The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies

"Excuse my deshabille. I did not expect to see you."

"I am aware the season is inopportune," he said apologetically. "But I did not care to put off my visit till Christmas. You see, with us Christmas is a kind of Bank Holiday; and when there is a general excursion, a refined spirit prefers its own fireside. Moreover, I am not, as you may see, very robust, and I scarce like to risk exposing myself to such an extreme change of temperature. Your English Christmas is so cold. With the pyrometer at three hundred and fifty, it is hardly prudent to pass to thirty. On a sultry day like this the contrast is less marked."

"I understand," I said sympathetically.

"But I should hardly have ventured," he went on, "to trespass upon you at this untimely season merely out of deference to my own valetudinarian instincts. The fact is, I am a littérateur."

"Oh, indeed," I said vaguely; "I was not aware of it."

"Nobody was aware of it," he replied sadly; "but my calling at this professional hour will, perhaps, go to substantiate my statement."

I looked at him blankly. Was he quite sane? All the apparitions I had ever heard of spoke with some approach to coherence, however imbecile their behaviour. The statistics of insanity in the spiritual world have never been published, but I suspect the percentage of madness is high. Mere harmless idiocy is doubtless the prevalent form of dementia, judging by the way the poor unhappy spirits set about compassing their ends; but some of their actions can only be explained by the more violent species of mania. My great-grandfather seemed to read the suspicion in my eye, for he hastily continued: —

"Of course it is only the outside public who imagine that the spirits of literature really appear at Christmas. It is the annuals that appear at Christmas. The real season at which we are active on earth is summer, as every journalist knows. By Christmas the authors of our being have completely forgotten our existence. As a writer myself, and calling in connection with a literary matter, I thought it more professional to pay my visit during the dog days, especially as your being in trouble supplied me with an excuse for asking permission to go beyond bounds."

"You knew I was in trouble?" I murmured, touched by this sympathy from an unexpected quarter.

"Certainly. And from a selfish point of view I am not sorry. You have always been so inconsiderately happy that I could never find a seemly pretext to get out to see you."

"Is it only when your descendants are in trouble that you are allowed to visit them?" I enquired.

"Even so," he answered. "Of course spirits whose births were tragic, who were murdered into existence, are allowed to supplement the inefficient police departments of the upper globe, and a similar charter is usually extended to those who have hidden treasures on their conscience; but it is obvious that if all spirits were accorded what furloughs they pleased, eschatology would become a farce. Sir, you have no idea of the number of bogus criminal romances tendered daily by those wishing to enjoy the roving license of avenging spirits, for the ex-assassinated are the most enviable of immortals, and cases of personation are of frequent occurrence. Our actresses, too, are always pretending to have lost jewels; there is no end to the excuses. The Christmas Bank Holiday is naturally inadequate to our needs. Sir, I should have been far happier if my descendants had gone wrong; but in spite of the large fortune I had accumulated, both your father and your grandfather were of exemplary respectability and unruffled cheerfulness. The solitary outing I had was when your father attended a séance, and I was knocked up in the middle of the night. But I did not enjoy my holiday in the least; the indignity of having to move the furniture made the blood boil in my veins as in a spirit-lamp, and exposed me to the malicious badinage of my circle on my return. I protested that I did not care a rap; but I was mightily rejoiced when I learnt that your father had denounced the proceedings as a swindle, and was resolved never to invite me to his table again. When you were born I thought you were born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards from our dwelling-place; but I was mistaken. Up till now your life has been a long summer afternoon."

"Yes, but now the shades are falling," I said grimly. "It looks as if my life henceforwards will be a long holiday – for you."

He shook his wig mournfully.

"No, I am only out on parole. I have had to give my word of honour to try to set you on your legs again as soon as possible."

"You couldn't have come at a more opportune moment," I cried, remembering how he had found me. "You are a good as well as a great-grandfather, and I am proud of my descent. Won't you have a cigar?"

"Thank you, I never smoke – on earth," said the spirit hurriedly, with a flavour of bitter in his accents. "Let us to the point. You have been reduced to the painful necessity of earning your living."

I nodded silently, and took a sip of lemon-squash. A strange sense of salvation lulled my soul.

"How do you propose to do it?" asked my great-grandfather.

"Oh, I leave that to you," I said confidingly.

"Well, what do you say to a literary career?"

"Eh? What?" I gasped.

"A literary career," he repeated. "What makes you so astonished?"

"Well, for one thing it's exactly what Tom Addlestone, the leader-writer of the Hurrygraph, was recommending to me this morning. He said: 'John, my boy, if I had had your advantages ten years ago, I should have been spared many a headache and supplied with many a dinner. It may turn out a lucky thing yet that you gravitated so to literary society, and that so many press men had free passes to your suppers. Consider the number of men of letters you have mixed drinks with! Why, man, you can succeed in any branch of literature you please.'"

My great-grandfather's face was radiant. Perhaps it was only the setting sun that touched it.

"A chip of the old block," he murmured. "That was I in my young days. Johnson, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, Hume, I knew them all – gay dogs, gay dogs! Except that great hulking brute of a Johnson," he added, with a sudden savage snarl that showed his white teeth.

"I told Addlestone that I had no literary ability whatever, and he scoffed at me for my simplicity. All the same, I think he was only poking fun at me. My friends might puff me out to bull-size; but I am only a frog, and I should very soon burst. The public might be cajoled into buying one book; they could not be duped a second time. Don't you think I was right? I haven't any literary ability, have I?"

"Certainly not, certainly not," replied my great-grandfather with an alacrity and emphasis that would have seemed suspicious in a mere mortal. "But it does seem a shame to waste so great an opportunity. The ball that Addlestone waited years for is at your foot, and it is grievous to think that there it must remain merely because you do not know how to kick it."

"Well, but what's a man to do?"

"What's a man to do?" repeated my great-grandfather contemptuously. "Get a ghost, of course."

"By Jove!" I cried with a whistle. "That's a good idea! Addlestone has a ghost to do his leaders for him when he's lazy. I've seen the young fellow myself. Tom pays him six guineas a dozen, and gets three guineas apiece himself. But of course Tom has to live in much better style, and that makes it fair all round. You mean that I am to take advantage of my influence to get some other fellow work, and take a commission for the use of my name? That seems feasible enough. But where am I to find a ghost with the requisite talents?"

"Here," said my great-grandfather.

"What! You?"

"Yes, I," he replied calmly.

"But you couldn't write – "

"Not now, certainly not. All I wrote now would be burnt."

"Then how the devil – ?" I began.

"Hush!" he interrupted nervously. "Listen, and I will a tale unfold. It is called The Learned Pig. I wrote it in my forty-fifth year, and it is full of sketches from the life of all the more notable personages of my time, from Lord Chesterfield to Mrs. Thrale, from Peg Woffington to Adam Smith and the ingenious Mr. Dibdin. I have painted the portrait of Sir Joshua quite as faithfully as he has painted mine. Of course much of the dialogue is real, taken from conversations preserved in my note-book. It is, I believe, a complete picture of the period, and being the only book I ever wrote or intended to write, I put my whole self into it, as well as all my friends."

"It must be, indeed, your masterpiece," I cried enthusiastically. "But why is it called The Learned Pig, and how has it escaped publication?"

"You shall hear. The learned pig is Dr. Johnson. He refused to take wine with me. I afterwards learnt that he had given up strong liqueurs altogether, and I went to see him again, but he received me with epigrams. He is the pivot of my book, all the other characters revolving about him. Naturally, I did not care to publish during his lifetime; not entirely, I admit, out of consideration to his feelings, but because foolish admirers had placed him on such a pedestal that he could damn any book he did not relish. I made sure of surviving him, so many and diverse were his distempers; whereas my manuscript survived me. In the moment of death I strove to tell your grandfather of the hiding-place in which I had bestowed it; but I could only make signs to which he had not the clue. You can imagine how it has embittered my spirit to have missed the aim of my life and my due niche in the pantheon of letters. In vain I strove to be registered among the 'hidden treasure' spirits, with the perambulatory privileges pertaining to the class. I was told that to recognise manuscripts under the head of 'treasures' would be to open a fresh door to abuse, there being few but had scribbled in their time and had a good conceit of their compositions to boot. I could offer no proofs of the value of my work, not even printers' proofs, and even the fact that the manuscript was concealed behind a sliding panel availed not to bring it into the coveted category. Moreover, not only did I have no other pretext to call on my descendants, but both my son and grandson were too respectable to be willingly connected with letters and too flourishing to be enticed by the prospects of profit. To you, however, this book will prove the avenue to fresh fortune."

"Do you mean I am to publish it under your name?"

"No, under yours."

"But, then, where does the satisfaction come in?"

"Your name is the same as mine."

"I see; but still, why not tell the truth about it? In a preface, for instance."

"Who would believe it? In my own day I could not credit that Macpherson spoke truly about the way Ossian came into his possession, nor to judge from gossip I have had with the younger ghosts did anyone attach credence to Sir Walter Scott's introductions."

"True," I said musingly. "It is a played-out dodge. But I am not certain whether an attack on Dr. Johnson would go down nowadays. We are aware that the man had porcine traits, but we have almost canonised him."

"The very reason why the book will be a success," he replied eagerly. "I understand that in these days of yours the best way of attracting attention is to fly in the face of all received opinion, and so in the realm of history to whitewash the villains and tar and feather the saints. The sliding panel of which I spoke is just behind the picture of me. Lose no time. Go at once, even as I must."

The shadowy contours of his form waved agitatedly in the wind.

"But how do you know anyone will bring it out?" I said doubtfully. "Am I to haunt the publishers' offices till – "

"No, no, I will do that," he interrupted in excitement. "Promise me you will help me."

"But I don't feel at all sure it stands a ghost of a chance," I said, growing colder in proportion as he grew more enthusiastic.

"It is the only chance of a ghost," he pleaded. "Come, give me your word. Any of your literary friends will get you a publisher, and where could you get a more promising ghost?"

"Oh, nonsense!" I said quietly, unconsciously quoting Ibsen. "There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea."

I was determined to put the matter on its proper footing, for I saw that under pretence of restoring my fortunes he was really trying to get me to pull his chestnuts out of the fire, and I resented the deceptive spirit that could put forward such tasks as favours. It was evident that he cherished a post-mortem grudge against the great lexicographer, as well as a posthumous craving for fame, and wished to use me as the instrument of his reputation and his revenge. But I was a man of the world, and I was not going to be rushed by a mere phantom.

"I don't deny there are plenty of ghosts about," he answered with insinuative deference. "Only will any of the others work for nothing?"

He saw he had scored a point, and his eyes twinkled.

"Yes, but I don't know that I approve of black-legs," I answered sternly. "You are taking the bread and butter out of some honest ghost's mouth."

The corners of his own mouth drooped; his eyes grew misty; he looked fading away. "Most true," he faltered; "but be pitiful. Have you no great-grand-filial feelings?"

"No, I lost everything in the crash," I answered coldly. "Suppose the book's a frost?"

"I shan't mind," he said eagerly.

"No, I don't suppose you would mind a frost," I retorted witheringly. "But look at the chaff you'd be letting me in for. Hadn't you better put off publication for a century or two?"

"No, no," he cried wildly; "our mansion will pass into strange hands. I shall not have the right of calling on the new proprietors."

"Phew!" I whistled; "perhaps that's why you timed your visit now, you artful old codger. I have always heard appearances are deceptive. However, I have ever been a patron of letters; and although I cannot approve of post-mundane malice, and think the dead past should be let bury its dead, still, if you are set upon it, I will try and use my influence to get your book published."

"Bless you!" he cried tremulously, with all the effusiveness natural to an author about to see himself in print, and trembled so violently that he dissipated himself away.

I stood staring a moment at the spot where he had stood, pleased at having out-manœuvred him; then my chair gave way with another crash, and I picked myself up painfully, together with the dead stump of my cigar, and brushed the ash off my trousers, and rubbed my eyes and wondered if I had been dreaming. But no! when I ran into the cheerless dining-room, with its pervading sense of imminent auction, I found the sliding panel behind the portrait by Reynolds, which seemed to beam kindly encouragement upon me, and, lo! The Learned Pig was there in a mass of musty manuscript.

As everybody knows, the book made a hit. The Acadæum was unusually generous in its praise: "A lively picture of the century of farthingales and stomachers, marred only by numerous anachronisms and that stilted air of faked-up archæological knowledge which is, we suppose, inevitable in historical novels. The conversations are particularly artificial. Still, we can forgive Mr. Halliwell a good deal of inaccuracy and inacquaintance with the period, in view of the graphic picture of the literary dictator from the novel point of view of a contemporary who was not among the worshippers. It is curious how the honest, sterling character of the man is brought out all the more clearly from the incapacity of the narrator to comprehend its greatness – to show this was a task that called for no little skill and subtlety. If it were only for this one ingenious idea, Mr. Halliwell's book would stand out from the mass of abortive attempts to resuscitate the past. He has failed to picture the times, but he has done what is better – he has given us human beings who are alive, instead of the futile shadows that flit through the Walhalla of the average historical novel."

All the leading critics were at one as to the cleverness with which the great soul of Dr. Johnson was made to stand out on the background of detraction, and the public was universally agreed that this was the only readable historical novel published for many years, and that the anachronisms didn't matter a pin. I don't know what I had done to Tom Addlestone; but when everybody was talking about me, he went about saying that I kept a ghost. I was annoyed, for I did not keep one in any sense, and I openly defied the world to produce him. Why, I never saw him again myself – I believe he was too disgusted with the fillip he had given Dr. Johnson's reputation, and did not even take advantage of the Christmas Bank Holiday. But Addlestone's libel got to Jenny Grant's ears, and she came to me indignantly, and said: "I won't have it. You must either give up me or the ghost."

"To give up you would be to give up the ghost, darling," I answered soothingly. "But you, and you alone, have a right to the truth. It is not my ghost at all, it is my great-grandfather's."

"Do you mean to say he bequeathed him to you?"

"It came to that."

I then told her the truth, and showed how in any case the profits of my ancestor's book rightfully reverted backwards to me. So we were married on them, and Jenny, fired by my success, tried her hand on a novel, and published it, truthfully enough, under the name of J. Halliwell. She has written all my stories ever since, including this one; which, if it be necessarily false in the letter, is true in the spirit.

Vagaries of a Viscount

That every man has a romance in his life has always been a pet theory of mine, so I was not surprised to find the immaculate Dorking smoking a clay pipe in Cable Street (late Ratcliff Highway) at half-past eight of a winter's morning. Nor was I surprised to find myself there, because, as a romancer, I have a poetic license to go anywhere and see everything. Viscount Dorking had just come out of an old clo' shop, and was got up like a sailor. Under his arm was a bundle. He lurched against me without recognising me, for I, too, was masquerading in my shabbiest and roughest attire, and the morning was bleak and foggy, the round red sun flaming in the forehead of the morning sky like the eye of a cyclop. But there could be no doubt it was Dorking – even if I had not been acquainted with the sedate Viscount (that paradox of the peerage, whose treatises on pure mathematics were the joy of Senior Wranglers) I should have suspected something shady from the whiteness of my sailor's hands.

Dorking was a dapper little man, almost dissociable from gloves and a chimneypot. The sight of him shambling along like one of the crew of H. M. S. Pinafore gave me a pleasant thrill of excitement. I turned, and followed him along the narrow yellow street. He made towards the Docks, turning down King David Lane. He was apparently without any instrument of protection, though I, for my part, was glad to feel the grasp of the old umbrella that walks always with me, hand in knob. Hard by the Shadwell Basin he came to a halt before a frowsy coffee-house, reflectively removed his pipe from his mouth, and whistled a bar of a once popular air in a peculiar manner. Then he pushed open the bleared glass door, and was lost to view.

After an instant's hesitation I pulled my sombrero over my eyes and strode in after him, plunging into a wave of musty warmth not entirely disagreeable after the frigid street. The boxes were full of queer waterside characters, among whom flitted a young woman robustly beautiful. The Viscount was already smiling at her when I entered. "Bring us the usual," he said, in a rough accent.

"Come along, Jenny, pint and one," impatiently growled a weather-beaten old ruffian in a pilot's cap.

"Pawn your face!" murmured Jenny, turning to me with an enquiring air.

"Pint and one," I said boldly, in as husky a tone as I could squeeze out.

Several battered visages, evidently belonging to habitués of the place, were bent suspiciously in my direction; perhaps because my rig-out, though rough, had no flavour of sea-salt or river-mud, for no one took the least notice of Dorking, except the comely attendant. I waited with some curiosity for my fare, which turned out to be nothing more mysterious than a pint of coffee and one thick slice of bread and butter. Not to appear ignorant of the prices ruling, I tendered Jenny a sixpence, whereupon she returned me fourpence-halfpenny. This appeared to me so ridiculously cheap that I had not the courage to offer her the change as I had intended, nor did she seem to expect it. The pint of coffee was served in one great hulking cup such as Gargantua might have quaffed. I took a sip, and found it of the flavour of chalybeate springs. But it was hot, and I made shift to drink a little, casting furtive glances at Dorking, three boxes off across the gangway.

My gentleman sailor seemed quite at home, swallowing stolidly as though at his own breakfast-table. I grew impatient for him to have done, and beguiled the time by studying a placard on the wall offering a reward for information as to the whereabouts of a certain ship's cook who was wanted for knifing human flesh. And presently, curiously enough, in comes a police-sergeant on this very matter, and out goes Dorking (rather hastily, I thought), with me at his heels.

No sooner had he got round a corner than he started running at a rate that gave me a stitch in the side. He did not stop till he reached a cab-rank. There was only one vehicle on it, and the coughing, red-nosed driver, unpleasantly suggesting a mixture of grog and fog, was climbing to his seat when I came cautiously and breathlessly up, and Dorking was returning to his trousers' pocket a jingling mass of gold and silver coins, which he had evidently been exhibiting to the sceptical cabman. He seemed to walk these regions with the fearlessness of Una in the enchanted forest. I had no resource but to hang on to the rear, despite the alarums of "whip behind," raised by envious and inconsiderate urchins.

And in this manner, defiantly dodging the cabman, who several times struck me unfairly behind his back, I drove through a labyrinth of sordid streets to the Bethnal Green Museum. Here we alighted, and the Viscount strolled about outside the iron railings, from time to time anxiously scrutinising the church clock and looking towards the fountain which only performs in the summer, and was then wearing its winter night-cap. At last, as if weary of waiting, he walked with sudden precipitation towards the turnstile, and was lost to view within. After a moment I followed him, but was stopped by the janitor, who, with an air of astonishment, informed me there was sixpence to pay, it being a Wednesday. I understood at once why the Viscount had selected this day, for there was no one to be seen inside, and it was five minutes ere I discovered him. He was in the National Portrait Gallery, before one of Sir Peter Lely's insipid beauties, which to my surprise he was copying in pencil. Evidently he was trying to while away the time. At eleven o'clock to the second he scribbled something underneath the sketch, folded it up carefully, picked up his bundle and walked unhesitatingly downstairs into the second gallery, where, after glancing about to assure himself that the policeman's head was turned away, he deposited the paper between two bottles of tape-worms, and stole out through the back door. Feverishly seizing the sketch, I followed him, but the policeman's eye was now upon me, and I had to walk with dignified slowness, though I was in agonies lest I should lose my man. My anxiety was justified; when I reached the grounds, the Viscount was nowhere to be seen. I ran hither and thither like a madman, along the back street and about the grounds, hacking my shins against a perambulator, and at last sank upon a frigid garden seat, breathless and exhausted. I now bethought me of the paper clenched in my fist, and, smoothing it out, deciphered these words faintly pencilled beneath a caricature of the Court beauty: —

"Not my fault you missed me. If you are still set on your folly, you will find me lunching at the Chingford Hotel."

I sprang up exultant, new fire in my veins. True, the mystery was darkening, but it was the darkness that precedes the dawn.

"Cherchez la femme!" I muttered, and darting down Three Colts Lane I reached the Junction, only to find the barrier dashed in my face. But half-a-crown drove it back, and I sprang into the guard's van on his very heels. A shilling stifled the oath on his lips, and transferred it to mine when I discovered I had jumped into the Enfield Fast. Before I really got to Chingford it was long past noon. But I found him.