I like your Cave-Brown-Cave story if it was true; it probably was, as a family of that name exists.[17]
I never heard John Redmond, I am sorry to say. He was, so to speak, after my time. I heard Parnell and, if I were only a mimic, could give you his curiously contemptuous, high-bred, high-pitched voice to-day. I heard Randolph; and at the time, in the eighties, both he and Arthur Balfour used to lisp. Does A. B. lisp now? Answer this: it interests me; and it has a sort of bearing on that passing-fashion competition which you were starting. So essential to birth and breeding was the lisp in those days that even the English-bred Comte de Paris lisped ... in French! I was at his silver wedding and well remember his reception of me.
“Vouth êtes le bienvenu ithi!”
Incidentally I remember that good King Edward (“then Prince of Wales,” as the memoir-writers say) glared at me furiously on that occasion, because I was wearing trousers of the identical pattern as his: an Urquhart check with a pink line....
In the course of a dinner-party given at this time, the conversation turned on those men and women who had won everlasting renown with the least effort or justification. The United States Ambassador (Mr. Davis) proposed Eutychus, of whom little is known but that he fell asleep during a sermon and tumbled from a window: I suggested the uncaring Gallio, who did less and is better known. Some one else put forward Melchisedec. Agreeing that every name in the Bible has a certain immortality, we turned to secular history. At the subsequent instigation of Mr. Davis, Lord Curzon of Kedleston propounded “the apple-bearing son of William Tell.” I invited Teixeira to give his opinion.
I can’t compete with Curzon, he replied on 6.8.20, though I’ve tried. After all, he was one of the Souls! I did think of Alfred and the cakes; but that monarch owes only 5/6 of his immortality to those cakes and young Tell owed all his to the apple. But stay! Many hold Tell and his offspring to be mythical persons. If so, what about the good wife who scolded Alfred? I should like you to find some one who will say that I have beaten Curzon....
I shall be in town from 8 September to a few days later. If you want to see me, you must arrange your engagements accordingly. I am the colour which we can never get our brown shoes to assume till just before the moment when they drop off our feet. But I am as weak as ten thousand rats....
On 7.8.20 he writes:
You will remember that ... I declined to join your Passing Fashion Research Society, or whatever you decided to call it. But I have no objection to being an honorary corresponding member. And I will set you a subject.