Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Vol. 158 1920-04-21 by Various

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Hobbs hadn't got that--no, really he hadn't.

The constable standing on guard, rather bored, interposed, "We ain't asking you to write a book about it."

"No, Sir, I couldn't do that," replied Hobbs anxiously. "What would you say, Sir, if you was me?"

"Don't ask me," answered the policeman. "It's your wire, not mine. Send something you can pay for. We only wants to find out if you're the person you say you are. Daresay you'd like me to write it for you, and you 'op it while I done it. I seen your kind before. Try again, mate."

So Hobbs tried again. And that is how it came about that at tea-time a telegraph-boy brought me the bewildering message: "Mr. Lockwood, The Nook, Monk's Langford. Sir, am I Hobbs? Hobbs."

BRIDGE NOTES.

It would, I feel, be but fair to the great Bridge-playing public to preface these few notes with a word of warning against the writers whom I find to my regret affecting to speak with authority on this subject in other periodicals. Until, as in the kindred profession of Medicine, it is impossible to practise without a Bridge degree, nothing can be done to prevent these quacks from laying down the law. All I can do for the present is to point out that there is only one writer who can speak not merely with authority, but with infallibility, upon all matters pertaining to our national game.

In this the eighth instalment of my series on Auction etiquette, I should like to urge once more upon the young Bridge-player the importance of playing quickly. And this because yet another case has come under my notice in which much trouble might have been avoided by doing so. In this case A. took seven minutes to decide whether to play the King or the Knave, which, especially as the Queen had already been played, was, I consider, far too long. Y., the declarer, sitting on A.'s left, certainly found it so, for towards the end of the seventh minute he dropped off to sleep and his cards fell forward face upward on the table. Dummy having gone away in search of liquid refreshment, A. and his partner B. then played out the hand as they liked and then roused Y. to inform him that, instead of making game, he had lost three hundred above.

Now, A. and B. were strictly within the rules of Auction Bridge in acting as they did. There is no legal time limit for players, as there is at cricket. But it would have been more tactful had they roused Y. at once, that he might see what they were doing with his cards.

Nor should tact be confined to such comparatively rare incidents as this. For instance, it is a mistake to confuse Auction Bridge with Rugby football. I have known players who declared "Two No-trumps" in very much the same manner as that in which a Rugby football-player throws the opposing three-quarter over the side-line. Excessive aggression is a mistake. A young Civil Servant of my acquaintance even went so far as to abstain from claiming an obvious revoke when the delinquent was the chief of his department. Unfortunately, however, this young man, so wise in other ways, had the annoying habit of turning his chair to bring him luck. On one evening, when the run of the cards was against him, he turned his chair between every hand and so annoyed his chief that no promotion has ever come his way, and he now spends his days bitterly regretting that he did not claim that revoke.

Passing to another point, I am asked by a correspondent if it is permissible occasionally to play from left to right, instead of from right to left, just to relieve the monotony. He asks, not unreasonably, why, if this is not so, writers on Bridge go to the trouble of putting those little curved arrows to show which way round the cards are to be played.

For myself, I see no reason why the right-to-left convention should not occasionally be reversed, always provided that the whole table agrees beforehand to play in the same direction.

THE MADDING CROWD.

The scene is an Irish Point-to-Point meeting.

The course lies along a shallow valley, bounded on the north by a wall of cloudy blue mountains.

At each jump stands a group of spectators; the difficulty or danger of an obstacle may be measured by the number of spectators who stand about it, recounting tales of past accidents and hoping cheerfully for the future. Motor cars, side-cars, waggonettes, pony-traps and ass-carts are drawn up anyhow round a clump of whitewashed farm buildings in the background.

Blanketed hunters are having their legs rubbed or being led up and down by grooms. Comes a broken-winded tootle on a coach-horn and the black-and- scarlet drag of the local garrison trundles into view. The unsophisticated gun-horses in the lead shy violently at the flapping canvas of an orange-stall and swerve to the left into a roulette-booth presided over by a vociferous ancient in a tattered overcoat and blue spectacles. The gamblers scatter like flushed partridges and the ancient bites the turf beneath his upturned board amid a shower of silver coins. The leaders, scared by the animated table, and the blood-curdling invocations and wildly-waving arms and legs of the fallen croupier, shy violently in the opposite direction and disappear into the refreshment-tent, whence issue the crash of crockery and the shrieks of the attendant Hebes.

The bookmakers are perched a-top of a grassy knoll which overlooks the whole course, and around them surges the crowd.

TELEPHONE TACTICS.

It is now some months since the great autumn offensive was conducted with the idea of biting off an awkward salient in my circumstances--in brief, of obtaining the necessary telephone to enable me to commence an ordered existence. For many, many days my voice had been unheard crying in the wilderness that I was a poor demobilised soldier, that I had once had a telephone and had given it up at my country's call, and please couldn't they give me back even my old, old telephone again? I have already told how in response to these very human appeals I at length got only a request for the balance due for calls for 1914. My old friend Time, however, worked his proverbial wonders and one day a telephone came--phit! like that.

Directly it had come I suspected a trap somewhere. Nor were my friends behindhand in telling me of the horrors of gigantic and inexorable bills from which there was no appeal. They said I must have a coin-box. Excellent idea! I would have a coin-box.

So the great Spring offensive began. In early February I opened a strong barrage upon the main headquarters and kept up a little light harassing fire upon the District Agent. The enemy replied with rigid uniformity upon printed forms--a mean advantage, for I have to type mine myself. But matters progressed. At the end of the first fortnight I had been advised that the work of installing my coin-box had been entrusted to no fewer than three groups of engineers, "to whom you should refer in all cases."

Well, I "referred" for some little time, and then, after a decent interval, made their acquaintance separately. If anything was calculated to bring back memories of the lighter side of the War it was the gracious and suave manner in which I despatched and redespatched to other departments. I might have been the buffest of buff slips the way I was "passed to you, please."

Once again I cancelled all my work in the pursuit of where the rainbow ends. Nor was this renunciation any great hardship, for I had been writing a book about the Realities of War, and had just found that all the horrors that ever might have happened had already been set down by one who saw most of the game, being an onlooker. "But this," I said, as I set out every morning--"this is the life, pure adventure in every moment of it."

My efforts were rewarded. In late February three people came and left three coin-boxes--in pieces. Then I must admit that I did a foolish thing. I wrote and said that I only wanted one box. I was afraid that if I kept them all it would be, a case of "Thr-r-ree pennies, please," instead of one. .

The crisis came in March. It was then that I joined the criminal classes. For many days I had haunted the telephone dump, taking a melancholy pleasure in watching real engineers come out with real coin-boxes for other people. No Peri at the golden gate ever looked more wistful. I know now that it is opportunity that makes the criminal, and one day the opportunity came. It came in the form of a young and evidently new hand, who emerged from the dump and pitched upon me--me of all people--to ask, "Can you tell me where this place is?" As he spoke he began to get out a slip with the address, and in that moment my fate was sealed. One glance showed me that he was the bearer of a perfectly good coin-box, and in a second I had seized the opportunity.

What he said I have not the slightest idea and it wouldn't have mattered what the address had been; before he started I had assured him that by a curious coincidence I was going to that very place, and that by a still more curious coincidence I was the very man who wanted that coin-box. Curious, wasn't it, how such coincidences happened in real life as well as in books?

I took him to my home in a taxi. On the way I succeeded in diverting his mind from any possible awkward questions by relating details of my sad story until I could see the poor fellow was on the verge of tears. For those interested in criminology I may say that all the best criminal devices are not necessarily planned beforehand to the end; they are begun any-old-how and the genius consists in carrying the thing through afterwards, much the same as running a great war. I recked not what might occur after I had nefariously induced the poor innocent to install the machine; perhaps I had some vague idea that the Englishman's house is his castle, though this seems ridiculous when considered calmly. However, what matter these psychological dissections? He came with me unsuspecting, and I piloted him out of the taxi without his ever noticing the name of the street even. How could I have foreseen? Well, anyhow I didn't, or I shouldn't have tipped him on the stairs.

With many nods and winks I gave my wife the hint how I had managed it, and we went about the house whispering and hobnobbing in odd corners like a couple of conspirators while he began the work of installation.

Then the first dreadful moment came. Suddenly he addressed me by my name, with a certain suspicious interrogation in his tone.

"Who?" I asked blandly, going as red as a turkey-cock, of course; I never can help it.

He looked surprised and I plunged heavily, giving the first name I could think of, which happened to be the one he had mentioned in the taxi--his own, in fact. He looked still more suspicious and I knew it had been a mistake, especially as close to where he had been working were two envelopes addressed to me. I am certain that if my wife had not called me at that moment I should have gone permanently purple all over.

When I got back --when I got back I could see that it had dawned upon him that I had wheedled him there without his knowing exactly where he was, and that he was determined not to be had. He asked me to sign for the installation.

Alas, I could not do that. It was only then that I realised that I am constitutionally honest; besides they might find me out.

We both tried to turn his thoughts to pleasanter topics. Perhaps asking him to have a glass of port was a mistake there are times when even bribery is bad policy. Briefly, after a mumbled remark that "there was something fishy," he refused to leave the box. Dry-eyed we watched him take it all down and depart in a dudgeon. We were left with a vision of shameless visitors with their twopenny calls and interminable bills running up even while we were away on our holidays.

"Let us," I said hoarsely--"let us go and look at our child; she is all we have left now."

Moodily we turned to go upstairs. In the hall we stopped dead. Upon the floor was the wretched paper which my Victorian conscience and my twentieth-century caution had prevented me from signing.

"He must," said my wife with her usual perspicacity, "have dropped it on his way out. Let's see who the box was really meant for."

We got it in the end. It came one morning, like the flowers in Spring, quite suddenly, and we spent a whole day telephoning to our friends to tell them we had a coin-box at last. I also wrote a letter full of gratitude to the telephone people and got the reply that, "owing to the shortage of plant, etc.," they regretted that for the time being they could not grant my request for a telephone.

We did not tell them that we had had one for three months; Heaven knows what would have happened.

And we are left in peace--now that our visitors have heard that we have a coin-box.

TWO "STEIN"-WAY GRANDS.

BY A PHILISTINE.

EINSTEIN and EPSTEIN were wonderful men, Bringing new miracles into our ken. EINSTEIN upset the Newtonian rule; EPSTEIN demolished the Pheidian School. EINSTEIN gave fits to the Royal Society; EPSTEIN delighted in loud notoriety. EINSTEIN made parallels meet in infinity; EPSTEIN remodelled the form of Divinity. Nature exhausted, I hopefully sing, Can't have more Steins of this sort in her sling.

Without waiting for the result of this unique contest Mr. Punch has no hesitation in saying that between them these warriors are responsible for the mightiest "blow" of the War.

FROM THE DANCE WORLD.

In the actual technique of his adopted art Mr. BENNETT has already shown extraordinary progress. The other day, while a wedding party was just about to leave St. George's, Hanover Square, Mr. BENNETT, who happened to be passing by, took a flying caracole clean over the Rolls-Royce which contained the happy pair. Those who witnessed the feat say that it eclipsed NIJINSKY in his most elastic mood. But Mr. BENNETT is not satisfied, and declined an invitation to appear at the Devonshire House Ball last week on the ground that his achievement does not yet square with his ambition. Moreover he has decided not to dance in public under his real name, but is not yet quite certain whether to choose the artistic pseudonym of Ben Netsky or Cinquecitt?--probably the latter.

Above all he is firmly resolved to preserve in his dancing the sympathetic and humanistic tone of his presentation of life in his books. It will be a message of hope. He is determined by his gestural artistry and resilient thistle-downiness to "sanction and fortify the natural human passion for believing that life can somehow, behind all the miseries and the mysteries, mean something profoundly worth while." To render justice to his mental and physical agility is beyond our powers.

We have been driven to culling this memorable sentence from the latest and most preternaturally precious of his American admirers.

OUR LITERARY LEGISLATORS.

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