"The nuisance is, I was born in the Midlands—to be precise, at West Bromicheham—the son of a well-to-do manufacturer of artificial jewellery. The only whiff of the brine that ever penetrated my father's office came wafted through an off-channel of his trade. He did an intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by. In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence. Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical inconvenience of Warwickshire—for a lad may run away to be a sailor, sir, but the devil take me if ever I heard of one running off to be a supercargo, and even this lay a bit beyond my ambition—I recoiled upon a passion to enter my father's business and increase the already tidy patrimonial pile.
"But here comes in the cross of my destiny. My father, sir, had secretly cherished dreams of raising me above his own station. To him a gentleman—and he ridiculously hoped to make me one—was a fellow above working for his living. He scoffed at my enthusiasm for trade, and at length he sent for me and in tones that brooked no denial commanded me to learn the violin.
"Never shall I forget the chill of heart with which I received that fatal mandate. I have no ear for music, sir. In tenderer years indeed I had made essay upon the Jew's harp, but had relinquished it without a sigh.
"'The violin!' I cried, though the words choked me. 'Father, anything but that! If it were the violoncello, now—'
"But he cut me short in cold incisive accents. 'The violin, or you are no son of mine.'
"I fled from the house, my home no longer. On the way to the front door I had sufficient presence of mind, and no more, to make a detour to the larder and possess myself of the longest joint; which my heated judgment, confusing temporal with linear measurement, commended to me as the most lasting. It proved to be a shin of beef: unnutritious except for soup (and I carried no tureen), useless as an object of barter. With this and two half-crowns in my pocket I slammed the front-door behind me and faced the future."
Mr. Fett paused impressively.
"And you call me an original, sir!" he went on in accents of reproach; "me, who started in life with two half-crowns in my pocket, the conventional outfit for a career of commercial success!"
"They have carried you all the way to Falmouth!"
"The one of them carried me so far as to Coventry, sir: where, finding a fair in progress as I passed through the town, and falling in with three bridesmaids who had missed their wedding-party in the crowd, I spent the other in treating them to the hobby-horses at one halfpenny a ride. Four halfpennies—there were four of us—make twopence, and two's into thirty are fifteen rides; a bold investment of capital, and undertaken (I will confess it) not only to solace the fair ones but to ingratiate myself with the fellow who turned the handle of the machine. To him I applied for a job. He had none to offer, but introduced me to a company of strolling players who (as fortune would have it) were on the point of presenting Hamlet with a dramatis personae decimated by Coventry ale. They cast me for 'Polonius' and some other odds and ends. You may remember, sir, that at one point the Prince of Denmark is instructed to 'enter reading.' That stage direction I caught at, and by a happy 'improvisation' spread it over the entire play. Not as 'Polonius' only, but as `Bernardo' upon the midnight platform, as 'Osric,' as 'Fortinbras,' as the 'Second Gravedigger,' as one of the odd Players—always I entered reading. In my great scene with the Prince we entered reading together. They killed me, still reading, behind the arras; and at a late hour I supped with the company on Irish stew; for, incensed by these novelties, the audience had raided a greengrocer's shop between the third and fourth acts and thereafter rained their criticism upon me in the form of cabbages and various esculent roots which we collected each time the curtain fell.