Funny Ha, Ha

by Paul Merton

  ‘We have eternity to stretch our legs in,’ replied the mystic. ‘It can be an infinity of things. I haven’t seen any of them—I’ve only seen the letter. I look at that, and say it’s not criminal.’

  ‘Then what’s the origin of it?’

  ‘I haven’t the vaguest idea.’

  ‘Then why don’t you accept the ordinary explanation?’

  Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:

  ‘Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and saw it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was Lord Kitchener. What would you think?’

  He paused a moment, and went on:

  ‘You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of ordinary personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that he inherited a dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been hypnotised at a séance; or threatened by a secret society with death if he refused the ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet—but not with Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days I knew him quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals quite well. It’s not a criminal’s letter. It’s all atmospheres.’ And he closed his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.

  Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and pity. The former said:

  ‘Well, I’m going, anyhow, and shall continue to think—until your spiritual mystery turns up—that a man who sends a note recommending a crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have that revolver?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Basil, getting up. ‘But I am coming with you.’ And he flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the corner.

  ‘You!’ said Rupert, with some surprise, ‘you scarcely ever leave your hole to look at anything on the face of the earth.’

  Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.

  ‘I scarcely ever,’ he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, ‘hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once, without going to see it.’

  And he led the way out into the purple night.

  We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet Street which contained Tanner’s Court. The erect, black figure of Major Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.

  Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner’s Court, with a quiver of delight at danger, and gripped Basil’s revolver in his great-coat pocket.

  ‘Shall we go in now?’ he asked.

  ‘Not get police?’ asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the street.

  ‘I am not sure,’ answered Rupert, knitting his brows. ‘Of course, it’s quite clear, the thing’s all crooked. But there are three of us, and—’

  ‘I shouldn’t get the police,’ said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert glanced at him and stared hard.

  ‘Basil,’ he cried, ‘you’re trembling. What’s the matter—are you afraid?’

  ‘Cold, perhaps,’ said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he was shaking.

  At last, after a few moments’ scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.

  ‘You’re laughing,’ he cried. ‘I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians—’

  ‘But I shouldn’t call the police,’ said Basil. ‘We four heroes are quite equal to a host,’ and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.

  Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.

  ‘Stand close,’ he said in the voice of a commander. ‘The scoundrel may be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and rush in.’

  The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.

  ‘Now,’ hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes suddenly over his shoulder, ‘when I say “Four’’, follow me with a rush. If I say “Hold him’’, pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say “Stop’’, stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your sword-stick ready. Now—one, two three, four!’

  With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room like an invasion, only to stop dead.

  The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared, at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed moustache, and the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked up as we came to a standstill.

  ‘Did you knock?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘I am sorry if I did not hear. What can I do for you?’

  There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.

  The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.

  ‘Is your name P.G. Northover?’ he asked.

  ‘That is my name,’ replied the other, smiling.

  ‘I think,’ said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his face, ‘that this letter was written by you.’ And with a loud clap he struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely nodded.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said the Major, breathing hard, ‘what about that?’

  ‘What about it, precisely,’ said the man with the moustache.

  ‘I am Major Brown,’ said that gentleman sternly.

  Northover bowed. ‘Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?’

  ‘Say!’ cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; ‘why, I want this confounded thing settled. I want—’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of the eyebrows. ‘Will you take a chair for a moment.’ And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.

  The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy young man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.

  ‘Mr Hopson,’ said Northover, ‘this is Major Brown. Will you please finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.

  ‘You will excuse me, gentlemen,’ said the egregious Northover, with his radiant smile, ‘if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don’t we? Ha! ha!’

  The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P.G. Northover; a raging silence on the part of everybody else.

  At length the scratching of Northover’s pen in the stillness was mingled with a knock at the door, almo
st simultaneous with the turning of the handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity, placed a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.

  The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him. He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered something, muttering—‘Careless.’ Then he read it again with the same impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown, whose hand was beating the devil’s tattoo on the back of the chair.

  ‘I think you will find that all right, Major,’ he said briefly.

  The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear later, but he found it like this:

  Major Brown to P.G. Northover.

  £

  s.

  d.

  January 1, to account rendered

  5

  6

  0

  May 9, to potting and embedding of zoo pansies

  2

  0

  0

  To cost of trolley with flowers

  0

  15

  0

  To hiring of man with trolley

  0

  5

  0

  To hire of house and garden for one day

  1

  0

  0

  To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc.

  3

  0

  0

  To salary of Miss Jameson

  1

  0

  0

  To salary of Mr Plover

  1

  0

  0

  ——

  Total

  £14

  6

  0

  A Remittance will oblige.

  ‘What,’ said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly rising out of his head, ‘What in heaven’s name is this?’

  ‘What is it?’ repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement. ‘It’s your account, of course.’

  ‘My account!’ The Major’s ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. ‘My account! And what have I got to do with it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Northover, laughing outright, ‘naturally I prefer you to pay it.’

  The Major’s hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover’s head.

  The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the empty floor.

  ‘Let me go, you scamps,’ he shouted. ‘Let me—’

  ‘Stand still,’ cried Rupert authoritatively. ‘Major Brown’s action is excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted—’

  ‘A customer has a perfect right,’ said Northover hotly, ‘to question an alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.’

  ‘What, in God’s name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?’ shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and exasperating mystery. ‘Who are you? I’ve never seen you or your insolent tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me—’

  ‘Mad,’ said Northover, gazing blankly round; ‘all of them mad. I didn’t know they travelled in quartettes.’

  ‘Enough of this prevarication,’ said Rupert; ‘your crimes are discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though only a private detective myself, I will take the responsibility of telling you that anything you say—’

  ‘Mad,’ repeated Northover, with a weary air.

  And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.

  ‘Major Brown,’ he said, ‘may I ask you a question?’

  The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.

  ‘You?’ he cried; ‘certainly, Mr Grant.’

  ‘Can you tell me,’ said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow, as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, ‘can you tell me what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?’

  The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:

  ‘Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something—a name with a hyphen—Gurney-Brown; that was it.’

  ‘And when did the house change hands?’ said Basil, looking up sharply. His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.

  ‘I came in last month,’ said the Major.

  And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.

  ‘Oh! it’s too perfect—it’s too exquisite,’ he gasped, beating the arms with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like weathercocks in a whirlwind.

  ‘Confound it, Basil,’ said Rupert, stamping. ‘If you don’t want me to go mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.’

  Northover rose.

  ‘Permit me, sir, to explain,’ he said. ‘And, first of all, permit me to apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand the loss.’ And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the waste-paper basket and bowed.

  Poor Brown’s face was still a picture of distraction. ‘But I don’t even begin to understand,’ he cried. ‘What bill? What blunder? What loss?’

  Mr P.G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration, there were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache, especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.

  ‘Do you know where you are, Major?’ he said.

  ‘God knows I don’t,’ said the warrior, with fervour.

  ‘You are standing,’ replied Northover, ‘in the office of the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ blankly inquired Brown.

  The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other’s face.

  ‘Major,’ said he, ‘did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen—something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: “Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.’’ Did you ever feel that?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said the Major shortly.

  ‘Then I must explain with more elaboration,’ said Mr Northover, with a sigh. ‘The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible a
nd pointed; it is almost a pity you did not see the end of it. I need scarcely explain further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor in your present house, Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks, ignoring alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military rank, positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of another man’s story.’

  ‘How on earth does the thing work?’ asked Rupert Grant, with bright and fascinated eyes.

  ‘We believe that we are doing a noble work,’ said Northover warmly. ‘It has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers—all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream.’

  Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.

  Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good humour.

  ‘Of course; awfully dense, sir,’ he said. ‘No doubt at all, the scheme excellent. But I don’t think—’ He paused a moment, and looked dreamily out of the window. ‘I don’t think you will find me in it. Somehow, when one’s seen— seen the thing itself, you know—blood and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, “There remaineth a rest’’.’