“You’re a genius,” I cried.
“Hardly that,” he said. “At least, I have no infinite capacity for taking pains. I am one of Nature’s slackers. Despite my talent for drawing up advertisements, I am often in great straits owing to my natural inertia and a passionate love of sleep. I sleep on the slightest provocation or excuse. I will back myself to sleep against anyone in the world, no age, weight, or colour barred. You, I should say, are of a different temperament. More energetic. The Get On or Get Out sort of thing. The Young Hustler.”
“Rather,” I replied briskly, “I am in love.”
“So am I,” said Julian Eversleigh. “Hopelessly, however. Give us a match.”
After that we confirmed our friendship by smoking a number of pipes together.
CHAPTER 5
THE COLUMN
(James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)
After the first week “On Your Way,” on the Orb, offered hardly any difficulty. The source of material was the morning papers, which were placed in a pile on our table at nine o’clock. The halfpenny papers were our principal support. Gresham and I each took one, and picked it clean. We attended first to the Subject of the Day. This was generally good for two or three paragraphs of verbal fooling. There was a sort of tradition that the first half-dozen paragraphs should be topical. The rest might be topical or not, as occasion served.
The column usually opened with a one-line pun—Gresham’s invention.
Gresham was a man of unparalleled energy and ingenuity. He had created several of the typical characters who appeared from time to time in “On Your Way,” as, for instance, Mrs. Jenkinson, our Mrs. Malaprop, and Jones junior, our “howler” manufacturing schoolboy. He was also a stout apostle of a mode of expression which he called “funny language.” Thus, instead of writing boldly: “There is a rumour that——,” I was taught to say, “It has got about that——.” This sounds funnier in print, so Gresham said. I could never see it myself.