March 13
H⸺ and I play Ludo incessantly. We’ve developed the gambling fever, and our pent-up excitement every now and then explodes in fiendish cackles, and Mother looks up over her spectacles and says, “William, William, they’ll hear in the street presently.”
For this world’s unfortunates, his is the ripe sympathy of a well-developed nature, standing in strong contrast with the rest of his personality, which is wholly self-centred, a little ungenerous, and what strong men of impeccable character call “weak.” If you are ill he is delightful, if you are robust or successful he can be very objectionable. To an influenza victim he goes out of his way to carry a book, but if you tell him with gusto you have passed your exam, he says, “Oh, but there’s not much behind it, is there?” “Oh! no,” I answer, comforting him, “it is really a misfortune to be a success.” And so only the bankrupts, dipsos (as he calls them), ne’er-do-weels, and sudden deaths ever touch his heart or tap his sympathy. He is a short, queery, dressy little fellow, always spruce and clean. His joy consists in a glass of beer, a full stomach, a good cigar, or a pretty girl to flirt with. He frequents drinking saloons and billiard rooms, goes to dances and likes to be thought a lady’s man. “Urn,” he will say, with the air of a connoisseur, “a little too broad in the beam,” as some attractive damsel walks down the street. Any day about twelve you can see both of us, “the long and the short of it” (he is only half my height and I call him .5), walking together in the Park, and engaged in the most heated discussion over some entirely trivial matter, such as whether he would marry a woman with sore eyes, etc., etc. More than once we have caught cabmen idle on the cab-rank or policemen on point duty jerking their thumbs backward at us and expressing some facetious remarks which we longed to overhear. I usually walk in the gutter to bring my height down a bit.
A good raconteur himself, he does not willingly suffer a story from another. The varmint on occasion finishes your joke off for you, which is his delicate way of intimating that he has heard it before. He is a first-class mimic, and sends everyone into a thousand fits while he gives you in succession the Mayor and all the Corporation. He also delights me at times by mimicking me. His mind is receptive rather than creative: it picks up all sorts of gaudy ideas by the wayside like a magpie, and I sometimes enjoy the exquisite sensation of hearing some of these petty pilferings (which he has filched from me) laid at my feet as if they were his own. The ideas which are his own are always unmistakable.
His favourite poems are “Omar” and “The Ballad of Reading Jail,” his favourite drinks Médoc or a Cherry Mixture. Me he describes as serpentilous with Gibbon-like arms, pinheaded, and so on. He amuses me. In fact I love him.