Plum Pie (33 page)

"And are you aware that some years back your sister smuggled in her pearls in the interior of a Felix the Cat which she had purchased at the ship's shop?"

Freddie was staring at Mr. Bunting as if the latter had been a
beautiful picture, which was far from being the case.

"You aren't suggesting?"

"It is more a matter of stating than suggesting. I have had the  pleasure of a long acquaintance with your sister, Judson, and I know how considerate she is. She would never have asked her loved one to smuggle her necklace through the Customs without giving him kindly advice on how to do it. I think if you were to open the animal...Ah, you have done so, and, as I foresaw..."

Freddie was staring at what he held in his hand. So was Judson.

"Do you mean," said the latter, appalled, "that that old crook let me go through those Customs sheds with that? Why, I might have got jugged for life! "

"He would naturally prefer that you and not he did the stretch you allude to. You spoke, Freddie?"

"If you can call saying 'Ha!' speaking."

"Did you say 'Ha!'?"

"Yes, I did, and I'll tell you why. I am now in a position to go to Pinkney and dictate terms."

"Could you sketch them out for us?"

"In a few simple words. I'm going to give Pinkney a buzz at the Plaza...What's the number?"

“I can tell you that. Plaza 3-3000."

"And inform him that I am holding this necklace in...what's the word?"

"Escrow?"

"That's right. I'm holding it in escrow till he comes through with a substantial order for Donaldson's Dog Joy and gives Joe Cardinal his money and...Have you anything to suggest?"

"You might make it a condition that he goes on a diet."

"I will."

Most people, meeting Freddie Threepwood, were struck by his remarkable resemblance to a sheep, but if they could have seen him now as he strode to the telephone and dialled, they would have realized that this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill sheep they were looking at, but a keen, brisk, alert sheep, the sort of sheep that knows all about drive and push and has been trained to develop its initiative.

"Plaza Hotel?" he said curtly. "Put me through to Mr. Arnold Pinkney's suite."

"He'll have a fit of apoplexy," said Judson, awed.

"He couldn't do better," said Freddie. "Ah, Pinkney, is that you? This is Threepwood speaking. Listen, Pinkney..."

Time Like an Ever-rolling Stream

I must confess that often I'm

A prey to melancholy

Because I do not work on
Time
.

Golly, it must be jolly.

No other bliss, I hold, but pales

Beside the feeling that you're

One of nine hundred—is it?—males

And females of such stature.

How very much I would enjoy,

To call Roy Alexander "Roy"

And hear him say "Hullo, dear boy!"

Not to mention mixing on easy terms with

Louis Banks

Richard Oulahan Jr.

Edward O. Cerf

Estetle Dembeck

Cecilia I. Dempster

Ed. Ogle

Robert Ajernian

Honor Balfour

Dorothy Slavin Haystead

Mark Vishniak

Old Uncle Fuerbringer and all.

The boys who run the (plural)
Times

Are carefully selected;

Chaps who makes puns or Cockney rhymes

Are instantly rejected.

Each day some literary gem

By these fine lads is written,

And everyone considers them

A credit to Great Britain.

But dash it all—let's face it, what?—

Though locally esteemed as hot

For all their merits they are not,

Well, to take an instance at random,

Robert W. Boyd Jr,

Lester Bernstein

Gilbert Cant

Edwin Copps

Henry Bradford Darrach Jr.

William Forbis

Barker T. Hartshorn

Roger S. Hewlett

Carl Solberg

Jonathan Norton Leonard

Old Uncle Fuerbringer and all.

Alas, I never learned the knack

(And on
Times
' staff you need it)

Of writing English front to back

Till swims the mind to read it.

Tried often I've my darnedest, knows

Goodness, but with a shock I'd

Discover that once more my prose

Had failed to go all cockeyed.

So, though I wield a gifted pen,

There'll never be a moment when

I join that happy breed of men.

I allude to (among others)

Douglas Auchincloss

Louis Kronenherger

Champ Clark

Alton J. Klingen

Michael Demarest

Bernard Frizell

Theodore E. Kalem

Carter Harman

Robert Shnayerson

Harriet Bachman

Margaret Quimby

Elsie Ann Brown

Shirley Estabrook

Marion Hollander Sanders

Danuta Reszke-Birk

Deirdre Mead Ryan

F. Sydnor Trapnell

Yi Ying Sung

Content Peckham

Quinera Sarita King

Old Uncle Fuerbringer and all,

Old Uncle Fuerbringer and all.

Printer's Error

As o'er my latest book I pored,

Enjoying it immensely

I suddenly exclaimed "Good Lord! "

And gripped the volume tensely. "

Golly!" I cried. I writhed in pain.

"They've done it on me once again! "

And furrows creased my brow.

I'd written (which I thought quite good)

"Ruth, ripening into womanhood,

Was now a girl who knocked men flat

And frequently got whistled at,"

And some vile, careless, casual gook

Had spoiled the best thing in the book

By printing "not"

(Yes, "not", great Scott!)

When I had written "now".

On murder in the first degree

The Law, I knew, is rigid:

Its attitude, if A kills B,

To A is always frigid.

It counts it not a trivial slip

If on behalf of authorship

You liquidate compositors.

This kind of conduct it abhors

And seldom will allow.

Nevertheless, I deemed it best

And in the public interest

To buy a gun, to oil it well,

Inserting what is called a shell,

And go and pot

With sudden shot

This printer who had printed "not"

When I had written "now".

I tracked the bounder to his den

Through private information:

I said "Good afternoon" and then

Explained the situation:

"I'm not a fussy man," I said.

"I smile when you put 'rid' for 'red’

And 'bad' for 'bed' and 'hoad' for 'head'

And 'bolge' instead of 'bough'.

When 'wone' appears in lieu of 'wine'

Or if you alter 'Cohn' to 'Schine',

I never make a row.

I know how easy errors are.

But this time you have gone too far

By printing 'not' when you knew what

I really wrote was 'now'.

Prepare," I said, "to meet your God

Or, as you'd say, your Goo or Bod

Or possibly your Gow."

A few weeks later into court

I came to stand my trial.

The Judge was quite a decent sort,

He said "Well, cocky, I'll

Be passing sentence in a jiff,

And so, my poor unhappy stiff,

If you have anything to say,

Now is the moment. Fire away.

You have?"

I said "And how!

Me lud, the facts I don't dispute.

I did, I own it freely, shoot

This printer through the collar stud.

What else could I have done, me lud?

He's printed 'not'..."

The Judge said "
What!
”

When you had written 'now'?

God bless my soul! Gadzooks! " said he

"The blighters did that once to me.

A dirty trick, I trow.

I hereby quash and override

The jury's verdict. Gosh! " he cried.

"Give me your hand. Yes, I insist,

You splendid fellow! Case dismissed."

(Cheers, and a Voice "Wow-wow! ")

A statue stands against the sky,

Lifelike and rather pretty.

'Twas recently erected by

The P.E.N, committee.

And many a passer-by is stirred,

For on the plinth, if that's the word,

In golden letters you may read

"This is the man who did the deed.

His hand set to the plough,

He did not sheathe the sword, but got

A gun at great expense and shot

The human blot who'd printed 'not'

When he had written 'now'.

He acted with no thought of self,

Not for advancement, not for pelf,

But just because it made him hot

To think the man had printed 'not'

When he had written 'now'."

A Note on Humour

It will not have escaped the notice of the discerning reader that the foregoing stories and in-between bits were intended to be humorous, and this would seem as good a time as any for me to undertake the What-is-Humour essay which every author is compelled by the rules of his Guild to write sooner or later.

In the sixteenth century they called humour 'a disorder of the blood', and though they were probably just trying to be nasty, it is not a bad description. It is, anyway, a disorder of something. To be a humourist you must see the world out of focus. You must, in other words, be slightly cockeyed. This leads you to ridicule established institutions, and as most people want to keep their faith in established institutions intact, the next thing that happens is that you get looked askance at. Statistics show that 87.03 of today's askance looks are directed at humourists, for the solid citizenry suspect them and are wondering uneasily all the time what they are going to be up to next, like baby-sitters with charges who are studying to be juvenile delinquents. There is an atmosphere of strain such as must have prevailed long ago when the king or prince or baron had one of those Shakespearian Fools around the castle, capering about and shaking a stick with a bladder and little bells attached to it. Tradition compelled him to employ the fellow, but nothing was going to make him like it.

"Never can understand a word that character says," he would mutter peevishly to his wife as the Fool went bounding about the throne room jingling his bells. "Why on earth do you encourage him? It was you who started him off this morning. All that nonsense about crows!"

"I only asked him how many crows can nest in a grocer's jerkin. Just making conversation."

"And what was his reply? Tinkling like a xylophone, he gave that awful cackling laugh of his and said 'A full dozen at cockcrow, and something less under the dog star, by reason of the dew, which lies heavy on men taken with the scurvy'. Was that sense?”

"It was humour."

"Who says so?"

"Shakespeare says so."

"Who's Shakespeare?"

"All right, George."

"I never heard of any Shakespeare."

"I said all right, George. Skip it."

"Well, anyway, you can tell him from now on to keep his humour to himself, and if he hits me on the head just once more with that bladder of his, he does it at his own risk. Every I time he gets within arm's reach of me—socko! And for that I pay him a penny a week, not deductible."

Humourists are often rather gloomy men, and what makes them so is the sense they have of being apart from the herd, of being, as one might say, the eczema on the body politic. They are looked down on by the intelligentsia, patronized by the critics and generally regarded as outside the pale of literature.  People are very serious today, and the writer who does not take them seriously is viewed with concern and suspicion.

"Fiddle while Rome burns, would you?" they say to him, and treat him as an outcast.

I think we should all be sorry for humourists and try to be very kind to them, for they are so vulnerable. You can blot the sunshine from their lives in an instant by telling them you don't see what's so funny in that, and if there is something funny in it, you can take all the heart out of them by calling them facetious or describing them as 'mere humourists'. A humourist who has been called mere not only winces. He frets. He refuses to eat his cereal. He goes about with his hands in his pockets and his lower lip jutting out, kicking stones and telling himself that the lot of a humourist is something that ought not to happen to a dog, and probably winds up by going in for 'sick' humour like Lenny Bruce, and the trouble about being like Lenny Bruce is that the cops are always arresting you, which must cut into your time rather annoyingly.

This is no doubt the reason why in these grey modern days you are hardly ever able to find a funny story in print, and in the theatre it is even worse. Playwrights nowadays are writing nothing but that grim stark stuff, and as about ten out of every twelve plays produced perish in awful agonies, I don't think they have the right idea. If only the boys would stop being so frightfully powerful and significant and give us a little comedy occasionally, everything would get much brighter. I am all for incest and tortured souls in moderation, but a good laugh from time to time never hurt anybody.