There was almost a sob in his voice.
"He hasn"t spoken definitely as yet," Fowler went on, "but we know there"s hardly any chance of his staying."
"Does he give any reason?" I asked.
"Nothing specific," said Fowler. "It"s just a sheer case of incompatibility. Meadows doesn"t like us."
He put his hand over his face and was silent.
I left very quietly a little later, without going up to the drawing-room. A few days afterwards I heard that Meadows had gone. The Ashcroft-Fowlers, I am told, are giving up in despair. They are going to take a little suite of ten rooms and four baths in the Grand Palaver Hotel, and rough it there for the winter.
Yet one must not draw a picture of the rich in colours altogether gloomy. There are cases among them of genuine, light-hearted happiness.
I have observed this is especially the case among those of the rich who have the good fortune to get ruined, absolutely and completely ruined. They may do this on the Stock Exchange or by banking or in a dozen other ways. The business side of getting ruined is not difficult.
Once the rich are ruined, they are, as far as my observation goes, all right. They can then have anything they want.
I saw this point ill.u.s.trated again just recently. I was walking with a friend of mine and a motor pa.s.sed bearing a neatly dressed young man, chatting gaily with a pretty woman. My friend raised his hat and gave it a jaunty and cheery swing in the air as if to wave goodwill and happiness.
"Poor old Edward Overjoy!" he said, as the motor moved out of sight.
"What"s wrong with him?" I asked.
"Hadn"t you heard?" said my friend. "He"s ruined--absolutely cleaned out--not a cent left."
"Dear me!" I said. "That"s awfully hard. I suppose he"ll have to sell that beautiful motor?"
My friend shook his head.
"Oh, no," he said. "He"ll hardly do that. I don"t think his wife would care to sell that."
My friend was right. The Overjoys have not sold their motor. Neither have they sold their magnificent sandstone residence. They are too much attached to it, I believe, to sell it. Some people thought they would have given up their box at the opera. But it appears not. They are too musical to care to do that. Meantime it is a matter of general notoriety that the Overjoys are absolutely ruined; in fact, they haven"t a single cent. You could buy Overjoy--so I am informed--for ten dollars.
But I observe that he still wears a seal-lined coat worth at least five hundred.
XVII. Humour as I See It
It is only fair that at the back of this book I should be allowed a few pages to myself to put down some things that I really think.
Until two weeks ago I might have taken my pen in hand to write about humour with the confident air of an acknowledged professional.
But that time is past. Such claim as I had has been taken from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my writing, "What is there, after all, in Professor Leac.o.c.k"s humour but a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and myosis?"
The man was right. How he stumbled upon this trade secret I do not know. But I am willing to admit, since the truth is out, that it has long been my custom in preparing an article of a humorous nature to go down to the cellar and mix up half a gallon of myosis with a pint of hyperbole.
If I want to give the article a decidedly literary character, I find it well to put in about half a pint of paresis. The whole thing is amazingly simple.
But I only mention this by way of introduction and to dispel any idea that I am conceited enough to write about humour, with the professional authority of Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x writing about love, or Eva Tanguay talking about dancing.
All that I dare claim is that I have as much sense of humour as other people. And, oddly enough, I notice that everybody else makes this same claim. Any man will admit, if need be, that his sight is not good, or that he cannot swim, or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon his sense of humour is to give him a mortal affront.
"No," said a friend of mine the other day, "I never go to Grand Opera," and then he added with an air of pride, "You see, I have absolutely no ear for music."
"You don"t say so!" I exclaimed.
"None!" he went on. "I can"t tell one tune from another.
I don"t know _Home, Sweet Home_ from _G.o.d Save the King_.
I can"t tell whether a man is tuning a violin or playing a sonata."
He seemed to get prouder and prouder over each item of his own deficiency. He ended by saying that he had a dog at his house that had a far better ear for music than he had. As soon as his wife or any visitor started to play the piano the dog always began to howl--plaintively, he said--as if it were hurt. He himself never did this.
When he had finished I made what I thought a harmless comment.
"I suppose," I said, "that you find your sense of humour deficient in the same way: the two generally go together."
My friend was livid with rage in a moment.
"Sense of humour!" he said. "My sense of humour! Me without a sense of humour! Why, I suppose I"ve a keener sense of humour than any man, or any two men, in this city!"
From that he turned to bitter personal attack. He said that _my_ sense of humour seemed to have withered altogether.
He left me, still quivering with indignation.
Personally, however, I do not mind making the admission, however damaging it may be, that there are certain forms of so-called humour, or, at least, fun, which I am quite unable to appreciate. Chief among these is that ancient thing called the Practical Joke.
"You never knew McGann, did you?" a friend of mine asked me the other day.
When I said I had never known McGann, he shook his head with a sigh, and said:
"Ah, you should have known McGann. He had the greatest sense of humour of any man I ever knew--always full of jokes. I remember one night at the boarding-house where we were, he stretched a string across the pa.s.sage-way and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke his leg. We nearly died laughing."
"Dear me!" I said. "What a humorist! Did he often do things like that?"
"Oh, yes, he was at them all the time. He used to put tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the chairs. He was full of ideas. They seemed to come to him without any trouble."
McGann, I understand, is dead. I am not sorry for it.
Indeed, I think that for most of us the time has gone by when we can see the fun of putting tacks on chairs, or thistles in beds, or live snakes in people"s boots.
To me it has always seemed that the very essence of good humour is that it must be without harm and without malice.
I admit that there is in all of us a certain vein of the old original demoniacal humour or joy in the misfortune of another which sticks to us like our original sin. It ought not to be funny to see a man, especially a fat and pompous man, slip suddenly on a banana skin. But it is.
When a skater on a pond who is describing graceful circles, and showing off before the crowd, breaks through the ice and gets a ducking, everybody shouts with joy. To the original savage, the cream of the joke in such cases was found if the man who slipped broke his neck, or the man who went through the ice never came up again. I can imagine a group of prehistoric men standing round the ice-hole where he had disappeared and laughing till their sides split. If there had been such a thing as a prehistoric newspaper, the affair would have headed up: "_Amusing Incident. Unknown Gentleman Breaks Through Ice and Is Drowned._"
But our sense of humour under civilisation has been weakened. Much of the fun of this sort of thing has been lost on us.
Children, however, still retain a large share of this primitive sense of enjoyment.
I remember once watching two little boys making snow-b.a.l.l.s at the side of the street and getting ready a little store of them to use. As they worked, there came along an old man wearing a silk hat, and belonging by appearance to the cla.s.s of "jolly old gentlemen." When he saw the boys his gold spectacles gleamed with kindly enjoyment.