I turned round immediately.
“Are you Dixon Scott?” I asked a man—a man who looked as unlike my preconceived picture of him as possible.
“Yes, and someone has just told me you are Gerald Cumberland.”
“How awfully jolly,” said I, “for now I have the opportunity of telling you how much I admire your wonderful genius.”
“Tophole!” said he. “I love praise, don’t you?”
“Ra-ther!” said I.
And then I fought for a taxi and saw Scott no more.
. . . . . . . .
Barry Pain, like the gentleman who used to be known as Adrian Ross, leads a double intellectual life. He earns [141] ]his bread by writing humorous literature; he is the king of modern jesters; but secretly (and perhaps in shame) he studies philosophy and metaphysics and is known to have written a big two-volume work dealing with the furtive processes of the human mind. He is a scholar, but Fate has made of him a manufacturer of jokes. While his tougher intellectual faculties are wrestling with the basic problems of the universe—the whence, whither and why of things—his observing eye is noting the little discrepancies of life, the jolly frailties of human nature, the absurdities of our everyday existence.
He revealed little of his capacity for humour when he entertained me to whisky and soda at his club. I found a big, bearded and rather fleshy man rolling about in a very easy chair. I had been sent to interview him by one of those very pushing newspapers that, in the Silly Season especially, run absurd “stories.” I have not the slightest recollection of the particular story that took me to Barry Pain, but I am perfectly certain that it was preposterous, and I am perfectly certain that my news editor—he was Stanley Bishop, of blessed memory—expected me to bring back to the office several gems of humour tempted from the brain and stolen from the lips of the famous writer. But Pain was coy. Perhaps he does not believe in giving away jokes for which coin of the realm is usually paid.