“Then a young woman with a low dress and high voice came out and screamed like a patient at a painless dentist’s. One of the papers next morning said she had a sweet voice, but ‘lacked execution.’ She wouldn’t have lacked it very long if she’d lived when I was Emperor. The final number on the programme was a performance on the ukelele by a pair of harmless looking youths whose appearance belied their real natures.
“I have read in my ‘Pocket Chesterfield’ that a gentleman is one who never inflicts needless pain or suffering on others. They were not gentlemen. In my day we occasionally used racks and thumb-screws and other instruments of necessary torture, but we knew nothing about ukeleles. They had not been invented. Has your country no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences? But it is unnecessary to ask.
“Yet you moderns have one advantage over us ancients when it comes to music, and I am willing to admit it: the phonograph. It is much more satisfactory than any human singer or player, because you can shut it off without hurting its feelings. It has a patent stop—something the tenor or soprano lacks. If you get up at a concert and request the soloist in the middle of a song kindly to cease as her effort is making you exceedingly nervous, you are simply reserving a seat for yourself in the patrol wagon.
“But at home with the phonograph all you’ve got to do is to push the little lever and it quits. You can enjoy its concerts without having to put on a clean white shirt and an open-face vest and a dinner coat. You can wear the same clothes you did at breakfast or sit around in an old bathrobe with your collar off and listen to Mary Garden gargle. If you did that at the grand opera house it would be sure to excite remark.
“And now you must excuse me, young man. I’ve promised to play tonight at the Mount Olympus firemen’s ball and I must have a little time to rehearse my piece—‘I’m a Roman in the Gloamin’.’ Perhaps you know it? By the way, are you a musician yourself? But you must be. Everybody is, more or less.”
“No, sir. I can’t play anything.”
“Oh, you must be mistaken. Are you married?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then to preserve the domestic harmony, you must be used to playing second fiddle.”
As I staggered down the stairs I felt that I had richly earned a Nero—I mean a hero, medal.