The Rupa Book of Laughter Omnibus & Funny Side Up (2 in 1)

by Ruskin Bond

  "God pity all the poor souls at sea!" he says. (They all say that. If you get used to it, and get to like it, you want to hear it said, no matter how often they say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it at him, really, but the effect was wonderful.)

  And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. "A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it."

  And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only daughter—the only one that he has—who is being cast to death upon the reef. Then comes the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it through the surf but him. You know that because the other man says so himself.

  But if he goes in the boat then the great light will go out. Untended it cannot live in the storm. And if it goes out—ah! If it goes out—ask of the angry waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's long toll of death must be without the light!

  I wish you could have seen it—you who only see the drawing-room plays of to-day—the scene when the lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and resolute, and says: "My place is here. God's will be done." And you know that as he says it and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is drifting, at that very moment, to the rocks.

  "How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can ask that question you little understand the drama as it was. Save her? No, of course they didn't save her. What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and force, no matter how wild and tragic it might be. They did not save her. They found her the next day, in the concluding scene—all that was left of her when she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. Her bottom boards had been smashed in, the gunwale was gone—in short, she was a wreck.

  The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl. That kind of thing was always taken care of. You see just as the lighthouse man said "God's will be done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging there. Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not ashamed to use Providence in the Old Drama. So he made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony and hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it every night.

  A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been. But, somehow, those of us who were brought up on that sort of thing, still sigh for it.

  Pause

  I would advise a man to pause

  Before he takes a wife;

  Indeed, and I can see no cause

  He should not pause for life.

  Pierre Marivaux

  Sigh No More, Ladies

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever;

  One foot on sea, and one on shore,

  To one thing constant never.

  Thomas Percy

  Drunkards of Distinction

  BEING A BRIEF CATALOGUE OF

  EMINENT TOPERS, LUSHES AND SOAKS.

  The roll of notable British drunkards is a long one. It begins far back. No doubt the island climate is to blame. This being but a brisk seasonable selection it is hardly necessary to apologise for omissions, even of some of your favourite topers, lushes and soaks.

  Let us begin, then, with some of our alcoholic rulers. Certainly one of the earliest must be Bonosus, a late Roman governor who hanged himself in a fit of maudlin remorse after a particularly disgraceful defeat by the Picts. His troops made brutal, typically heavy Roman jokes on the lines of: "There hangs a wineskin."

  Bonosus used to get drunk on the rough, heady Falernian red, which he imported straight from Tuscany. Meanwhile the grape vines and viticulture had been introduced into the island by St. Augustine's missionaries who needed wine handy for communion. Attached to the monasteries were vineyards which produced excellent British wines, thought to be not unlike still champagne and burgundies. But by the 9th century the import of wine was big enough to be worth taxing.

  The coarse Saxon invaders preferred mead, beer, and crude spirits which produced a savage hangover, known in Old English literature as "ayenbite of inwit." It proved too much for the native Britons. There is a story that Hengist got the British King, Vortigern, so stewed that he gave away the county of Kent.

  The Danes also laid an early foundation to their universal reputation as big boozers. Hardicanute blew up at a wedding breakfast and fell to earth with a terrible convulsion. As for Canute, he was certainly not sober when he tried that megalomaniac experiment with the tide. "Half seas over, I should say," remarked one of his courtiers.

  With the Norman invasion, wine again became the ruling class drink. The Conqueror was sober, but his son, William Rufus, besides alas, being given to importuning male persons in the New Forest, was a chronic alcoholic and hopelessly drunk when the arrow got him.

  The three sons of Henry II were all drinkers. Geoffrey was a hopeless lush. Richard Coeur de Lion hit the bottle hard without letting it master him. John couldn't hold his and blew up.

  British vineyards, meanwhile, were put out of big business by the fact that from 1152, for three centuries onwards, the Bordeaux claret-country belonged to the English crown. Prices make your mouth water. In the 12th century claret retailed in London at 1d. Per gallon; in the 13th century at 2d.; in the 14th at 3½ d.; in the 16th at 8d.

  Among the Plantagenets, Edward II and Richard II tippled conscientiously, especially Edward II who qualifies for the lush class. Henry V drank hard. And for the Tudors, Henry VIII enjoyed periods, lasting sometimes for several days, of total intoxication.

  James I was certainly a toper, if not a lush, though we should not be too hard on him for he was but following the example of his nurse and his tutor. He was also, on occasion, led away by his brother-in-law Christian IV, King of Denmark.

  Christian's visit to London in 1606 was the occasion of a tremendous booze-up at which, according to a contemporary letter:

  The two Monarchs embraced each other so lovingly that remarks were passed. The Nobles wallowed "in beastly delights." The ladies abandoned all sobriety and were seen to roll about in intoxication … King James, attempting to dance with the lady who was playing the part of the Queen of Sheba in a masque of Solomon's temple, passed out cold and was laid on a state bed. The ladies representing Peace, Hope, and Charity followed suit….

  Cromwell's son, Dick, hardly counts as a ruler though he was midway between lush and soak. Charles I was a persistent bibber, though not a lush. Queen Anne was fond of brandy, in a quiet way, though not so fond of it as her obscure consort who belongs to the special category of Steady Silent Soaks.

  It was not until the end of the 17th century that the impressed flush cork, together with that epoch-making invention the corkscrew, ushered in a period when really heavy drinking could be combined with connoisseurship.

  The first two Hanoverians, though no blue-riband boys, were not particularly boozy, nor was poor manic-depressive-George III. George IV was indubitably a toper, especially fond of brandy and sticky French liqueurs which he swigged at the oddest hours. He was seen more than once flat out in public. You could count him as a lush, or even a soak if you were feeling harsh. His brother William—Sailor Billy—was a breezy open-air type of toper.

  Queen Victoria's moderation was beyond reproach; her attitude toward drink was entirely rational. She told Gladstone to warn Canon Wilberforce, when preaching at Westminster, to lay off "the very strong total abstinence language which he has carried to such an extreme hitherto. Total abstinence is an impossibility; and though it may be necessary in individual cases it will not do to insist on it as a general practice."

  Of alcohol-addicted ecclesiastics you could mention Cardinal Wolsey, who was put in the stocks for drunkenness in his youth. And you must not forget Richard Corbett, Bishop of Oxford, in the 17th century, who got drunk with some ballad-singers one market day and sang with them at Abingdon Cross. He and his chaplain, Dr. Lushington, used sometimes to lock themselves in the episcopal wine cellar for d
ays at a time. Spare a moment, too, for the Elizabethan Dean Nonell of St. Paul's, thought by some to have been the accidental inventor of bottled beer.

  Among 18th century divines there were some notable drunkards, among them the Rev. Parnell, who could not finish a sermon without stooping down in the pulpit every few sentences to fortify himself. There were still heavy drinking clerics of the sporting parson type in the 19th century, such as the Cornish vicar whom Benson visited soon after he took over the new bishopric of Truro. While he was trying, vainly, to get him to discuss church matters, the butler entered and asked what wine he should put out for communion? "Damn it," roared the vicar, "let's give 'em hock for a change."

  The aristocracy has always been renowned for its single-mindedness in this field. As you know, the all-time record for drunkenness among peers, or for that matter among poets—another highly addicted group—is held by the Earl of Rochester, most dissolute of all the Restoration Rakes, who was well away continuously for five on end.

  Among the drunkenest of Rochester's cronies were Sackville, later Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sedley. Together with Sir Thomas Ogles, they were fined for indecently exposing themselves, after dinner, to the public from a balcony in Covent Garden. A play written by Sackville had to be taken off after the third act, as the cast had become incapable, the author's lines calling for almost continuous punch-drinking, and he having generously provided real punch for the actors.

  Politicians and lawyers are supposed to need the full possession of their faculties, but there have been some notably bibulous figures among them. Brandy is generally their stand-by; you used to be able to smell it coming from the windows of the younger Pitt's coach as it rolled round Parliament Square after a late session. As for Fox, his liver was so hard that when they opened him up after death the surgeons rang guineas on it.

  The record toper in the category is undoubtedly Sheridan. In the hardest drinking period of English history he outdrank them all. There was no limit to his capacity for wine. During his famous 24-hour speech in the House of Commons on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he drank a gallon of brandy. He must somehow have communicated his intoxication to his audience for they declared that the speech was the most brilliant oration ever delivered at Westminster. It reads today as dully as a laundry list endlessly repeated.

  An omnibib of equal capacity with Sheridan was the great scholar Richard Porson, of whom it was said that he would sooner drink ink than nothing. He preferred port or brandy, but was known on occasion to down lamp-oil, embrocation, and the spirits of wine in which anatomical specimens had been preserved.

  Literary men display a high proportion of topers, lushes and soaks. The problem generally is how precisely to classify them. The poets Occleve, Chaucer and Skelton (himself a wine merchant's son) were all topers, though not necessarily chronics. Shakespeare, in his youth, drank for the Stratford Boozers in an away match against the Sidbury Sippers and passed out under a tree. His death was brought on by a visit, when he was yet convalescent, from Ben Jonson and Drayton. They kept the delicate Swan of Avon out of bed swigging sack and canary and he folded.

  Marvell wrote his poems on claret. The priggish Addison complained of ghastly hangovers. Steel was a chronic lush. Dr. Johnson was a three bottle (port) man before he gave it up. He held his drink splendidly, unlike Boswell who passed out more than once on the pavement and was pulled in by the watch.

  The fact that Lamb, the gentle Elia, was often stewed as an eel has been carefully kept from generations of schoolboys.

  From Lilliput

  Company

  BY AIMOR A. DICKSON

  One night in late October

  When I was far from sober,

  Returning with my load with manly pride,

  My feet began to stutter

  So I lay down in the gutter,

  And a pig came near and lay down by my side.

  A lady passing by was heard then plain to say,

  "You can tell a man who boozes,

  By the company he chooses,"

  At which the pig got up and slowly walked away.

  Wimpole's Woe

  BY LOUIS GOLDING

  Albert Wimpole was the sort of little man concerning whom women nudge each other in omnibuses and say, "What a nice kind face he's got!" He was too kind to be a success as a business man, too industrious to be a success as a bricklayer, too tiny to make a good thing out of odd jobs in Covent Garden. So he became, because even editors could not resist his nice kind face, a literary critic.

  He became the nicest and kindest literary critic in London. He found something of novelty in the most laboriously stereotyped novel, a certain lightness of touch in the most thunderous of sermons. Even about minor poetry he could not bring himself to be unkind. As he wrote his criticism he had a feeling that the author he was treating stood by his elbow with clasped hands and beseeching eyes. He could no more bring himself to say an unkind word about the book before him than he could have pushed its author into a vat of hot oil.

  So he went on from season to season, finding somehow, somewhere, a little extenuation for the jejune, the lewd, the preposterous. A split infinitive might perhaps earn a gentle rebuke, but he would promptly apologise for his temerity by drawing attention to the author's delicacy or profundity. A nice kind critic.

  And then one morning a volume appeared on Wimpole's table entitled Gangrene and Lilies, the author being Mr. Eustace Chasuble. I want to insist on this—Wimpole had not, as the saying is, got out of bed the wrong side that morning. His landlady had not scorched the bacon. He suffered occasionally from gumboils, but he was free at that time from that minor but unpleasing affliction. Yet the fact remains that even as he unwrapped the book from the parcel, he felt that Gangrene and Lilies gave off an offensive odour. It stank. It was a volume of verses, an astonishing amalgam of the jejune, the lewd, the preposterous. No book had ever affected Wimpole in this desperate fashion before. It made him blink, his ears burned with shame, his gorge rose. And he sat down and wrote about it. All the ferocity he had suppressed for years blazed into one tempest of denunciation. (Is not the nicest and kindest little man in the world fundamentally a shrieking ape from the primordial jungles?) Whatever in the past he might have said about all the authors he had been nice and kind to, he now heaped upon Eustace Chasuble. And lots more. The sheets of paper flew from his pen like sparks from a knife-grinder's wheel. Wimpole grunted. Wimpole sweated. Then he sent his landlady's small daughter to the post with the completed jeremiad, and lay back on his chair and wept.

  I assure you it was not the last time that Eustace Chasuble dissolved little Wimpole into a pool of tears. It was not the last time that Chasuble's large-eyed phantom came reproachfully into the room and stood beside Wimpole and wrung its hands and moaned. Poor little Wimpole! He could not have felt a more consummate blackguard if he had murdered his grandmother. Waves of repentance surged over him and drowned him. Not a single word he had ever written could have so much as troubled a fly's wing. And now … And now … He beat his bosom.

  He sometimes wondered whether his review had caused Eustace Chasuble to commit suicide. He paraded various methods of suicide in grisly pageantry before him. Chasuble hanging from a beam, his lips and tongue purple … Chasuble contorted in the unspeakable anguish of strychnine … Chasuble a dismembered corpse in the wake of the great North express. But always the original picture asserted itself in the end, the large-eyed phantom that came reproachfully into the room and stood beside him and wrung its hands and moaned.

  He developed in his mind an extraordinary precise picture of Fustace Chasuble. He was about five feet four inches in height, his head was pear-shaped and rather too big for his body. The hair was long and jet black, the lips a vivid scarlet upon a sallow face. The finger-nails were long and (if the truth were told) a little dirty. He was knock-kneed. He had a fluting, high pitched voice. But his eyes, his reproachful, melancholy eyes … Wimpole lay back in his chair and sobbed.

&nbs
p; Many years passed. Never again did Wimpole utter a word of criticism which was not in the last degree nice and kind. But he could not ever exorcise the phantom of Eustace Chasuble—the knock-kneed, long-haired, sad-eyed phantom of little Eustace Chasuble.

  Behold him at this moment in the tiny market town of Bugmarsh, where he has a couple of hours to idle away before catching his connection for Town. He has been spending his annual fortnight's holiday in the heart of the country. But now the call of duty has gone forth and he must return to his labours. It is dusk. He is rather short-sighted. He is peering at the posters pasted up outside the parish hall of Bugmarsh. He learns that there is to be an auction sale of farm implements and effects next Tuesday, that to-morrow night an illustrious pianist from the Metropolis is actually going to honour Bugmarsh with his presence, that to-night—that to-night—O Heavens! No!

  Wimpole's scalp froze. His hairs stood on end. As if to make it quite, quite certain that there could not be two Eustace Chasubles in the world, you were informed in chaste lettering under his name that he was the "author of Gangrene and Lilies". Mr. Eustace Chasuble was to lecture that night, that very night, in the parish hall of Bugmarsh. His theme was to be—how blunt, how direct it was—"Pigs". No more than that—"Pigs". The lecture had started at seven o'clock. It was now half-past seven. Even if Eustace Chasuble continued for another hour there would be ample time to catch his train. Could he repudiate this opportunity, after so many years, to make amends? His heart filled with pity Once more the phantom of little Chasuble stretched out its hands, stared mournfully and reproachfully upon him. Perhaps it was his own vitriolic review that had driven little Chasuble from the rivers of poetry (even though he had made them smell like sewers) and caused him to abandon lilies for mangel-wurzels, gazelles for pigs.