking for mushrooms, mother. Every investigation says Atheneus, which is guided by principles of nature, fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach. Have you found any mushrooms? Heaps, Mrs. Goodwin, said James. Mother, I said, we want to tell you something. The fact is, Mrs. Goodwin, we are engaged. My mother liked James. Margie, she once said to me, there is good in Mr. Cloyster. He is not forever offering to pass me things. Time had not caused her to modify this opinion. She received our news calmly and inquired into James's means and prospects. James had forty pounds and some odd silver. I had nothing. The key note of my mother's contribution to our conference was, Wait. You are both young, she said. She then kissed me, smiled contemplatively at James, and resumed her book. When we were alone, my darling, said James, we must wait. Tomorrow I catch the boat for Weymouth. I shall go straight to London. My first manuscript shall be in an editor's hands on Wednesday morning. I will go, but I will come back. I put my arms round his neck. My love, I said, I trust you. Go, always remember that I know you will succeed. I kissed him. And when you have succeeded, come back. End of Section 2 Section 3 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 1 Chapter 3 A Harmless Deception Miss Margaret Goodwin's narrative continued. They say that everyone is capable of one novel, and in my opinion most people could write one play. After I wrote mine in an inspiration of despair I cannot say, I wrote it. Three years had passed, and James was still haggling with those who buy men's brains. His earnings were enough just to keep his head above water, but not enough to make us two one. Perhaps because everything is clear and easy for us now, I am gradually losing a proper appreciation of his struggle. That should never be. He did not win, but he did not lose, which means nearly as much. It is almost less difficult to win than not to lose, so my mother has told me, in modern journalistic London. And I know that he would have won. The fact that he continued the fight as he did was in itself a pledge of ultimate victory. What he went through while trying with his pen to make a living for himself and me I learned from his letters. London, he wrote, is not paved with gold, but in literary fields there are nuggets to be had by the lightest scratching, and those nuggets are plays. A successful play gives you money and a name automatically. What the ordinary writer makes in a year the successful dramatist receives without labor in a fortnight. He went on to deplore his total lack of dramatic intuition. Some men, he said, have some of the qualifications while falling short of the others. They have a sense of situation without the necessary tricks of technique, or they sacrifice plot to atmosphere or atmosphere to plot. I, worse luck, have not one single qualification. The nursing of a climax, the tremendous omissions in the dialogue, the knack of stage characterization, all these things are in some inexplicable way outside me. It was this letter that set me thinking. Ever since James had left the island I had been chafing at the helplessness of my position. While he toiled in London what was I doing? Nothing. I suppose I helped him in a way. The thought of me would be with him always, spurring him on to work, that the time of our separation might be less. But it was never enough. I wanted to be doing something. And it was during these restless weeks that I wrote my play. I think nothing will ever erase from my mind the moment when the central idea of the girl who waited came to me. It was a boisterous October evening. The wind had been rising all day. Now the branches of the lilac were dancing in the rush of the storm. And far out in the bay one could see the white crests of the waves gleaming through the growing darkness. We had just finished tea. The lamp was lit in our little drawing-room, and on the sofa, so placed that the light fell over her left shoulder in the manner recommended by oculists, sat my mother with Chopinauer's art of literature. Ponto slept on the rug. Everything in the unruffled piece of the scene tore at my nerves. I have seldom felt so restless. It may have been the storm that made me so. I think myself that it was James's letter. The boat had been late that morning, owing to the weather, and I had not received the letter till after lunch. I listened to the howl of the wind and longed to be out in it. My mother looked at me over her book. You are restless, Margie, she said. There is a volume of Marcus Aurelius on the table beside you if you care to read. No, thank you, mother, I said. I think I shall go for a walk. Wrap up well, my dear, she replied. She then resumed her book. I went out of our little garden and stood on the cliff. The wind flew at me like some wild thing. Spray stung my face. I was filled with a wild exhilaration. And then the idea came to me. The simplest, most dramatic idea. Quaint, whimsical, with just that suggestion of pathos blended with it, which makes the fortunes of a play. The central idea to be brief of the girl who waited. Of my man-ed tramp along the clipped top with my brain of fire, and my return draggled and dripping an hour late for dinner, of my writing and rewriting, of my tears and black depression, of the pens I wore out, and the choirs of paper I spoiled. And finally of the ecstasy of the day when the piece began to move and the characters to live, I need not speak. Anyone who has ever written will know the sensations. James must have gone through a hundred times what I went through once. At last, at long last, the play was finished. For two days I gloated alone over the great pile of manuscript. Then I went to my mother. My diffidence was exquisite. It was all I could do to tell her the nature of my request when I spoke to her after lunch. At last she understood that I had written a play and wished to read it to her. She took me to the bow window with gentle solicitude and waited for me to proceed. At first she encouraged me for I faltered over my opening words. But as I warmed my work and as my embarrassment left me, she no longer spoke. Her eyes were fixed intently upon the blue space beyond the lilac. I read on and on till at length my voice trailed over the last line, rose glantly at the last fence, the single word curtained and abruptly broke. The strain had been too much for me. Tenderly my mother drew me to the sofa and quietly with closed eyelids I lay there until in the soft cool of the evening I asked for her verdict. Seeing as she did instantly that it would be more dangerous to deny my request and to exceed to it, she spoke. That there is an absence, my dear Margie, of any relationship with life that not a single character is in any degree human, that passion and virtue and vice and real feeling are wanting, this surprises me more than I can tell you. I had expected to listen to a natural, ordinary, unactable episode arranged more or less in psycho-muthics. There is no work so scholarly and engaging as the amateurs. But in your play I am amazed to find the touch of the professional and experienced playwright. Yes, my dear, you have proved that you happen to possess the quality, one that is most difficult to acquire, of surrounding a situation which is improbable enough to be convincing with that absurdly mechanical conversation which theater-going public demands. As your mother I am disappointed. I had hoped for originality. As your literary well-wisher I stifle my maternal feelings and congratulate you unreservedly. I thanked my mother effusively. I think I cried a little. She said affectionately that the hour had been one of great interest to her, and she added that she would be glad to be consulted with regard to the steps I contemplated taking in my literary future. She then resumed her book. I went to my room and re-read the last letter I had had from James. The Barrel Club, Covent Garden, London. My darling Margie, I am writing this line simply and solely for the selfish pleasure I gain from the act of writing to you. I know everything will come right some time or other, but at present I am suffering from a bad attack of the blues. I am like a general who has planned out a brilliant attack and realizes that he must fail for one of sufficient troops to carry a position on the taking of which the whole success of the assault depends. Briefly, my position is like this. My name is pretty well known in a small sort of way among editors and the like as that of a man who can turn out fairly good stuff. Besides this I have many influential friends. You see where this brings me? I am in the middle of my attacking movement and I have not been beaten back, but the key to the enemy's position is still uncaptured. You know what this key is from my other letters. It's the stage. Ah, Margie, one acting play, only one. It would mean everything. Apart from the actual triumph and the direct profits, it would bring so much with it. The enemy's flank would be turned and the rest of the battle would become a mere rout. I should have an accepted position in the literary world which would convert all the other avenues to wealth on which I have my eye instantly into royal roads. Obstacles would vanish. The fact that I was a successful playwright would make the acceptance of the sort of work I am doing now inevitable and I should get paid 10 times as well for it. And it would mean, well, you know what it would mean, don't you? Darling Margie, tell me again that I have your love, that the waiting is not too hard, that you believe in me. Dearest, it will come right in the end. Nothing can prevent that. Love and the will of a man have always beaten time and fate. Right to me, dear, ever your devoted James. How utterly free from thought of self. His magnificent loyalty forgot the dreadful tension of his own great battle and pictured only the tedium of waiting which it was my part to endure. I finished my letter to James very late that night. It was a very long and explanatory letter and it enclosed my play. The main point I aimed at was not to damp his spirits. He would, I knew well, see that the play was suitable for staging. He would, in short, see that I, an inexperienced girl, had done what he, a trained professional writer, had failed to do. Lest, therefore, his peak should kill admiration and pleasure when he received my work, and the road is one begging of favor. Here, I said, we have the means to achieve all we want. Do not, oh, do not criticize. I have written down the words, but the conception is yours. The play was inspired by you, but for you I should never have begun it. Take my play, James. Take it as your own, for yours it is. Put your name to it and produce it if you love me under your own signature. If this hurts your pride, I will word my request differently. You alone are able to manage the business side of the production. You know the right men to go to. To approach them on behalf of a stranger's work is far less likely to lead to success. I have assumed you will see that the play is certain to be produced, but that will only be so if you adopt it as your own. Claim the authorship and all will be well. Much more, I wrote to James in the same strain, and my reward came next day in the shape of a telegram. But thankfully, cloister. Of the play and its reception by the public there is no need to speak. The criticisms were all favorable. Neither the praise of the critics nor the applause of the public aroused any trace of jealousy in James. Their unanimous note of praise has been a source of pride to him. He is proud, odd joy, that I am to be his wife. I have lauded the last page of this commonplace love story of mine. The moon has come out from behind a cloud, and the whole bay is one vast sheet of silver. I could sit here at my bedroom window and look at it all night. But then I should be sure to oversleep myself and be late for breakfast. I shall read what I have written once more, and then I shall go to bed. I think I shall wear my white muslin tomorrow. End of Ms. Margaret Goodwin's narrative. End of Section 3. End of Part 1. Section 4 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 2, Chapter 1. The Invasion of Bohemia. James Orlbar Cloyster's narrative. It is curious to reflect that my marriage, which takes place today week, destroys once and for all my life's ambition. I have never won through to the goal I longed for, and now I never shall. Ever since I can remember, I have yearned to be known as a Bohemian. That was my ambition. I have ceased to struggle now. Married Bohemians live in Oakley Street, Kings Road, Chelsea. We are to rent a house in Halcott Place. Three years have passed since the excellent but unsteady steamship Ibex brought me from Guernsey to Southampton. It was a sleepy, hot, and sticky wreck that answered to the name of James Orlbar Cloyster that morning. But I had my first youth and 40 pounds, so that soap and water, followed by coffee and an omelet, soon restored me. The journey to Waterloo gave me opportunity for tobacco and reflection. What chiefly exercised me, I remember, was the problem, whether it was possible to be a Bohemian and at the same time to be in love. Bohemia I looked on as a region where one became inevitably entangled with women of unquestionable charm but dealt for morality. There were supper parties, festive gatherings in the old studio, the bet, Lucille, the artist's ball. Were these things possible for a man with an honest, earnest, wholehearted affection? The problem engaged me tensely till my ticket was collected at Vox Hall. Just there the solution came. I would be a Bohemian but a misogynist. People would say, dear old Jimmy Cloyster, how he hates women. It would add to my character a pleasant touch of dignity and reserve, which would rather accentuate my otherwise irresponsible way of living. Little did the good Bohemians of the Metropolis know how keen a recruit the boat train was bringing to them. As a Piedotère, I selected a cheap and dingy hotel in York Street, and from this base, I determined to locate my proper sphere. Chelsea was the first place that occurred to me. There was St. John's Wood, of course, but that was such a long way off. Chelsea was comparatively near to the heart of things, and I had heard that one might find there artistic people whose hand to mouth Saturnalian existence was redolent of that exquisite gaiety, which so attracted my own casual temperament. Sallying out next morning into the brilliant sunshine and the dusty rattle of York Street, I felt a sense of elation at the thought that the time for action had come. I was in London, London, the home of the fragrant motor omnibus in the night-blooming hooligan. London, the battlefield of the literary aspirants since Caxton invented the printing press. It seemed to me, as I walked firmly across Westminster Bridge, that Margie gazed at me with the love-light in her eyes, and that a species of amorous telepathy from Guernsey was girding me for the fight. Manresa Road, I had once heard mentioned as being the heart of Bohemian Chelsea. To Manresa Road, accordingly, I went by way of St. James's Park, Buckingham Palace Road, and Lower Sloan Street, thence to Sloan Square. Here I paused, for I knew that I had reached the last outpost of respectable, inartistic London. How sudden, I slowly acquiesced, is the change. Here I am in Sloan Square, regular, business-like, and unimaginative, while a few hundred yards away, King's Road leads me into the very midst of genius, starvation, and possibly free love. Sloan Square, indeed, gave me the impression not so much of a suburb as of the suburban portion of a great London railway terminus. It was positively pretty. People were shopping with comparative leisure. Omnibus horses were being rubbed down and watered on the west side of the square, out of the way of the mainstream of traffic. A postman clearing the letterbox at the office stopped his work momentarily to read the contents of a postcard. For the moment, I understood Caesar's feelings on the brink of the Rubicon, and the emotions of Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. I was on the threshold of great events. Behind me was Orthodox London, before me the unknown. It was distinctly a caesarean glance, full of deliberate revolt that I bestowed upon the street called Sloan, that clean, orderly thoroughfare which leads to night's bridge and fence, either to the respectabilities of Kensington or the plush of Piccadilly. Setting my hat at a wild angle, I stepped with a touch of abandon along the King's Road to meet the charming and powerist artists whom our country refuses to recognize. My first glimpse of the Manresa Road was, I confess, a complete disappointment. Never was Bohemian as a more handicapped by its setting than that of Chelsea if the Manresa Road was to be taken as a criterion. Along the uninviting uniformity of this street, no trace of unorthodoxy was to be seen. There came no merry, roistering laughter from attic windows, no talented figures of idle geniuses fetched pints of beer from the public house at the corner, no one dressed in an ancient ulster and a battered straw hat and puffing enormous clouds of blue smoke from a treasured clay pipe gazed philosophically into space from a doorway. In point of fact, saved for a most conventional butcher boy, I was alone in the street. Then the explanation flashed upon me. I had been seen approaching. The word had been passed round, a stranger. The click resents intrusion. It lies hid. These gay fellows see me all the time and are secretly amused, but they did not know with whom they have to deal. I have come to join them and join them, I will. I am not easily beaten. I will outlast them. The joke shall be eventually against them at some eccentric supper. I shall chaff them about how they tried to elude me and failed. The hours passed. Still, no Bohemians. I began to grow hungry. I sprang on to a passing bus. It took me to Victoria. I lunched at the Shakespeare Hotel, smoked a pipe, and went out into the sunlight again. It had occurred to me that night was perhaps the best time for trapping my shy quarry. Possibly the rebels did not begin in Manresa Road till darkness had fallen. I spent the afternoon and evening in the park, dined at Lyon's popular cafe. It must be remembered that I was not yet a Bohemian and consequently owed no deference to the traditions of the order. And returned at nine o'clock to the Manresa Road. Once more I drew blank. A barrel organ played cakewalk airs in the middle of the road, but it played to an invisible audience. No bearded men danced cancans around it, shouting merry jests to one another. Solitude reigned. I wait. The duel continues. What grim determination, what perseverance can these Bohemians put into a mad jest? I find myself thinking how much better it would be were they to apply to their art the same earnestness and fixity of purpose which they squandered on a practical joke. Evening fell. Lines began to be drawn down. Lamps were lit behind them one by one. Despair was gnawing at my heart, but still I waited. Then just as I was about to retire defeated I was arrested by the appearance of a house numbered 93A. At the first floor window sat a man. He was writing. I could see his profile, his long untidy hair. I understood in a moment. This was no ordinary writer. He was one of those Bohemians whose wit had been exercised upon me so successfully. He was a literary man, and though he enjoyed the sport as much as any of the others, he was under the absolute necessity of writing his copy up to time. Unobserved by his gay comrades he had slipped away to his work. They were still watching me, but he, probably owing to a contract as some journal, was obliged to give up his share in their merriment in toil with his pen. His pen fascinated me. I leaned against the railings of the house opposite and thralled. Ever and anon he seemed to be consulting one or other of the books of reference piled up on each side of him. Doubtless he was preparing a scholarly column for a daily paper. Presently a printer's devil would arrive clamoring for his copy. I knew exactly the sort of thing that happened. I had read about it in novels. How unerring is instinct, if properly cultivated? Hardly had the clock struck twelve when the emissaries, there were two of them, which showed the importance of their errand, walked briskly to number 93 A.N. knocked at the door. The writer heard the knock. He rose hurriedly and began to collect his papers. Meanwhile the knocking had been answered from within by the shooting of bolts, noises that were followed by the apparition of a female head. A few brief questions and the emissaries entered. The pause. The literature is warning the menials that their charge is sacred, that the sheets he has produced are impossible to replace. High words. Abrupt reopening of the front door, struggling humanity projected onto the pavement. Three persons, my scribe in the middle and emissary on either side stagger strangely past me. The scribe enters the purple night only under the stony compulsion of the emissaries. What does this mean? I have it. The emissaries have become overanxious. They dare not face the responsibility of conveying the priceless copy to Fleet Street. They have completely lost their nerve. They insist upon the author accompanying them to see with his own eyes that all is well. They do not wish posterity to hand their names down to eternal infamy as the men who lost blanks manuscript. So greatly against his will he has dragged off. My vigil is rewarded. Number 93 A. Harbers of Bohemian. Let it be inhabited also by me. I stepped across and rang the bell. The answer was a piercing scream. Ah-ha, I said to myself complacently, there are more Bohemians than one then in this house. The female head again appeared. Not another. Oh sir, say there ain't another one. It said the head in a passionate cockney accent. That is precisely what there is, I replied. I want what for? For something moderate. Well that's a comfort in a why. Which of them is that you want? The first floor back? I have no doubt the first floor back would do quite well. My words had a curious effect. She scrutinized me suspiciously. Oh, she said with a sniff. You don't seem to care much which it is you get. I don't, I said not particularly. Look here, she exclaimed. You just pop it, see. I don't want none of your flarks here and what's more I won't have them. I don't believe you're a copper tall. I'm not, far from it. Then what do you mean coming here, saying you want my first floor back? But I do, or any other room if that is occupied. Ow, room, why didn't you sigh so? You'll pardon me sir, if I've said anything hasty like. I thought about my mistake. Not at all, can you let me have a room? I noticed that the gentleman whom I have just seen she cut me short. I was about to explain that I was a Bohemian, too. He's gone for a stroll, sir. I expect him back every moment. He's forgot his latch-key. That's why I'm sitting up for him. Mrs. Driver, my name is, sir. That's my name and well-known in the neighborhood. Mrs. Driver spoke earnestly but breathlessly. I do not contemplate asking you, Mrs. Driver, to give me the apartments already engaged by the literary gentleman. Yes, sir, she interpolated. That's what he was, I mean is, a literary gent. But have you not got another room vacant? The second floor back, sir. Very comfortable, nice room, sir. Shady in the morning and against the setting sun. Had the meteorological conditions been adverse to the point of malignancy, I should have closed with her terms. Simple agreements were ratified then and there by the light of a candle in the passage. And I left the house, promising to come in in the course of the following afternoon. End of section four. Section five of Not George Washington by P.G. Woodhouse. The Slibervox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P.G. Woodhouse. Part two, chapter two, I evacuate Bohemia. James Orlbar Cloyster's narrative continued. The three weeks which I spent at number 93A mark an epoch in my life. It was during that period that I came near us to realizing my ambition to be a Bohemian. And at the end of the third week, for reasons which I shall state, I deserted Bohemia firmly and with no longing lingering glance behind and settled down to the prosaic task of grubbing earnestly for money. The second floor back had a cupboard of a bedroom leading out of it. Even I, desirous as I was of seeing romance in everything, could not call my lodgings anything but dingy, dark and commonplace. They were just like a million other of London's mean lodgings. The window looked out over a sea of backyards bounded by tall, depressing houses and intersected by clothes lines. A cat's club, social, musical, and pugilistic used to meet on the wall to the right of my window. One or two dissipated trees gave the finishing touch of gloom to the scene, nor was the interior of the room more cheerful. The furniture had been put in during the reign of George III and last dusted in that of William and Mary. A black horsehair sofa ran along one wall. There was a deal table, a chair, and a rickety bookcase. It was a room for a realist to write in and my style, such as it was, was bright and optimistic. Once in, I set about the task of ornamenting my abode with much figure. I had my own ideas of mural decoration. I papered the walls with editorial rejection forms of which I was beginning to have a representative collection. Properly arranged, these looked very striking. There is a good deal of variety about them. The ones I liked best were those which I have received at the rate of three a week, bearing a very pleasing picture in green of the publishing offices at the top of the sheet of note paper. Scattered about in sufficient quantities, these lend an air of distinction to a room. Pearson's magazine also supplies a taking line in rejection forms. Punches I never cared for very much. Need I grant you, but to my mind too cold. I like a touch of color in a rejection form. In addition to these, I purchased from the grocer at the corner a collection of pictorial advertisements. What I had really wanted was the theatrical poster, printed and signed by well-known artists. But the grocer didn't keep them and I was impatient to create my proper atmosphere. My next step was to buy a corn cob pipe into quantity of rank jet black tobacco. I hated both and kept them more as ornaments than for use. Then having hacked my table about with a knife and battered it with a poker till it might have been the table of a shaggy and unrecognized genius, I settled down to work. I was not a brilliant success. I had that little knowledge which has held to be such a dangerous thing. I had not plunged into the literary profession without learning a few facts about it. I had read nearly every journalistic novel and hints on writing for the paper's book that had ever been published. In theory, I knew all that there was to be known about writing. Now all my authorities were very strong on one point. Right, they said, very loud and clear. Not what you like, but what editors like. I smiled to myself when I started. I felt that I had stolen a march on my rivals. All around me, I said to myself, are young authors bombarding editors with essays on Lucretius, translations of Marshall and disquisitions on Ionic comedy. I know too much for that. I work on a different plan. Study the papers and see what they want, said my authorities. I studied the papers. Some wanted one thing apparently, others another. There was one group of three papers whose needs seemed to coincide and I could see an article rejected by one paper being taken by another. This offered me a number of chances instead of one. I could back my manuscripts to win or for a place. I began a serious siege of these three papers. By the end of the second week, I had curious freaks of eccentric testators, singular scenes in court, actors who have died on the stage, curious scenes in church and seven others rejected by all three. Somehow this sort of writing is not so easy as it looks. A man who was on the staff of a weekly once told me that he had had 2,000 of these articles printed since he started, poor devil. He had the knack. I could never get it. I sent up 53 in all in the first year of my literary life and only two stuck. I got 15 shillings from one periodical for men who have missed their own weddings and later a guinea from the same for single day marriages. That paper has a penchant for the love interest. Yet when I sent it my duchesses who have married dustmen, it came back by the early post next day. That was, to me, the worst part of those gray days. I had my victories, but they were always followed by a series of defeats. I would have a manuscript accepted by an editor. Hello, I would say, here's the man at last, the editor who believes in me, let the thing go on. I would send him off another manuscript. He would take it. Victory by Jove, then wonk. Back would come my third effort with the courtest of refusals. I always imagined editors in those days to be pedish whimsical men who amused themselves by taking up a beginner and then wearying of the sport, dropped him back into the slime from which they had picked him. In the intervals of articles I wrote short stories, again for the same three papers. As before, I studied these papers carefully to see what they wanted, then worked out a mechanical plot invariably with a quarrel in the first part, an accident and a rescue in the middle, and a reconciliation at the end. Told it in a style that makes me hot all over when I think of it and sent it up. In closing, a stamped, dressed envelope in case of rejection, a very useful precaution as it always turned out. It was the little knowledge to which I have referred above which kept my walls so thickly covered with rejection forms. I was in precisely the same condition as a man who has been taught the rudiments of boxing. I knew just enough to hamper me and not enough to do any good. If I had simply blundered straight at my work and written just what occurred to me in my own style, I should have done much better. I have a sense of humor. I deliberately stifled it. For it, I substituted a grisly kind of playfulness. My hero called my heroine little woman in the concluding passage where he kissed her was written in a sly, roguish vein for which I suppose I shall have to atone in the next world. Only the editor of the Colony Hatch Argus could have accepted work like mine, yet I toiled on. It was about the middle of my third week at number 93A that I definitely decided to throw over my authorities and work by the light of my own intelligence. Nearly all my authorities had been very severe on the practice of verse writing. It was, they asserted, what all young beginners tried to do, and it was the one thing editors would never look at. In the first order of my revolt, I determined to do a set of verses. It happened that the weather had been very bad for the last few days. After a month and a half of sunshine, the rain had suddenly begun to fall. I took this as my topic. It was raining at the time. I wrote a satirical poem full of quaint rhymes. I had always had rather a turn for serious verse. It struck me that the rain might be treated poetically as well as satirically. That night I sent off two sets of verses to a daily and an evening paper. Next day both were in print with my initials to them. I began to see light. Verse is the thing, I said. I will reorganize my campaign. First the skirmishers, then the real attack. I will peg along with verses till somebody begins to take my stories and articles. I felt easier in my mind than I had felt for some time. A story came back by the nine o'clock post from a monthly magazine to which I had sent it from Mirabrovato, but the thing did not depress me. I got out my glue pot and began to fasten the rejection form to the wall, whistling a lively air as I did so. While I was engaged in this occupation, there was a testy wrap at the door and Mrs. Driver appeared. She eyed my maneuvers with the rejection form with a severe frown. After a preliminary sniff, she embarked upon a rapid lecture on what she called my irregular and untidy habits. I had turned her second floor back, she declared, into a pigsty. Such a litter, she said, but I protested this is a Bohemian house, is it not? She appeared so shocked, indeed so infuriated that I dared not give her time to answer. The gentleman below, he's not very tidy, I added diplomatically. What gent below, said Mrs. Driver? I reminded her of the night of my arrival. All in, she said, shaken, while he's not come back. Mrs. Driver, I said sternly, you said he'd gone out for a stroll. I refused to believe that any man would stroll for three weeks. So I did say it, was the defiant reply. I said it so as you shouldn't be put off coming. You looked a steady young fella and I wanted to let. Wish I'd told you the truth if it had stopped you. What is the truth? He was a wrong and he was. Writing begging letters to parties as was a bit soft. That was his little game. But he was a bit too clever one day and the coppers got him. Now you know. Mrs. Driver paused after this outburst and allowed her eye to wander slowly and ominously round my walls. I was deeply moved. My one link with Bohemia had turned out a fraud. Mrs. Driver's voice roused me from my meditations. I must ask you to be good enough, if you please, kindly to remove those there bits of paper. She pointed to the rejection forms. I hesitated. I felt that it was a thing that ought to be broken gently. The fact is, Mrs. Driver, I said, and no one can regret it more deeply than I do, the fact is they're stuck on with glue. Two minutes later I had received my marching orders and the room was still echoing with the slam of the doors that closed behind the indignant form of my landlady. End of section five. Section six of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part two, chapter three, The Orb. James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued. The problem of lodgings in London is an easy one to a man with an adequate supply of money in his pocket. The only difficulty is to select the most suitable to single out from the eager crowd the ideal landlady. Evicted from number 93A, it seemed to me that I had better abandon Bohemia, postpone my connection with that land of lotus-eaters for the moment, while I provided myself with the means of paying rent and buying dinners. Farther down the King's Road there were comfortable rooms to be had for a moderate sum per week. They were prosaic, but inexpensive. I chose Walpole Street. A fairly large bed-sitting room was vacant at number 23. I took it and settled down seriously to make my writing pay. There were advantages in Walpole Street which Manresa Road had lacked. For one thing, there was more air and it smelled less than the Manresa Road air. Walpole Street is bounded by Burton Court where the household brigade plays cricket and the breezes from the river come to it without much interruption. There was also more quiet. Number 23 is the last house in the street. And even when I sat with my window open, the noise of traffic from the King's Road was faint and rather pleasant. It was an excellent spot for a man who meant to work. Except for a certain difficulty in getting my landlady and her daughters out of the room when they came to clear away my meals and talk about the better days they had seen, and a few umbrellas with the eight cats which infested the house, it was the best spot I think that I could have chosen. Living a life ruled by the strictest economy I gradually forged ahead. First, light and serious continued my long suit. I generally managed to place two of each brand a week and that meant two guineas, sometimes more. One particularly pleasing thing about this verse writing was that there was no delay as there was with my prose. I would write a set of verses for a daily paper after tea, walk to Fleet Street with them at half past six, thus getting a little exercise, leave them at the office, and I would see them in print in the next morning's issue. Payment was equally prompt. The rule was send in your bill before five on Wednesday and call for payment on Friday at seven. Thus I had always enough money to keep me going during the week. In addition to verses, I kept turning out a great quantity of prose, fiction, and otherwise, but without much success. The visits of the postman were the big events of the day at that time. Before I had been in Walpole Street a week, I could tell by ear the difference between a rejected manuscript and an ordinary letter. There was a certain solid plop about the fall of the former which not even a long envelope full of proofs can imitate successfully. I worked extraordinarily hard at that time, all day sometimes. The thought of Margie waiting in Guernsey kept me writing when I should have done better to have taken a rest. My earnings were small in proportion to my labor. The guineas I made, except from verse, were like the ounce of gold to the ton of ore. I no longer papered the walls with rejection forms, but this was from choice, not from necessity. I had plenty of material had I cared to use it. I made a little money, of course. My takings for the first month amounted to nine cons, 10 shillings. And that's double figures in the next, with 11 pounds, one shilling, six pence. Then I dropped to seven pounds, zero shillings, and six pence. It was not starvation, but it was still more unlike matrimony. But at the end of the sixth month, there happened to me what, looking back, I considered to be the greatest piece of good fortune of my life. I received a literary introduction. Some authorities scoff at literary introductions. They say that editors read everything whether they know the author or not. So they do. And if the work is not good, a letter to the editor from a man who once met his cousin at a garden party is not likely to induce him to print it. There is no journalistic ring in the sense in which the word is generally used. But there are undoubtedly a certain number of men who know the ropes and can act as pilots in a strange sea. And an introduction brings one into touch with them. There is a world of difference between contributing blindly work, which seems suitable to the style of a paper and sending in matter designed to attract the editor personally. Mr. McCray, whose pupil I had been at Cambridge, was the author of my letter of introduction. At St. Gabriel's, Mr. McCray had been a man for whom I entertained awe and respect. Likes and dislikes, in connection with one's tutor, seemed outside the question. Only a chance episode had shown me that my tutor was a mortal with a mortal's limitations. We were bicycling together one day along the Trumpington Road when a form appeared coming to meet us. My tutor's speech grew more and more halting as the form came nearer. At last he stopped talking altogether and wobbled in his saddle. The man bowed to him, and as if he had won through some fiery ordeal, he shot ahead like a gay professional rider. When I drew a level with him, he said, that Mr. Cloyster is my tailor. Mr. McCray was typical of the university Don, who is Scott. He had married the senior historian of Newnham. He lived and still lives by proxy. His publishers order his existence. His honeymoon had been placed at the disposal of these gentlemen, and they had allotted to that period in addition of Aristotle's ethics. Aristotle accordingly received the most scholarly attention from the recently united couple somewhere on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. All the reviews were satisfactory. In my third year at St. Gabriel's, it was popularly supposed that Master Pericles Ashelus, Mr. McCray's infant son, was turned to correct my Latin prose, though my ambics were withheld from him at the request of the family doctor. The letter which Pericles Ashelus's father had addressed to me was one of the pleasantest surprises I have ever had. It ran as follows. St. Gabriel's College, Cambridge. My dear Cloyster, the divergence of our duties and pleasures during your residence here caused us to see but little of each other. Would it had been otherwise? And too often our intercourse had on my side a distinctly professional flavor. Your attitude towards your religious obligations was, I fear, something to seek. Indeed, the line, pastor decorum coltorette infrequence might have been directly inspired by your views on the keeping of chapels. On the other hand, your contributions to our musical festival had the true Aristophanes Panache. I hear you are devoting yourself to literature and I beg that you will avail yourself of the enclosed note which is addressed to a personal friend of mine. Believe me, your well-wisher, David Ossian McCray. The enclosure bore this inscription. Charles Furman Esquire, offices of the orb, strand London. I had received the letter at breakfast. I took a cab and drove straight to the orb. A painted hand marked editorial indicated a flight of stairs. At the top of these I was confronted by a glass door beyond which entrenched behind a desk at a cynical-looking youth. A smaller boy in the background talked into a telephone. Both were giggling. On seeing me, the slightly larger of the two advanced with a half-hearted attempt at solemnity, though unable to resist a partheon shaft at his companion, who was seized on the instant with a paroxysm of suppressed hysteria. My letter was taken down a mysterious stone passage. After some waiting the messenger returned with the request that I would come back at eleven as Mr. Furman would be very busy till then. I went out into the strand and sought a neighboring hostelry. It was essential that I should be brilliant at the coming interview if only spiritously brilliant. And I wished to remove a sensation of stomachic emptiness such as I had been want to feel at school when approaching the headmaster's study. At eleven I returned and asked again for Mr. Furman and presently he appeared, a tall, thin man who gave one the impression of being in a hurry. I knew him by reputation as a famous quarter-miler. He had been president of the OUAC some years back. He looked as if at any moment he might dash off in any direction at a quarter-mile pace. We shook hands and I tried to look intelligent. Sorry to have to keep you waiting, he said, as we walked to his club, but we are always rather busy between ten and eleven, putting the column through. Gresham and I do on your way, you know. The last copy has to be down by half past ten. We arrived at the club and sat in a corner of the lower smoking-room. McCrae says that you are going in for writing. Of course I'll do anything I can, but it isn't easy to help a man. As it happens, though, I can put you in the way of something if it's your style of work. Do you ever do verse? I felt like a batsman who sees a slow full toss sailing through the air. It's the only thing I can get taken, I said. I've had quite a lot in the chronicle and occasional bits in other papers. He seemed relieved. Oh, that's all right then, he said. You know on your way. Perhaps you'd care to come in and do that for a bit. It's only holiday work, but it'll last five weeks. And if you do it all right, I can get you the whole of the holiday work on the column. That comes to a good lot in the year. We're always taking odd days off. Can you come up at a moment's notice? Easily, I said. Then, you see, if you did that, you would drop into the next vacancy on the column. There's no saying when one may occur. It's like the general election. It may happen tomorrow or not for years. Still, you'd be on the spot in case. It's awfully good of you. Not at all. As a matter of fact, I was rather in difficulties about getting a holiday man. I'm off to Scotland the day after tomorrow and I had to find a sub. Well, then will you come in on Monday? All right. You've had no experience of newspaper work, have you? No. Well, all the work at the Orbs done between nine and eleven. You must be there at nine sharp. Literally sharp. I mean, not half-past. And you'd better do some stuff overnight for the first week or so. You'll find working in the office difficult till you get used to it. Of course, though, you'll always have Gresham there, so there's no need to get worried. He can fill the column himself if he's pushed. Four or five really good paragraphs a day and an occasional set of verses are all he'll want from you. I see. On Monday then, nine sharp. Goodbye. I walked home along Piccadilly with almost a cakewalk stride. At last I was in the inner circle. An orb cart passed me. I nodded cheerfully to the driver. He was one of us. End of Section Six. Section Seven of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part Two, Chapter Four. Julian Eversly. James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued. I determined to celebrate the occasion by dining out, going to a theater, and having supper afterwards, none of which things were ordinarily within my means. I had not been to a theater since I had arrived in town, and except on Saturday nights I always cooked my own dinner, a process which was cheap, and which appealed to the passion for Bohemianism, which I had not wholly cast out of me. The morning paper informed me that there were eleven musical comedies, three Shakespeare plays, a blank verse drama, and two comedies, last weeks, for me to choose from. I bought a stall at the Briggs Theater. Stanley Briggs, who afterwards came to bulk large in my small world, was playing there in a musical comedy which had had even more than the customary musical comedy success. London, my night, had always had an immense fascination for me. Coming out of the restaurant after supper, I felt no inclination to return to my lodgings and end the greatest night of my life tamely with a book and a pipe. Here was I, a young man fortified by an excellent supper in the heart of Stevenson's London. Why should I have known new Arabian night adventure? I would stroll about for half an hour and give London a chance of living up to its reputation. I walked slowly along Piccadilly and turned up Rupert Street, a magic name. Prince Florizel of Bohemia had ended his days there in his tobacconist divan. Mr. Gilbert's policeman forth had been discovered there by the men of London at the end of his long wanderings through Soho. Probably, if the truth were known, Rudolph Rassendill had spent part of his time there. It could not be that Rupert Street would send me empty away. My confidence was not abused. Turning into Rupert Court, a dark and suggestive passage some short distance up the street on the right, I found a curious little comedy being played. A door gave on to the deserted passageway, and on each side of it stood a man, the lurcher type of man that is bread of London streets. The door opened inwards. Another man stepped out. The hands of one of the lurchers flew to the newcomer's mouth. The hands of the other lurcher flew to the newcomer's pockets. At that moment I advanced. The lurchers vanished noiselessly and instantaneously. Their victim held out his hand. Come in, won't you? He said, smiling sleepily at me. I followed him in, murmuring something about caught in the act. He repeated the phrase as we went upstairs. Caught in the act? Yes, they are ingenious creatures. Let me introduce myself. My name is Julian Eversley. Sit down, won't you? Excuse me for a moment. He crossed to a writing table. Julian Eversley inhabited a single room of irregular shape. It was small and situated immediately under the roof. One side had a window which overlooked Rupert Court. The view from it was, however, restricted because the window was inset, so that the walls projecting on either side prevented one seeing more than a yard or two of the court. The room contained a hammock, a large tin bath propped up against the wall, a big wardrobe, a couple of bookcases, a deal writing table at which the proprietor was now sitting with a pen in his mouth, gazing at the ceiling, and a demand-like formation of rugs and cube sugar boxes. The owner of this mixed lot of furniture wore a very faded blue-surge suit. The trousers bagged yet the knees and the coat threadbare at the elbows. He had the odd expression which green eyes combined with red hair give a man. Caught in the act, he was murmuring, caught in the act. The phrase seemed to fascinate him. I had established myself on the demand and was puffing at a cigar, which I had bought by way of setting the coping stone on my knight's extravagance, before he got up from his writing. Those fellows, he said, producing a bottle of whiskey and a siphon from one of the lower drawers at the wardrobe, did me a double service. They introduced me to you, say when, and they gave me, when, an idea. But how did it happen? I asked. Quite simple, he answered. You see, my friends, when they call on me late at night, can't get in by knocking at the front door. It is a shop door and is locked early. Van Cot, my landlord, is a baker, and as he has to be up making muffins somewhere about five in the morning, we all have our troubles. He does not stop up late. So people who want me go into the court and see whether my lamp is burning by the window. If it is, they stand below and shout, Julian, till I open the door into the court. That's what happened tonight. I heard my name called, went down, and walked into the arms of the enterprising gentleman whom you chance to notice. They must have been very hungry, for even if they had carried the job through, they could not have expected to make their fortunes. In point of fact, they would have cleared one in three pence. But when you're hungry, you can see no further than the pit of your stomach. Do you know I almost sympathize with the poor brutes? People sometimes say to me, What are you? I have often half of mine to reply, I have been hungry. My stars, be hungry once and you're educated if you don't die of it for a lifetime. This sort of talk from a stranger might have been the prelude to an appeal for financial assistance. He dissipated that half-born thought. Don't be uneasy, he said. You have not been lured up here by the ruse of a clever borrower. I can do a bit of touching when in the mood, mind you, but you're safe. You are here because I see that you are a pleasant fellow. Thank you, I said. Besides, he continued, I am not hungry at present. In fact, I shall never be hungry again. You're lucky, I remarked. I am. I am the fortunate possessor of the knack of writing advertisements. Indeed, I said, feeling awkward, for I saw that I ought to be impressed. Ah, he said, laughing outright. You're not impressed in the least, really. But I'll ask you to consider what advertisements mean. First, they are the life essence of every newspaper, every periodical, and every book. Every book? Practically, yes. Most books contain some latent support of a fashion in clothes or food or drink, or of some pleasant spot or phase of benevolence or vice, all of which form the interest of one or other of the sections of society, which sections require publicity in all costs for their respective interests. I was about to probe searchingly into so optimistic a view of modern authorship, but he stalled me off by proceeding rapidly with his discourse. Apart, however, from the less obvious modes of advertising, you'll agree that this is the age of all ages for the man who can write puffs. Good wine needs no bush, has become a trade paradox. Judged by appearances, a commercial platitude, the man who is ambitious and industrious turns his trick of writing into purely literary channels and becomes a novelist. The man who is not ambitious and not industrious, and who does not relish the prospect of becoming a loafer in strand wine shops, writes advertisements. The gold-bearing area is always growing. It's a Tom Tiddler's ground. It is simply a question of picking up the gold and silver. The industrious man picks up as much as he wants. Personally, I am easily content. An occasional nugget satisfies me. Here's tonight's nugget, for instance. I took the paper he handed to me. It bore the words, Caught in the Act. Caught in the act of drinking Skeffington's Slogan, a man will always present a happy and smiling appearance. Skeffington's Slogan adds a crowning pleasure to prosperity, and is a consolation and adversity of all grocers. Skeffington's, he said, pay me well. I'm worth money to them, and they know it. At present they are giving me a retainer to keep my work exclusively for them. The stuff they have put on the market is neither better nor worse than the average Slogan, but my advertisements have given it a tremendous vogue. It is the only brand that grocers stock. Since I made the firm issue a weekly paper called Skeffington's Poultry Farmer, Free to All Country Customers, the consumption of Slogan has been enormous among agricultureists. My idea, too, of supplying suburban buyers grottis with a small drawing book, skeleton illustrations, and four-colored chalks has made the drink popular with children. You must have seen the poster I designed. There's a reduced copy behind you. The father of a family is unwrapping a bottle of Skeffington's Slogan. His little ones crowd round him, laughing and clapping their hands. The man's wife is seen peeping roguishly in through the door. Beneath is the popular catchphrase, ain't mother going to have none? You're a genius, I cried. Hardly that, he said. At least I have no infinite capacity for taking pains. I am one of nature's slackers. Despite my talent for drawing up advertisements, I am often in great straits owing to my natural inertia and a passionate love of sleep. I sleep on the slightest provocation or excuse. I will back myself to sleep against anyone in the world. No age, weight, or color barred. You, I should say, are of a different temperament. More energetic. The get-on-or-get-out sort of thing. The young hustler. Rather, I replied briskly, I am in love. So am I, said Julian Eversly, hopelessly, however. Give us a match. After that, we confirmed our friendship by smoking a number of pipes together. End of Section 7. Section 8 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 2, Chapter 5, The Column. James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued. After the first week, On Your Way on the Orb offered hardly any difficulty. The source of material was the morning papers which were placed in a pile on our table at nine o'clock. The half-penny papers were our principal support. Gresham and I each took one and picked it clean. We attended first to the subject of the day. This was generally good for two or three paragraphs of verbal fooling. There was a sort of tradition that the first half-dozen paragraphs should be topical. The rest might be topical or not, as occasion served. The column usually opened with a one-line pun, Gresham's invention. Gresham was a man of unparalleled energy and ingenuity. He had created several of the typical characters who appeared from time to time On Your Way. As, for instance, Mrs. Jenkinson, Mrs. Malaprop, and Jones Jr., our howler manufacturing schoolboy. He was also a stout apostle of a mode of expression which he called funny language. Thus, instead of writing boldly, there is a rumor that, I was taught to say, it has got about that. This sounds funnier in print, so Gresham said. I could never see it myself. Gresham had a way of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, and folding it in funny language, adding a pun and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of paraphrases and a telling command of adverbs. Here is an illustration. An account was given one morning by the central news of the breaking into of a house at Johnsonville, Michigan by a negro who had stolen a quantity of greenbacks. The thief escaping across some fields was attacked by a cow, which, after severely injuring the negro, ate the greenbacks. Gresham's unacknowledged version of the episode ran as follows. The sleepy god had got the stranglehold on John Denville when Caesar Bones, a colored gentleman, entered John's house at Johnsonville, Michigan, about midnight. Did the nocturnal caller disturb his slumbering host? No, Caesar Bones has the finer feelings. But as he was noiselessly retiring, what did he see? Why a pile of greenbacks which John had thoughtlessly put away in a fireproof safe. To prevent the story being cut out by the editor, who revised all the proofs of the column with the words, too long scribbled against it, Gresham continued his tale in another paragraph. Decemberian Secure, murmured the visitor to himself, transplanning the notes in a neighborly way into his pocket, marked the sequel. The noble Caesar met on his homeward path an irritable cuddster. The encounter was brief. Caesar went weak in the second round and took the count in the third. Elated by her triumph and hungry from her exertions, the horrid quadruped nosed the wad of paper money and daringly devoured it. Caesar has told the court that if he is convicted of felony, he will arraign the owner of the ostrich-like bovine on a charge of receiving stolen goods. The owner merely ejaculates, blackmail. On his day Gresham could write the column and have a hundred lines over by ten o'clock. I, too, found plenty of copy as a rule, though I continued my practice of doing a few paragraphs overnight. But every now and then fearful days would come when the papers were empty of material for our purposes, and when two out of every half-dozen paragraphs which we did succeed in hammering out were returned deleted on the editor's proof. The tension at these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that, on your way, was fifty lines short. At ten o'clock he would come in person and be plaintive. Gresham, the old hand, applied to such occasions desperate remedies. He would manufacture out of even the most pointless item of news two paragraphs by adding to his first the words, this reminds us of Mr. Punch's famous story. He would then go through the bound volumes of punch, we had about a dozen in the room, with lightning speed, until he chanced upon a more or less appropriate tag. Those were mornings when verses would be padded out from three stanzas to five. Gresham turning them out under fifteen minutes. He had a wonderful facility for verse. As a last expedient one fell back upon a standing column, a moth-eaten collection of alleged jests which had been set up years ago to meet the worst emergencies. It was, however, considered a confession of weakness and a degradation to use this column. We had also in our drawer a book of American witticisms published in New York. To cut one out, preface it with, the Good American story comes to hand, and pin it on a slip was a pleasing variation of the usual mode of constructing a paragraph. Gresham and I each had our favorite method. Personally, I had always a partiality for dealing with buffers. The brakes refused to act and the train struck the buffers at the end of the platform, invariably suggested that if elderly gentlemen would abstain from loitering on railway platforms, they would not get hurt in this way. Gresham had a similar liking for turns. The performance at the frivolous music hall was in full swing when the scenery was noticed to be on fire. The audience got a turn, an extra turn. Julian Aversley, to whom I told my experiences on the orb, said he admired the spirit with which I entered into my duties. He said, moreover, that I had a future before me, not only as a journalist, but as a writer. Nor, indeed, could I help seeing for myself that I was getting on. I was making a fair income, now, and had every prospect of making a much better one. My market was not restricted. Verses, articles, and fiction from my pen were being accepted with moderate regularity by many of the minor periodicals. My scope was growing distinctly wider. I found, too, that my work seemed to meet with a good deal more success when I sent it in from the orb, with a letter to the editor on orb note paper. All together my five weeks on the orb were invaluable to me. I ought to have paid rather than have taken payment for working on the column. By the time Furman came back from Scotland to turn me out, I was a professional. I had learned the art of writing against time. I had learned to ignore noise, which, for a writer in London, is the most valuable quality of all. Every day at the orb, I had had to turn out my stuff for the hum of the strand traffic in my ears, varied by an occasional barrel organ, the whistling of popular songs by the printers, whose window faced ours, and the clatter of a typewriter in the next room. Often I had to turn out a paragraph or a verse while listening and making appropriate replies to some other member of the staff who had wandered into our room to pass the time of day or read out a bit of his own stuff which had happened to please him particularly. All this gave me a power of concentration without which writing is difficult in this city of noises. The friendship I formed with Gresham, too, besides being pleasant, was of infinite service to me. He knew all about the game. I followed his advice and prospered. His encouragement was as valuable as his advice. He was my pilot and saw me at great trouble to himself through the dangerous waters. I foresaw that the future held out positive hope that my marriage with Margaret would become possible, and yet, pausing in the midst of my castle building, I suffered a sense of revulsion. I had been brought up to believe that the only adjective that could be coupled with the noun journalism was precarious. Was I not, as Gresham would have said, solving an addition sum in infantile poultry before their mother, the feathered denizen of the farmyard had lured them from their shell? Was I not mistaking a flash in the pan for a genuine success? These thoughts numbed my fingers in the act of writing to Margaret. Instead, therefore, of the jubilant letter I had intended to send her, I wrote one of quite a different tone. I mentioned the arduous nature of my work. I referred to the struggle in which I was engaged. I indicated cleverly that I was a man of extraordinary courage battling with fate. I implied that I made just enough to live on. It would have been cruel to arouse expectations which might never be fulfilled. In this letter, accordingly, and in subsequent letters, I rather went to the opposite extreme. Out of pure regard for Margaret, I painted my case unnecessarily black. Considerations of a similar nature prompted me to keep on my lodging in Walpole Street. I had two rooms instead of one, but they were furnished severely and with nothing but the barest necessities. I told myself through it all that I loved Margaret as dearly as ever. Yet there were moments, and they seemed to come more frequently as the days went on, when I found myself wondering, did I really want to give up all this, the untidiness, the scratch meals, the nights with Julian? And when I was honest, I answered, no. Somehow, Margaret seemed out of place in this new world of mine. Section 9 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recorded by Deborah Lynn. Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Section 6. New Year's Eve. James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued. The morning of New Year's Eve was a memorable one for me. My first novel was accepted. Not an ambitious volume. It was rather short, and the plot was not obtrusive. The sporting gentleman who accepted it, however, Messrs. Proder and Wei, seemed pleased with it. Though, when I suggested a summon cash in advance of royalties, they displayed a most embarrassing coyness, and also, as events turned out, good sense. I carried the good news to Julian, whom I found as usual asleep in his hammock. I had fallen into the habit of calling on him after my orb work. He was generally sleepy when I arrived at half past eleven, and while we talked, I used to make his breakfast act as a sort of early lunch for myself. He said that the people of the house had begun by trying to make the arrival of his breakfast coincide with the completion of his toilet, that this had proved so irksome that they had struck, and that finally it had been agreed on both sides, that the meals should be put in his room at eleven o'clock, whether he was dressed or not. He said that he often saw his breakfast come in and would drowsily determined to consume it hot, but he had never had the energy to do so. Once, indeed, he had mistaken the time and had confidently expected that the morning of a hot breakfast had come at last. He was dressed by nine and had sat for two hours, gloating over the prospect of steaming coffee and frizzling bacon. On that particular morning, however, there had been some domestic tragedy, the firing of a chimney or the illness of a cook, and at eleven o'clock, not breakfast, but an apology for its absence had been brought to him. This embittered Julian. He gave up the unequal contest, and he has frequently confessed to me that cold breakfast is an acquired yet not unpleasant taste. He woke up when I came in, and after hearing my news and congratulating me, began to open the letters that lay on the table at his side. One of the envelopes had Skeffington's trademarks stamped upon it, and contained a banknote and a sheet closely typewritten on both sides. Half a second, Jimmy, said he, and began to read. I poured myself out a cup of cold coffee, and avoiding the bacon and eggs which lay embalmed in frozen grease, began to launch off bread and marmalade. I'll do it, he burst out when he had finished. It's a sweat, a fearful sweat, but— Skeffington's have written urging me to undertake a rather original advertising scheme. They're very pressing, and they've enclosed a tenor in advance. They want me to do them a tragedy in four acts. I sent them the scenario last week. I sketched out a skeleton plot in which the hero is addicted to a strictly moderate use of Skeffington's slo-jin. His wife adopts every conceivable measure to wean him from this harmless, even praiseworthy indulgence. At the end of the second act, she thinks she has cured him. He has promised to gratify what he regards as merely a capricious whim on her part. I will give—yes, I will give it up, darling—George, George! She falls on his neck. Over her shoulder he winks at the audience, who realize that there is more to come. Curtin. In act three the husband is seen sitting alone in his study. His wife is gone to a party. The man searches in a cupboard for something to read. Instead of a novel, however, he lights on a bottle of Skeffington's slo-jin. Instantly the old, overwhelming craving returns. He hesitates. What does it matter? She will never know. He gulps down glass after glass. He sinks into an intoxicated stupor. His wife enters. Curtin again. Act four—the draft of nectar tasted in the former act after a period of enforced abstinence has produced a deadly reaction. The husband, who previously improved his health, his temper, and his intellect by a strictly moderate use of Skeffington's slo-jin, has now become a ghastly dipsomaniac. His wife, realizing too late the awful effect of her idiotic antagonism to Skeffington's, experiences the keenest pangs of despair. She drinks laudanum and the tragedy is complete. Fine, I said, finishing the coffee. In a deferential post-script, said Julian, Skeffington suggests an alternative ending, that the wife should drink not laudanum but slo-jin and grow under its benign influence, resigned to the fate she has brought on her husband and herself. Resignation gives way to hope. She devotes her life to the care of the inebriate man, and by way of pathetic retribution she lives precisely long enough to nurse him back to sanity. Which finale do you prefer? Yours, I said. Thank you, said Julian, considerably gratified. So do I. It's tercer, more dramatic, and all together a better advertisement. Skeffington's make jolly good slo-jin, but they can't arouse pity and terror. Yes, I'll do it, but first let me spend the tenor. I'm taking a holiday, too, today, I said. How can we amuse ourselves? Julian had opened the last of his letters. He held up two cards. Tickets for Covent Garden Ball tonight, he said. Why not come? It's sure to be a good one. I should like to, I said. Thanks. Julian dropped from his hammock and began to get his bath ready. We arranged to dine early at the Maison Suisse in Rupert Street, Table de Hote, one franc plus two pence from Edmoselle, and go on to the gallery of a first night. I was to dress for Covent Garden at Julian's after the theatre, because white waistcoats and the franc Table de Hote didn't go well together. When I dined out, I usually went to the Maison Suisse. I shall never have the chance of going again, even if, as a married man, I were allowed to do so, for it has been pulled down to make room for the Hicks Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. When I did not dine there, I attended a quaint survival of last century's coffee houses in Glasshouse Street. Tall, pew-like boxes, wooden tables without tablecloths, paneled walls, an excellent menu of chops, steaks, fried eggs, sausages, and other British products. Once the resort of bucks and macaroni's forged coffee house I found frequented by a strange assortment of individuals, some of whom resembled bookmakers' touts, others clerks of an inexplicably rustic type. Who these people really were, I never discovered. I generally have supper at Peppalos, said Julian, as we left the theatre, before a covent garden ball. Shall we go on there? There are two entrances to Peppalos' restaurant, one leading to the ground floor, the other to the brasuary and the basement. I like to spend an hour or so there occasionally, smoking and watching the crowd. Every sixth visit on an average I would happen upon somebody interesting among the ordinary throng of medical students and third-rate clerks, watery-eyed old fellows who remembered Cremorne, a mahogany derelict who had spent his youth on the sea when liners were sailing ships, and the apprentices, terrorized by bullying mates and the rollers of the bay, lay howling in the scuppers and prayed to be thrown overboard. He told me of one voyage on which the millet cook went mad and escaping into the rat-lines shot down a dozen of the crew before he himself was sniped. The supper tables are separated from the brasuary by a line of stucco arches, and as it was now a quarter to twelve the place was full. At a first glance it seemed that there were no empty supper tables. Presently, however, we saw one, laid for four, at which only one man was sitting. Hello! said Julian, there's Malim. Let's go and see if we can push into his table. Well, Malim, how are you? Do you know Cloyster? Mr. Malim had a lofty expression. I should have put him down as a scholarly recluse. His first words upset this view somewhat. Coming to Covent Garden, he said genially, I am, so is Kit. She'll be down soon. Good, said Julian, may Jimmy and I have supper at your table. Do, said Malim, plenty of room. We'd better order our food and not wait for her. We took our places and looked round us. The home of conversation was persistent. It rose above the clatter of the supper tables and the sudden bursts of laughter. It was now five minutes to twelve. All at once, those nearest the door sprang to their feet. A girl in scarlet and black had come in. Ah, there's Kit at last, said Malim. They're cheering her, said Julian. As he spoke, the tentative murmur of a cheer was caught up by everyone. Men leaped upon chairs and tables. Hello, hello, hello! said Kit, reaching us. Kitty, when they do that, it makes me feel shy. She was laughing like a child. She leaned across the table, put her arms around Malim's neck and kissed him. She glanced at us. Malim smiled quietly but said nothing. She kissed Julian and she kissed me. Now we're all friends, she said, sitting down. Better know each other's names, said Malim. Kit, this is Mr. Cloyster. Mr. Cloyster, may I introduce you to my wife? End of Section 9 Section 10 of Not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recorded by Deborah Lynn, not George Washington by P. G. Woodhouse. Part 2, Chapter 7 I meet Mr. Thomas Blake. James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued. Someone had told me that the glory of Covent Garden Ball had departed. It may be so, yet the floor with its strange conglomeration of music hall artists, callow university men, shady horse dealers, and raucous military infants, had an atmosphere of more than meretricious gaiety. The clothes of an old year and the birth of a new one touched the toughest. The band was working away with a strident brassiness which filled the room with noise. The women's dresses were a shriek of color. The vulgarity of the scene was so immense as to be almost admirable. It was certainly interesting. Watching his opportunity, Julian presently drew me aside into the smoking-room. Malim, he said, has paid you a great compliment. Really, I said, rather surprised, for Julian's acquaintance had done nothing more to my knowledge than give me a cigar and a whiskey and soda. He's introduced you to his wife. Very good of him, I'm sure. You don't understand. You seek it for what she is, a pretty good-natured creature bred in the gutter. But Malim, well, he's in the foreign office and is secretary to Sir George Grant. And what in heaven's name, I cried, induced him to marry. My dear Jimmy, said Julian, adroitly avoiding the arm of an exuberant lady impersonating winter and making fair practice with her detachable icicles. It was kit or no one. Just consider Malim's position, which was that of thousands of other men of his type. They are the cleverest men of their schools. They are the intellectual stars of their varsities. I was at Oxford with Malim. He was a sort of tin god. Double first and all that, just like all the rest of them. They get what is looked upon as a splendid appointment under government. They come to London, hire comfortable chambers or a flat, go off to their office in the morning, leave it in the evening and are given a salary, which increases by regular gradations from an initial 200 a year. Say that a man begins this kind of work at 24. What are his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire attention. The idea that government clerks don't work is a fiction preserved merely for the writers of Berlesque, from the moment he wakes in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking, from 8.30 until 12. The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He has, therefore, ambitions. The more intellectual he is, the more he loads the stupid routine of his daily task. Thus his leisure is his most valuable possession. There are books he wants to read, those which he liked in the days previous to his slavery, and new ones which he sees published every day. There are plays he wants to see performed, and there are subjects on which he would like to write. We give his left hand to write if the loss of that limb wouldn't disqualify him for his post. Where is his social chance? It surely exists only in the utter abandonment of his personal projects, and to go out when one is tied to the clock is a poor sort of game. But suppose he does seek the society of what friends he can muster in London. Is he made much of? Fussed over? Not a bit of it. Brainless subalterns, ridiculous midshipmen, have, in the eyes of the girl whom he has come to see, a reputation that he can never win. There in the service. They're so dashing. They're so charmingly extravagant. They're so tremendous in face of an emergency, that their conversational limitations of yes and no are hailed as brilliant flights of genius. Their inane anecdotes, their pointless observations are positively corded. It is they who retire to the conservatory with the divine violet, whose face is like the Venus of Milo's, whose hair one hears reaches to her knees, whose eyes are like blue saucers and whose complexion is a pink poem. It is Jane, the stumpy, the flat-footed Jane who wears glasses and has all the virtues which are supposed to go with indigestion, big hands and an enormous waist. Jane, I repeat, who is told off to talk to a man like Malim. If, on the other hand, he and his fellows refuse to put on evening clothes and be bored to death of an evening, who can blame them? If they deliberately find enough satisfaction for their needs in the company of a circle of men friends and the casual pleasures of the town, selfishness is the last epithet with which their behavior can be charged. Uns selfishness has been their curse. No sane person would, of his own accord, become the automaton that a government office requires. Pressure on the part of relations of parents has been brought to bear on them. The steady employment, the graduated income, the pension, that fatal pension, has been danced by their fathers and their mothers and their uncle John's before their eyes. Appeals have been made to them on filial not to say religious grounds. Threats would have availed nothing. But appeals, downright tearful appeals from Mama, husky hand-gripping appeals from Papa, that is what has made escape impossible. A huge act of uns selfishness has been compelled. A lifetime of reactionary egotism is inevitable and legitimate. It was wrong when I said Malim was typical. He has to the good and ingenuity which assists naturally in the solution of the problem of self and circumstance. A year or two ago Chance brought him in contact with Kit. They struck up a friendship. He became an habitué at the fried fish shop in Tottenham Court Road. Whenever we questioned his taste he said that a physician recommended fish as a tonic for the brain. But it was not his brain that took Malim to the fried fish shop. It was his heart. He loved Kit and presently he married her. One would have said this was an impossible step. Misery for Malim's people, his friends himself, and afterwards for Kit. But nature has endowed both Malim and Kit with extraordinary common sense. He kept to his flat. She kept to her job in the fried fish shop. Only instead of living in she was able to retire after her day's work to a little house which he hired for her in the Hamsted Road. Her work for which she is eminently fitted keeps her out of mischief. His flat gives the impression to his family and the head of his department that he is still a bachelor. Thus all goes well. I've often read in the police reports I said of persons who lead double lives and I'm much interested in Malim and Kit bore down upon us. We rose. It's the March past, observed the former, come upstairs. Kitty said, Kit, give me your arm. At half past four we were in Wellington Street. It was a fine, mild morning and in the queer light of the false dawn we betook ourselves to the old hummums for breakfast. Other couples had done the same. The steps of the hummums facing the market harbored already a waiting crowd. The doors were to be opened at five. We also found places on the stone steps. The market was alive with porters who hailed our appearance with every profession of delight. Early hours would seem to lend a certain acidity to their bad nidge. By and by a more personal note crept into their facetious comments. Two guardsmen on the top steps suddenly displayed in return a very creditable gift of repartee. Covent Garden Market was delighted. It felt the stern joy which warriors feel with foam and worthy of their steel. It suspended its juggling feats with vegetable baskets and devoted itself exclusively to the task of silencing our guns. Porters, coasters, and the riffraff of the streets crowded in a semicircle around us. Just then it was born in on us how small our number was. A solid phalanx of the toughest customers in London faced us. Behind this semicircle a line of carts had been drawn up. Unseen enemies from behind this lager now began to amuse themselves by bombarding us with the product of the Market Garden. Tomatoes, cauliflower, and potatoes came hurtling into our midst. I saw Julian consulting his watch. Five minutes more, he said. I had noticed some minutes back that the ardor of the attack seemed to center round one man in particular, a short, very burly man in a costume that seemed somehow vaguely nautical. His face bore the expression of one cheerfully conscious of being well on the road to intoxication. He was the ringleader. It was he who threw the largest cabbage, the most pese tomato. I don't suppose he had ever enjoyed himself so much in his life. He was standing now on a cart full of potatoes and firing them in with tremendous force. Kit saw him, too. Why, there's that blaggard Tom, she cried. She had been told to sit down behind Malim for safety. Before anyone could stop her or had guessed her intention, she had pushed her way through us and stepped out into the road. It was so unexpected that there was an involuntary lull in the proceedings. Tom. She pointed an accusing finger at the man who gaped burly. Tom, who pissed Farber's best trousers and popped them. There was a roar of laughter. A moment before, and Tom had been the pet of the market, the energetic leader, the champion potato slinger. Now he was a thing of derision. His friends took up the question. Keen anxiety was expressed on all sides as to the fate of Father's trousers. He was requested to be a man and speak up. The uproar died away as it was seen the Kit had not yet finished. Cheez it, some of your shouted a voice. The lady wants to ask him something else. Tom, said Kit, who was sent with tuppence to buy postage stamps and spend it on beer? The question was well received by the audience. Tom was beaten. A potato, vast and nobly, fell from his palsy hand. He was speechless. Then he began to stammer. Just you stop it, Tom, shouted Kit triumphantly. Just you stop it. Do you hear? You stop it. She turned towards us on the steps and taking us all into her confidence added, He's a nice thing to have for a brother anyway. Then she rejoined Malim amid peals of laughter from both armies. It was a Homeric incident. Only a half-hearted attempt was made to renew the attack. And when the door of the Hummums at last opened, Malim observed to Julian and me, as we squashed our way in, that if a man's wife's relations were always as opportunist as Kit's, the greatest objection to them would be removed.