“A king!” corrected Mrs. Smith, with emphasis.
“Well, then, a king,” agreed Estelle. “And he is very good to me. Everyone knows that. What I want with your husband?”
There was a lot more talk, and in the end Mrs. Smith, still unconvinced, went back to her hotel, packed up her things, and took the first train back to London.
Soon afterwards Smith came to me and told me all about it, asking my advice.
“Somebody’s been having a game with you,” I said. “Let’s go round to the Post Office, and try and get a look at the original of the telegram.”
We went, and after some demur the postmaster allowed us to see the telegraph form. Smith scanned it carefully, but McMillan had well carried out my instructions as to disguising his handwriting, and he could make nothing of it.
Then, in an evil moment, it occurred to him to turn the form over, and there at the back, in the space provided for the name and address of the sender, he read, “Carlton, Hippodrome, Brighton.” My dresser, instead of putting the name and address of the actress, had, in a moment of temporary forgetfulness, inserted my own.
Smith, I will say, took the matter in good part; but I had a rough time explaining matters to his wife.
A joke I once saw played by one friend on another struck me as being amazingly funny. One was clean-shaven, the other had a long thick beard, into which his friend stuck some half-dozen prawns, without, of course, his being aware of it. It did look funny. Try it yourself. But don’t try it on a man who is bigger than you, or possibly awkward results may ensue.
The late Dan Lesson, as I have already remarked, was a rare hand at these sort of practical jokes, and speaking of prawns somehow naturally reminds me of kippers. On one occasion Dan was dissatisfied at the way the orchestra played his music, so he got a none too fresh kipper and tacked it inside the bass viol. In a few days that orchestra was the sickest orchestra in England. The smell was something awful. It was hot weather, and the theatre was a bit close anyhow. They pulled up the boards. They even tore up the drains. But they didn’t succeed in locating where the smell came from. For all I know the mummified remains of that kipper, now of course no longer smellable, is in that viol yet.