in June instead of in September, I should be unworthy of the privileges my forefathers had fought and died to bestow upon me.
He told me the company had not a leg to stand upon, and at his instigation I sat down and wrote an insulting letter to the chairman.
The secretary replied that, having regard to the attitude I had taken up, it would be incumbent upon themselves to treat it as a test case, and presumed that my solicitors would accept service on my behalf.
When I showed him this letter he was delighted.
'You leave it to me,' he said, pocketing the correspondence, 'and we'll teach them a lesson.'
I left it to him. My only excuse is that at the time I was immersed in the writing of what in those days was termed a comedy-drama. The little sense I possessed must, I suppose, have been absorbed by the play.
The magistrate's decision somewhat damped my ardour, but only inflamed his zeal. Magistrates, he said, were muddle-headed old fogies. This was a matter for a judge.
The judge was a kindly old gentleman, and said that bearing in mind the unsatisfactory wording of the sub- clause, he did not think he could allow the company their costs, so that, all told, I got off for something under fifty pounds, inclusive of the original fourteen and tenpence.
Afterwards our friendship waned, but living as we did in the same outlying suburb, I was bound to see a good deal of him; and to hear more.
At parties of all kinds he was particularly prominent, and on such occasions, being in his most good-natured mood, was most to be dreaded. No human being worked harder for the enjoyment of others, or produced more universal wretchedness.
One Christmas afternoon, calling upon a friend, I found some fourteen or fifteen elderly ladies and gentlemen trotting solemnly round a row of chairs in the centre of the drawing-room while Poppleton played the piano. Every now and then Poppleton would suddenly cease, and everyone would drop wearily into the nearest chair, evidently glad of a rest; all but one, who would thereupon creep quietly away, followed by the envying looks of those left behind. I stood by the door watching the weird scene. Presently an escaped player came towards me, and I enquired of him what the ceremony was supposed to signify.
'Don't ask me,' he answered grumpily. 'Some of Poppleton's damned tomfoolery.' Then he added savagely, 'We've got to play forfeits after this.'
The servant was still waiting a favourable opportunity to announce me. I gave her a shilling not to, and got away unperceived.
After a satisfactory dinner, he would suggest an impromptu dance, and want you to roll up mats, or help him move the piano to the other end of the room.
He knew enough round games to have started a small purgatory of his own. Just as you were in the middle of an interesting discussion, or a delightful tete-a-tete with a pretty woman, he would swoop down upon you with: 'Come along, we're going to play literary consequences,' and dragging you to the table, and putting a piece of paper and a pencil before you, would tell you to write a description of your favourite heroine in fiction, and would see that you did it.
He never spared himself. It was always he who would volunteer to escort the old ladies to the station, and who would never leave them until he had seen them safely into the wrong train. He it was who would play 'wild beasts' with the children, and frighten them into fits that would last all night.
So far as intention went, he was the kindest man alive. He never visited poor sick persons without taking with him in his pocket some little delicacy calculated to disagree with them and make them worse. He arranged yachting excursions for bad sailors, entirely at his own expense, and seemed to regard their subsequent agonies as ingratitude.
He loved to manage a wedding. Once he planned matters so that the bride arrived at the altar three-quarters of an hour before the groom, which led to unpleasantness upon a day that should have been filled only with joy, and once he forgot the clergyman. But he was always ready to admit when he made a mistake.
At funerals, also, he was to the fore, pointing out to the grief-stricken relatives how much better it was for all concerned that the corpse was dead, and expressing a pious hope that they would soon join it.
The chiefest delight of his life, however, was to be mixed up in other people's domestic quarrels. No domestic quarrel for miles round was complete without him. He generally came in as mediator, and finished as leading witness for the appellant.
As a journalist or politician his wonderful grasp of other people's business would have won for him esteem. The error he made was working it out in practice.
THE MAN WHO LIVED FOR OTHERS
The first time we met, to speak, he was sitting with his back against a pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe. He smoked it very slowly, but very conscientiously. After each whiff he removed the pipe from his mouth and fanned away the smoke with his cap.
'Feeling bad?' I asked from behind a tree, at the same time making ready for a run, big boys' answers to small boys' impertinences being usually of the nature of things best avoided.
To my surprise and relief—for at second glance I perceived I had under-estimated the length of his legs—he appeared to regard the question as a natural and proper one, replying with unaffected candour, 'Not yet.'
My desire became to comfort him—a sentiment I think he understood and was grateful for. Advancing into the open, I sat down over against him, and watched him for a while in silence. Presently he said:-
'Have you ever tried drinking beer?'
I admitted I had not.
'Oh, it is beastly stuff,' he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.
Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the past, he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.
'Do you often drink it?' I inquired.
'Yes,' he replied gloomily; 'all we fellows in the fifth form drink beer and smoke pipes.'
A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.
He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge. Before he reached it, however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.
'If you follow me, young 'un, or look, I'll punch your head,' he said swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.
He left at the end of the terms and I did not see him again until we were both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey.
I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed. During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this, but his relatives—a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in India—were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.
In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject.
'What's the matter with him?' I said. 'Is he ill?'
The old lady chuckled.
'You'll be like that one day,' she whispered gleefully.
'When,' I asked, not unnaturally alarmed.
'When you're in love,' she answered.
'Is HE in love?' I inquired after a pause.
