the game had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little man with waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boasting heartily of his temperance. It was then that he who told this mournful story, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little over the green blaze into the light of the two guttering candles and revealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. One woman to him was as ugly as another.
And the silenced boasters arose and went home to bed leaving him all alone, as he supposed, with his unequalled virtue. And yet he was not alone, for when the rest had gone there arose a member out of a deep armchair at the dark end of the room and walked across to him, a man whose occupation he did not know and only now suspects.
“You have,” said the stranger, “a surpassing virtue.”
“I have no possible use for it,” my poor friend replied.
“Then doubtless you would sell it cheap,” said the stranger.
Something in the man’s manner or appearance made the desolate teller of this mournful tale feel his own inferiority, which probably made him feel acutely shy, so that his mind abased itself as an Oriental does his body in the presence of a superior, or perhaps he was sleepy, or merely a little drunk. Whatever it was he only mumbled “O yes,” instead of contradicting so mad a remark. And the stranger led the way to the room where the telephone was.
“I think you will find my firm will give a good price for it,” he said: and without more ado he began with a pair of pincers to cut the wire of the telephone and the receiver. The old waiter who looked after the club they had left shuffling round the other room putting things away for the night.
“Whatever are you doing of?” said my friend.
“This way,” said the stranger. Along a passage they went and away to the back of the club and there the stranger leaned out of a window and fastened the severed wires to the lightning conductor. My friend has no doubt of that, a broad ribbon of copper, half an inch wide, perhaps wider, running down from the roof to the earth.
“Hell,” said the stranger with his mouth to the telephone; then silence for a while with his ear to the receiver, leaning out of the window. And then my friend heard his poor virtue being several times repeated, and then words like yes and No.
“They offer you three jokes,” said the stranger, “which shall make all who hear them simply die of laughter.”
I think my friend was reluctant then to have anything more to do with it, he wanted to go home; he said he didn’t want any jokes.
“They think very highly of your virtue,” said the stranger. And at that, odd as it seems, my friend wavered, for logically if they thought highly of the goods they should have paid a higher price.
“O all right,” he said.
The extraordinary document that the agent drew from his pocket ran something like this:
“I ..... in consideration of three new jokes received from Mr. Montagu-Montague, hereinafter to be called the agent, and warranted to be as by him stated and described, do assign to him, yield, abrogate, and give up all recognitions, emoluments, perquisites or rewards due to me Here or Elsewhere on account of the following virtue, to wit and that is to say ..... that all women are to me equally ugly.” The last eight words were being filled in in ink by Mr. Montagu-Montague.
My poor friend duly signed it. “These are the jokes,” said the agent. They were boldly written on three slips of paper. “They don’t seem very funny,” said the other when he had read them. “You are immune,” said Montagu-Montague, “but anyone else who hears them will simply die of laughter: that we guarantee.”
An American firm had bought at the price of waste paper a hundred thousand copies of The Dictionary of Electricity written when electricity was new, — and it had turned out that even then its author had not rightly grasped his subject, — the firm had paid 10,000 pounds to a respectable English paper (no other in fact than the Briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain orders for The Briton Dictionary of Electricity was the occupation of my unfortunate friend. He seems to have had away with him. Apparently he knew by a glance at a man, or a look round at his garden, whether to recommend the book as “an absolutely up-to-date achievement, the finest thing of its kind in the world of modern science” or as “at once quaint and imperfect, a thing to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear old times that are gone.” So he went on with this quaint though usual business, putting aside the memory of that night as an occasion on which he had “somewhat exceeded” as they say in circles where a spade is called neither a spade nor an agricultural implement but is never mentioned at all, being altogether too vulgar.
And then one night he put on his suit of dress clothes and found the three jokes in the pocket. That was perhaps a shock. He seems to have thought it over carefully then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner at the club to twenty of the members. The dinner would do no harm he thought -might even help the business, and if the joke came off he would be a witty fellow, and two jokes still up his sleeve.
Whom he invited or how the dinner went I do not know for he began to speak rapidly and came straight to the point, as a stick that nears a cataract suddenly goes faster and faster. The dinner was duly served, the port went round, the twenty men were smoking, two waiters loitered, when he after carefully reading the best of the jokes told it down the table. They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled his cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke had succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not stop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waited wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and the waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minutes when this frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: it was forced laughter! However could anything have induced him to tell so foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity as in revelation; and the more he thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too, the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother touts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. He was very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. And then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away, and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, he scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared at you; and the headlines said: Twenty-Two Men Dead at a Club.
Yes, he saw it then: the laughter had not stopped, some had probably burst blood vessels, some must have choked, some succumbed to nausea, heart-failure must have mercifully taken some, and they were his friends after all, and none had escaped, not even the waiters. It was that infernal joke.
He thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the drive to Victoria Station, the boat-train to Dover and going disguised to the boat: and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, two constables that wished to speak for a moment with Mr. Watkyn-Jones. That was his name.
In a third-class carriage with handcuffs on his wrists, with forced conversation when any, he returned between his captors to be tried for murder at the High Court of Bow.
At the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerable ability who had gone into the cabinet in order to enhance his forensic reputation. And he was ably defended. It is no
