It is the same with everything he puts his hand to. Either he does not care for boating at all, or, as a matter of course, he pulls stroke in the University Boat-race; and then takes the train on to Henley and wins the Diamond Sculls so easily that it hardly seems worth while for the other fellow to have started. Were I living in Novel-land, and had I entered for the Diamond Sculls, I should put it to my opponent before the word was given to us to go.
“One minute!” I should have called out to him. “Are you the hero of this novel, or, like myself, only one of the minor characters? Because, if you are the hero you go on; don’t you wait for me. I shall just pull as far as the boathouse and get myself a cup of tea.”
Because it always seems to be his Day.
There is no sense of happy medium about the hero of the popular novel. He cannot get astride a horse without its going off and winning a steeplechase against the favourite. The crowd in Novel-land appears to have no power of observation. It worries itself about the odds, discusses records, reads the nonsense published by the sporting papers. Were I to find myself on a racecourse in Novel-land I should not trouble about the unessential; I should go up to the bookie who looked as if he had the most money, and should say to him:
“Don’t shout so loud; you are making yourself hoarse. Just listen to me. Who’s the hero of this novel? Oh, that’s he, is it? The heavy-looking man on the little brown horse that keeps coughing and is suffering apparently from bone spavin? Well, what are the odds against his winning by ten lengths? A thousand to one! Very well! Have you got a bag?—Good. Here’s twenty-seven pounds in gold and eighteen shillings in silver. Coat and waistcoat, say another ten shillings. Shirt and trousers—it’s all right, I’ve got my pyjamas on underneath—say seven and six. Boots—we won’t quarrel—make it five bob. That’s twenty-nine pounds and sixpence, isn’t it? In addition here’s a mortgage on the family estate, which I’ve had made out in blank, an I O U for fourteen pounds which has been owing to me now for some time, and this bundle of securities which, strictly speaking, belong to my Aunt Jane. You keep that little lot till after the race, and we will call it in round figures, five hundred pounds.”
That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand pounds—provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.
Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about. If the hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human being that he does it. You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine. He goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes. Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water. This chap lies on his back and carols, and the wild waves, seeing him, go round the other way. At billiards he can give the average sharper forty in a hundred. He does not really want to play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson. He has not handled a cue for years. He picked up the game when a young man in Australia, and it seems to have lingered with him.
He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his nightshirt; he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him. If his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down off the animal’s back and throws the poor thing over; it saves argument. If he gets cross and puts his shoulder to the massive oaken door, we know there is going to be work next morning for the carpenter. Maybe he is a party belonging to the Middle Ages. Then when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of Europe to a duel, our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.
“You silly fool,” one feels one wants to say; “why, it is the hero of the novel! You take a friend’s advice while you are still alive, and get out of it anyway—anyhow. Apologize—hire a horse and cart, do something. You’re not going to fight a duel, you’re going to commit suicide.”
If the hero is a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has only something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a library—anybody’s library does for him. He passes Sir Walter Scott and the “Arabian Nights,” and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to be an instinct with him. By help of a dictionary he worries it out in the original Greek. This gives him a passion for Greek.