BY TELEGRAPH

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 January 1928, Page 8

BY TELEGRAPH

SOME CURIOUS MESSAGES.

It was once written of the German Kaiser that if he had nothing else to do he sent a telegram. The general public is not quite like that, but it sends an extraordinary number of telegrams, often about the most intimate personal things that some people would even hesitate to put in a letter. The receiving clerk takes them without a smile, but if he possesses a sense of humour, he stores them away in his memory for future use. Most telegrams are dry as dust. But occasionally some individual, whose emotions have, been stimulated to the point of violent expression, rushes into the telegraph office, dashes down a message in terms as choice as the regulation permit, and sends it away. For instance, plenty of girls break oft their engagements by telegraph, or punish their swains for some dereliction. • If engagement rings could be sent over the wire, quite a lot of them would be returned that way. Love messages are as plentiful as flies in summer. Telegraph officials have watched many a romance being fed by Morse. One notable instance is that in which a man whose lady love had gone to another town, filed a series of urgent wires, each containing one word. Pieced together, they made up a full message. The first contained the word “how,” the second “are,” the third “you,” and so on. It was an expensive way of sending a love message, and the sequence of urgent wires held up the line for quite a while. What the lady s feelings were when this shower of messages descended upon her was never ascertained, but they must have become a. nuisance at the finish, seeing that they ran to 30 or 40. 1 More sensible was the young man whose inamorata went to the country. In three weeks he attended at the telegraph office every morning just before 9 a.m., and sent a plain, ordinary message couched in the most affectionate and poetic terms. The messages used to run something like this: “My only love you are the only one even if there was fifty others it wouldn’t matter the stars, have got nothing on your eyes love.” He was a colossal liar, of course, but perjury is excusable and permissible in the circumstances. He used to ring the changes a bit, and make sentimental references to moonlight and other atmospherics, in which the grand passion thrives. But his star turn was the stars and her eyes, and, no doubt, the lady fully appreciated it, in spite of its iteration. After about three weeks, the messages ceased, and it is to be presumed that the girl with the twinkling eyes returned to the city and her poetic lover. The man who telegraphed: “How are you love. I’m feeling rotten, was a master of consideration. He expressed in a. few words the yearnings of his heart for her sweet presence, and an unhappy state of mind because of her absence.

Another rather cryptic message was: “Whatever Stan tells you is lies.” Presumably the lady in the case was about to receive a visit from a.person named Stan, who had a tale to tell. It is impossible to know the merits of the case, but it suggests that the sender had been violating the ethics of true love and constancy, and the person named Stan, who aspired to be in his shoes, was off to see the lady to put the sender’s “pot on.” In the interest of the wider code of ethics, it is to be hoped he did not succeed* Not all emotional telegrams have to do with erotic sentiment, although they may hinge on it. The girl who telegraphed:. “Take back your rotten ring; it only cost a quid, anyway,” was undoubtedly angry. The circumstances, of course, could not be discovered, but love’s young dream had received a shock from which it was not expected to recover. She seemed rather surprised when she discovered that the ring could not go with the wire.

These vituperative telegrams are by no means uncommon. Some of them are real masterpieces of invective. They resemble an argument between two harridans in a slum suburb, who asperse each other to the best of their ability by stating that somebody’s mother was never married, that her father had done two years for burglary, and that her husband was always drunk. \ One morning a man handed in a telegram addressed to a country town. It read: “Put your shirt on Athabasca.” The clerk checked it and then said, sotto voce: “Athabasca was scratched this morning.” The sender gasped “It was given him as an absolute cert last night.” The clerk, who was a racing enthusiast, suggested that he should substitute Dalmatia for Athabasca. A friend of his who knew a man whose sister’s husband had a brother working in a factory alongside a. brother of a man who lived next door to a chap whose sister was married to the Dalmatia, and so the wire was altered.