this is the story that the desolate man told to me on the lonely highland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stags roaring.
the saddening twilight, the mountain already black, the dreadful melancholy of the stags' voices, his friendless mournful face, all seemed to be of some most sorrowful play staged in that valley by an outcast god, a lonely play of which the hills were part and he the only actor.
for long we watched each other drawing out of the solitudes of those forsaken spaces. then when we met he spoke.
"i will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter. i will keep it to myself no longer. but first i must tell you how i came by it."
i do not give the story in his words with all his woeful interjections and the misery of his frantic self-reproaches for i would not convey unnecessarily to my readers that atmosphere of sadness that was about all he said and that seemed to go with him where-ever he moved.
it seems that he had been a member of a club, a west-end club he called it, a respectable but quite inferior affair, probably in the city: agents belonged to it, fire insurance mostly, but life insurance and motor-agents too, it was in fact a touts' club. it seems that a few of them one evening, forgetting for a moment their encyclopedias and non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over a card-table when the game had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little man with waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boasting heartily of his temperance. it was then that he who told this mournful story, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little over the green baize into the light of the two guttering candles and revealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. one woman was to him as ugly as another.
and the silenced boasters rose and went home to bed leaving him all alone, as he supposed, with his unequalled virtue. and yet he was not alone, for when the rest had gone there arose a member out of a deep arm-chair at the dark end of the room and walked across to him, a man whose occupation he did not know and only now suspects.
"you have," said the stranger, "a surpassing virtue."
"i have no possible use for it," my poor friend replied.
"then doubtless you would sell it cheap," said the stranger.
something in the man's manner or appearance made the desolate teller of this mournful tale feel his own inferiority, which probably made him feel acutely shy, so that his mind abased itself as an oriental does his body in the presence of a superior, or perhaps he was sleepy, or merely a little drunk. whatever it was he only mumbled, "o yes," instead of contradicting so mad a remark. and the stranger led the way to the room where the telephone was.
"i think you will find my firm will give a good price for it," he said: and without more ado he began with a pair of pincers to cut the wire of the telephone and the receiver. the old waiter who looked after the club they had left shuffling round the other room putting things away for the night.
"whatever are you doing of?" said my friend.
"this way," said the stranger. along a passage they went and away to the back of the club and there the stranger leaned out of a window and fastened the severed wires to the lightning conductor. my friend has no doubt of that, a broad ribbon of copper, half an inch wide, perhaps wider, running down from the roof to the earth.
"hell," said the stranger with his mouth to the telephone; then silence for a while with his ear to the receiver, leaning out of the window. and then my friend heard his poor virtue being several times repeated, and then words like yes and no.
"they offer you three jokes," said the stranger, "which shall make all who hear them simply die of laughter."
i think my friend was reluctant then to have anything more to do with it, he wanted to go home; he said he didn't want jokes.
"they think very highly of your virtue," i said the stranger. and at that, odd as it seems, my friend wavered, for logically if they thought highly of the goods they should have paid a higher price.
"o all right," he said. the extraordinary document that the agent drew from his pocket ran something like this:
"i . . . . . in consideration of three new jokes received from mr. montagu-montague, hereinafter to be called the agent, and warranted to be as by him stated and described, do assign to him, yield, abrogate and give up all recognitions, emoluments, perquisites or rewards due to me here or elsewhere on account of the following virtue, to wit and that is to say . . . . . that all women are to me equally ugly." the last eight words being filled in in ink by mr. montagu-montague.
my poor friend duly signed it. "these are the jokes," said the agent. they were boldly written on three slips of paper. "they don't seem very funny," said the other when he had read them. "you are immune," said mr. montagu-montague, "but anyone else who hears them will simply die of laughter: that we guarantee."
an american firm had bought at the price of waste paper a hundred thousand copies of the dictionary of electricity written when electricity was new,—and it had turned out that even at the time its author had not rightly grasped his subject,—the firm had paid £10,000 to a respectable english paper (no other in fact than the briton) for the use of its name, and to obtain orders for the briton dictionary of electricity was the occupation of my unfortunate friend. he seems to have had a way with him. apparently he knew by a glance at a man, or a look round at his garden, whether to recommend the book as "an absolutely up-to-date achievement, the finest thing of its kind in the world of modern science" or as "at once quaint and imperfect, a thing to buy and to keep as a tribute to those dear old times that are gone." so he went on with this quaint though usual business, putting aside the memory of that night as an occasion on which he had "somewhat exceeded" as they say in circles where a spade is called neither a spade nor an agricultural implement but is never mentioned at all, being altogether too vulgar. and then one night he put on his suit of dress clothes and found the three jokes in the pocket. that was perhaps a shock. he seems to have thought it over carefully then, and the end of it was he gave a dinner at the club to twenty of the members. the dinner would do no harm he thought—might even help the business, and if the joke came off he would be a witty fellow, and two jokes still up his sleeve.
whom he invited or how the dinner went i do not know for he began to speak rapidly and came straight to the point, as a stick that nears a cataract suddenly goes faster and faster. the dinner was duly served, the port went round, the twenty men were smoking, two waiters loitered, when he after carefully reading the best of the jokes told it down the table. they laughed. one man accidentally inhaled his cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. the joke had succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not stop and the waiters would not be silent. he waited, and waited wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and the waiters as loud as any. it had gone on for three or four minutes when this frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: it was forced laughter! however could anything have induced him to tell so foolish a joke? he saw its absurdity as in revelation; and the more he thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too, the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother touts again. and still the laughter went roaring and choking on. he was very angry. there was not much use in having a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. and then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away, and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. poor man, he scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared at you; and the headlines said:—twenty-two dead men at a club.
yes, he saw it then: the laughter had not stopped, some had probably burst blood vessels, some must have choked, some succumbed to nausea, heart-failure must have mercifully taken some, and they were his friends after all, and none had escaped, not i even the waiters. it was that infernal joke.
he thought out swiftly, and remembers clear as a nightmare, the drive to victoria station, the boat-train to dover and going disguised to the boat: and on the boat pleasantly smiling, almost obsequious, two constables that wished to speak for a moment with mr. watkyn-jones. that was his name.
in a third-class carriage with handcuffs on his wrists, with forced conversation when any, he returned between his captors to victoria to be tried for murder at the high court of bow.
at the trial he was defended by a young barrister of considerable ability who had gone into the cabinet in order to enhance his forensic reputation. and he was ably defended. it is no exaggeration to say that the speech for the defence showed it to be usual, even natural and right, to give a dinner to twenty men and to slip away without ever saying a word, leaving all, with the waiters, dead. that was the impression left in the minds of the jury. and mr. watkyn-jones felt himself practically free, with all the advantages of his awful experience, and his two jokes intact. but lawyers are still experimenting with the new act which allows a prisoner to give evidence. they do not like to make no use of it for fear they may be thought not to know of the act, and a lawyer who is not in touch with the very latest laws is soon regarded as not being up to date and he may drop as much as £50,000 a year in fees. and therefore though it always hangs their clients they hardly like to neglect it.
mr. watkyn-jones was put in the witness box. there he told the simple truth, and a very poor affair it seemed after the impassioned and beautiful things that were uttered by the counsel for the defence. men and women had wept when they heard that. they did not weep when they heard watkyn-jones. some tittered. it no longer seemed a right and natural thing to leave one's guests all dead and to fly the country. where was justice, they asked, if anyone could do that? and when his story was told the judge rather happily asked if he could make him die of laughter too. and what was the joke? for in so grave a place as a court of justice no fatal effects need be feared. and hesitatingly the prisoner pulled from his pocket the three slips of paper: and perceived for the first time that the one on which the first and best joke had been written had become quite blank. yet he could remember it, and only too clearly. and he told it from memory to the court.
"an irishman once on being asked by his master to buy a morning paper said in his usual witty way, 'arrah and begorrah and i will be after wishing you the top of the morning.'"
no joke sounds quite so good the second time it is told, it seems to lose something of its essence, but watkyn-jones was not prepared for the awful stillness with which this one was received; nobody smiled; and it had killed twenty-two men. the joke was bad, devilish bad; counsel for the defence was frowning, and an usher was looking in a little bag for something the judge wanted. and at this moment, as though from far away, without his wishing it, there entered the prisoner's head, and shone there and would not go, this old bad proverb: "as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb." the jury seemed to be just about to retire. "i have another joke," said watkyn-jones, and then and there he read from the second slip of paper. he watched the paper curiously to see if it would go blank, occupying his mind with so slight a thing as men in dire distress very often do, and the words were almost immediately expunged, swept swiftly as if by a hand, and he saw the paper before him as blank as the first. and they were laughing this time, judge, jury, counsel for the prosecution, audience and all, and the grim men that watched him upon either side. there was no mistake about this joke.
he did not stay to see the end, and walked out with his eyes fixed on the ground, unable to bear a glance to the right or left. and since then he has wandered, avoiding ports and roaming lonely places. two years have known him on the highland roads, often hungry, always friendless, always changing his district, wandering lonely on with his deadly joke.
sometimes for a moment he will enter inns, driven by cold and hunger, and hear men in the evening telling jokes and even challenging him; but he sits desolate and silent, lest his only weapon should escape from him and his last joke spread mourning in a hundred cots. his beard has grown and turned grey and is mixed with moss and weeds, so that no one, i think, not even the police, would recognise him now for that dapper tout that sold the briton dictionary of electricity in such a different land.
he paused, his story told, and then his lip quivered as though he would say more, and i believe he intended then and there to yield up his deadly joke on that highland road and to go forth then with his three blank slips of paper, perhaps to a felon's cell, with one more murder added to his crimes, but harmless at last to man. i therefore hurried on, and only heard him mumbling sadly behind me, standing bowed and broken, all alone in the twilight, perhaps telling over and over even then the last infernal joke.
