THE HOBBY EWER.

Press, Volume LI, Issue 8780, 28 April 1894, Page 10

THE HOBBY EWER.

Characterscape by Jeromt K. Jerome.

To-Day.

Bamp. Bump. Bump-bump. Bamp.

I sat up in bed end listened latently. It seemed to mc as if someone, with a muffled hammer, were trying to knock bricks out of the wall.

"Burglars," I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter' of course, that everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due to burglars), and I reflected what a curiously literal, but atthe same time clow and cumbersome, method of itouse-breaking they had adopted.

The bumping continued irregularly, yet uninterruptedly.

My bed was by the window. I reached out my hand and drew aside a corner of the curtain. The sunlight streamed into the room. I looked at my watch: it was ten minutes past five.

A most unbusinesslike hour forburglars, I thought. Why, it will be breakfastlime before they get. in.

Suddenly there came a crash, and some substance, striking against the blind, fell upon the floor. I sprang out of bed and threw open the window. A red-haired young gentleman, scantily clad iv a sweater and a pair of flannel trousers, stood on the lawn below mc. ~

" Good morning." he said, cheerily; **do you mind throwing mc back wj ball?' f

"Whatball?" I said.

"My tennis ball," he answered ; " ifc must be some were in the room. Ie went clean through the window." I found the ball and threw it back to

him. " What are you doing ?" I asked. " Play-

ing tennis ? " "No," he said, "I am just practising against the aide of the house. It improves your game wonderfully." " It don't improve my night's rest," I answered, somewhat surlily, I fear. " I came down here for rest and quiet. Cannot you do it in the daytime ? " " Daytime !" he laughed. " Why, it has been daylighb for the last two hours. Never mind; Til go round the other side." He disappeared round the corner, and set to work at the back, where he woke up the dog. I heard another window smash, followed by a sound a* of somebody getting up violently in a distant part of the house; and shortly afterwards I muse have fallen asleep again. I had come to spend a few weeks at a boarding establishment in Deal. He was the only other young man in the house, and I was naturally thrown a good deal upon his society. He was a pleasant, genial young fellow; but he would have been better company had he been a little less enthusiastic as regards tennis. He played tennis ten hours a day on the Average. He got up romantic parties to play it by moonlight (when half his time was generally taken up in separating his ppponents); aud godless parties to play it «a Sundays. On wet days I have seen laim practising services by himself in a macintosh and goloshes. He had been spending the winter with his people at Tangier, and I asked him how he liked the place. "Oh, a beast of a hole!" he replied. "'There is not a court anywhere in the town. We tried playing on the roof, but .the mater thought it dangerous." Switzerland he had been delighted with. He counselled mc, next time I went, to itay at Zermatt. *' There is a capital court at Zermatt," he said; "you might •lmoet fancy yourself at Wimbledon." ▲ mutual acquaintance, whom 1 subsequently met, told mc that at the top of jfche Jungfrau he had said to him, hie eyes jßxed the while upon a small snow plateau, Enclosed by precipices, a few hundred feet ibelow them, "By Jove 1 That wouldn't make half a bad little tennis court—that Hat bit, down there—have to be careful jou didn't run back too far." When he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading about tennis, lie was talking about tennis. Renshaw /wae the prominent figure in the tennis rworld at that time, and he mentioned isUnshaw until there grew ud within my iaoul a dark desire to kill Renshaw in a 4}uite, unostentatious way, and bury him. One drenching afternoon he talked frennis to mc for three hours on end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred and thirteen times. After tea he drew his chair to the window beside mc, and commenced :— "Have you ever noticed how Ben* *haw " I said, "Suppose someone took a gun— someone who could aim very straight—and -went out, and shot Renshaw till he was eulfce dead, would you tennis plavera drop "»»»»■»» and aboat momabo&y else ? " •* Ofa, but; -wriio would sliooc Senahaw ?** kuhhinhji - "Nevernaiad," I said, "suppose some-«ne-4id ? " j ." "Willi ■ tUiDi tta lroaia 1)0 bis .Ijrother. lie reulied. _^^ X bad forgotten tbst. " Wei J, -ere won*fc fcrffUe about now many ol Inem there are, i aaid. ; " suppose someone killed tbe Joe, should we hear lees of Benshaw ?" V Never," he replied emphatically. " Ren-aha-vr -will alwrays be a. name wherever iuinis is spoken of." I dread to think what tbe result might 2>ave been had his answer been other than i It was. The next year he dropped tennis completely and became an ardent amateur photographer, and all his friends implored him to return to tennis, and sought tointertfst him in talk abouc services and returns i and volleys, and in anecdotes concerning Jlenshaw. But he would not heed them. Whatever he saw, wherever he went, j te took. He took his friends and made ' -ahem his enemies. He took babies and brought despair to fond mothers' hearts. J9e took young wives, and cast a shadow on the home. Once there was a young man \ who loved not wisely, so his friends thought, but the more they talked against ber the more he clung to her.' Then a iiappy idea occurred to the father, he got BetCglely to photograph her in seven different positions. When her lover saw the first, be said :— " What an awful looking thing! Who Alidltf When Begglely showed him the second, lie said :— " But my dear fellow, it's not a bit like her. You ye made her look an ugly old woman." At Ihe third, he said :— "Whatever have you done to her feet? They can't be that size you know. It isn't in nature." At the fourth be exclaimed :— "But, heavens, man! Look at the shape you've made her. Where on earth did yon get the idea from t" At the first glimpse of the fifth he staggered. "Great Scott!" he cried with a shudder, "what a ghastly expression you've got into it! It isn't human!" Begglely was growing offended, but the lather, who was standing by, came to his defence. "It's nothing to do with Begglely," exclaimed the old gentleman suavely. *' It can't be his fault. What is a photographer? Simply an instrument in the hands of science. He arranges his .apparatus, and whatever is in front of it comee into it." "No," continued the old gentleman, laying a constraining hand upon Begglely, who was about to resume the exhibition, *? don't—don't show him the other two." I was sorry for the poor girl, for I believe •hereally cared for the youngster; and as for her looks, they were quite up to the average. But some evil sprite seemed to bare got into Begglelj's camera.: It aeized upon defects with the unerring instinct of a born critic, and dilated upon them to the obscuration of all virtue. A man with a pimple became a pimple with a> man a* background. People with ■trongly-marked features became mere adjuncts to their own noses. One man in the neighbourhood had, undetected, worn a wig for fourteen yearn. Beggely's camera discovered the fraud in an instant, and so completely exposed it that the man's friends wondered afterwards bow the fact could ever have escaped them. The thing seemed to take a pleasure in showing humanity at its worst. Babies usually came out with an expression of low* cunning. Most young girls had to tike their choice of appearing either as simpering idiots or embryo vixens. To mild old ladies it generally gave a look of •ggreasive cynicism. Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman as ever breathed. Begglely presented to us as a beetlebrowed savjge of a peculiarly low type of Intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the town he bestowed an expression of eucti thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few who caw the photograph cared ever again to trust him with their affairs. As regards myself, I should perhaps make no comment; lam possibly a prejudiced party. All I will «ay, therefore, is that if I in any way resemble Besglely's mm) !photograpk of mc, then the critics are mm -fully justified in everything they have at M& -any time, anywhere, said of me—and m 'more. Nor, I maintain—though I make f no pretence of possessing the figure of an

Apollo—is one of my legs twice the length of the other, and neither does it curve upwards. This I can prove. Begglely allowed that an accident had occurred to the negative during the process ot developement, but this explanation does not appear on the picture, and I cannot help feeling that an injustice has been done mc.

His perspective seemed to be governed by no law, either human or divine. I have seeu a photograph of his uncle and a windmill, judging from which 1 defy any unprejudiced person to say which was the bigger, the uncle or the mill.

6u one occasion he created quite a scandal in the parish by exhibiting n wellknown and eminently respectaoie miiileti lady nursing a young man on her knee. The gentleman's face was indistinct, and he was dressed in a costume which, upon a man of hi* size — one would have estimated him as rising 6£t 4in—appeared absurdly juvenile. He had one arm round her neck and she was holding his other hand, and smirking. 1, knowing something of Begglely'a machine, willingly accepted the iativ'e explanation, which was to the effect that the male in question was her nephew-, sg.'d eleven, but the uncharitable ridiculed this ecatementaud appearances were certainly against her. It was in the early days of the photographic craze, and an inexperienced world was rather pleased with the idea of being taken on the cheap. The consequence was that nearly everyone for three miles round bat or siood or leant or lay to Begglely at one time or another, with the result that a less conceited parish than ours it would have been difficult to discover. No one who had or.cc looked upon a photograph of himself taken by Begglely ever agaiu felt any pride iv his personal appearance. The picture was iurariably a revelation to him. Later, some evil-dispo3ed person invented Kodaks, and Begglely went everywhere siuug on to a thing that looked like an overgrown missionary box, and that bore a legend to the effect that if Begglely would pull the button, a shameless company would do the rest. Life became a misery to Begglely's friends. Nobody daied do anything for fear of being taken in the act. He took an instantaneous photograph of his own father swearing at the gardener, and snapped his youngest sister and her lover at the exact moment of farewell at the garden gate. Nothing was sacred to him. He Kodaked his aunt's funeral from behind, and showed the chief mourner but one whispering a funny story into the ear of: the third cousin as they stood behind their hats beside the grave. Public indignation was at ire highest when a new comer to the neighbourhood, a young fellow named Haynoth. suggested the getting together of a for a summer's tour iv Turkey. Everybody took up the idea with enthusiasm, aud recommended Begglely as the "party." "We had great hopes from that tour. Our idea was that Begglely would pull his button outside a harem or behind a sultana, and that a Bashi Bazouk or a Janissary would do the rest for us. We were, however, partly doomed to disappointment—l say "partly" because, although Begglely returned alive, he came back entirely cured of his photographic craze. He said that every English-speak-ing man, womau, or child whom he met aoroad had its camera with it, and that after a time the sight of a black cloth or the click of a button began co madden him.

He told us that on the summit of Mount Tutra, in the Carpathians, the English and American amateur photographer* wsitiag to take "the grand panorama" were formed by the Hungarian police in queue, two abreast, each with his or her camera under his or her arm, and that a man had to stand sometimes as long as three and a half hours before his turn came round. He also told us that the beggar* in Constantinople went about with placards hung rouud their necks, stating their charges for being photographed. One of these price list*, he brought back with him as a sample. It ram :— ; fI'CS. One snap shot, back or front 2 ~ . with expression ... 3 „ surprised iv quaint attitude 4 „ while saying prayers... 5 while fighting... ...10

He said that in some instances where a man had an exceptionally villainous cast of countenance or was exceptionally deformed, as much as twenty francs was demanded and readily obtained.

He abandoned photography and took to golf. He showed people how, by digging a hole here and putting a brickbat or two there, they could convert a tennis-lawn into a miniature golf link, and diet it for them. He persuaded elderly ladies and gentlemen that it was the mildest exercise gpiag, and would drag them for miles over wet gorse and heather, aud bring them botue. dead beat, pouebing, anil full of e-vIX thonghta. The la.se time X saw Ixixxa. was* in Smtzer-

different to tbe subject of golt, but talked much about -whist. We met by chance at Grludelwalu. and agreed 10 climb the Faulfaorn tospther xiejcc raorainpr- £Za.lfvraj up vre and Ietrolle« on a, little way by mysel£ to gala a view. Returning, I found him with a " Cavendish " in his haud, and a pack of cards spread out before him on the grass, solving a problem.