"No," was the reply, "but Mr. Leno is a famous comedian."
Such is fame. Here I had been patting myself on the back, thinking I was some pumpkins as a comedian, and my negative destroyed. However, there is balm in Gilead. I tell him I am Charlie Chaplin and he wants to turn the place upside down to get some new pictures of me; but we haven't the time, and, besides, I want to get out, because I am hearing suppressed snickers from my friends, before whom I was going to show off.
VIII.
A MEMORABLE NIGHT IN LONDON
So we wandered along through South London by Kennington Cross and Kennington Gate, Newington Butts, Lambeth Walk, and the Clapham Road, and all through the neighbourhood. Almost every step brought back memories, most of them of a tender sort. I was right here in the midst of my youth, but somehow I seemed apart from it. I felt as though I was viewing it under a glass. It could be seen all too plainly, but when I reached to touch it it was not there—only the glass could be felt, this glass that had been glazed by the years since I left.
If I could only get through the glass and touch the real live thing that had called me back to London. But I couldn't.
A man cannot go back. He thinks he can, but other things have happened to his life. He has new ideas, new friends, new attachments. He doesn't belong to his past, except that the past has, perhaps, made marks on him.
My friends and I continue our stroll—a stroll so pregnant with interest to me at times that I forget that I have company and wander along alone.
Who is that old derelict there against the cart? Another landmark. I look at him closely. He is the same—only more so. Well do I remember him, the old tomato man. I was about twelve when I first saw him, and he is still here in the same old spot, plying the same old trade, while I—
I can picture him as he first appeared to me standing beside his round cart heaped with tomatoes, his greasy clothes shiny in their unkemptness, the rather glassy single eye that had looked from one side of his face staring at nothing in particular, but giving you the feeling that it was seeing all, the bottled nose with the network of veins spelling dissipation.
I remember how I used to stand around and wait for him to shout his wares. His method never varied. There was a sudden twitching convulsion, and he leaned to one side, trying to straighten out the other as he did so, and then, taking into his one good lung all the air it would stand, he would let forth a clattering, gargling, asthmatic, high-pitched wheeze, a series of sounds which defied interpretation.