The Strand Magazine, March 1911
 

I want to tell you all about dear old Bobbie Cardew. It’s a most interesting story. I can’t put in any literary style and all that; but I don’t have to, don’t you know, because it goes on its Moral Lesson. If you’re a man you mustn’t miss it, because it’ll be a warning to you; and if you’re a woman you won’t want to, because it’s all about how a girl made a man feel pretty well fed up with things.

If you’re a recent acquaintance of Bobbie’s, you’ll probably be surprised to hear that there was a time when he was more remarkable for the weakness of his memory than anything else. Dozens of fellows, who have only met Bobbie since the change took place, have been surprised when I told them that. Yet it’s true. Believe me.

In the days when I first knew him Bobbie Cardew was about the most pronounced young rotter inside the four-mile radius. People have called me a silly ass, but I was never in the same class with Bobbie. When it came to being a silly ass, he was a plus four man, while my handicap was about six. Why, if I wanted him to dine with me, I used to post him a letter at the beginning of the week, and then the day before send him a telegram and a ’phone-call on the day itself, and—half an hour before the time we’d fixed—a messenger in a taxi, whose business it was to see that he got in and that the chauffeur had the address all correct. By doing that I generally managed to get him, unless he had left town before my messenger arrived.

The funny thing was that he wasn’t altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite.

At least, that’s what I thought. But there was another way which hadn’t occurred to me. Marriage, I mean. Marriage, the dynamite of the soul; that was what hit Bobbie. He married. Have you ever seen a bull-pup chasing a bee? The pup sees the bee. It looks good to him. But he doesn’t know what’s at the end of it till he gets there. It was like that with Bobbie. He fell in love, got married—with a sort of whoop, as if it were the greatest fun in the world—and then began to find out things.

She wasn’t the sort of girl you would have expected Bobbie to rave about. And yet, I don’t know. What I mean is, she worked for her living; and to a fellow who has never done a hand’s turn in his life there’s undoubtedly a sort of fascination, a kind of romance, about a girl who works for her living.

Her name was Anthony. Mary Anthony. She was about five feet six; she had a ton and a half of red-gold hair, grey eyes, and one of those determined chins. She was a hospital nurse. When Bobbie smashed himself up at polo, she was told off by the authorities to smooth his brow and rally round with cooling unguents and all that; and the old boy hadn’t been up and about again for more than a week before they popped off to the registrar’s and fixed it up. Quite the romance.

Bobbie broke the news to me at the club one evening, and next day he introduced me to her. I admired her. I’ve never worked myself—my name’s Pepper, by the way. Almost forgot to mention it. Reggie Pepper. My uncle Edward was Pepper, Wells, and Co., the colliery people. He left me a sizable chunk of bullion—I say I’ve never worked myself, but I admire anyone who earns a living under difficulties, especially a girl. And this girl had had a rather unusually tough time of it, being an orphan and all that, and having had to do everything off her own bat for years.

Mary and I got along together splendidly. We don’t now, but we’ll come to that later. I’m speaking of the past. She seemed to think Bobbie the greatest thing on earth, judging by the way she looked at him when she thought I wasn’t noticing. And Bobbie seemed to think the same about her. So that I came to the conclusion that, if only dear old Bobbie didn’t forget to go to the wedding, they had a sporting chance of being quite happy.

Well, let’s brisk up a bit here, and jump a year. The story doesn’t really start till then.

They took a flat and settled down. I was in and out of the place quite a good deal. I kept my eyes open, and everything seemed to me to be running along as smooth as you could want. If this was marriage, I thought, I couldn’t see why fellows were so frightened of it. There were a lot of worse things that could happen to a man.

But we now come to the incident of the Quiet Dinner, and it’s just here that love’s young dream hits a snag, and things begin to occur.

I happened to meet Bobbie in Piccadilly, and he asked me to come back to dinner at the flat. And, like a fool, instead of bolting and putting myself under police protection, I went.

When we got to the flat, there was Mrs. Bobbie looking—well, I tell you, it staggered me. Her gold hair was all piled up in waves and crinkles and things, with a what-d’-you-call-it of diamonds in it. And she was wearing the most perfectly ripping dress. I couldn’t begin to describe it. I can only say it was the limit. It struck me that if this was how she was in the habit of looking every night when they were dining quietly at home together, it was no wonder that Bobbie liked domesticity.

“Here’s old Reggie, dear,” said Bobbie. “I’ve brought him home to have a bit of dinner. I’ll ’phone down to the kitchen and ask them to send it up now—what?”

She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. Then she turned scarlet. Then she turned as white as a sheet. Then she gave a little laugh. It was most interesting to watch. Made me wish I was up a tree about eight hundred miles away. Then she recovered herself.

“I am so glad you were able to come, Mr. Pepper,” she said, smiling at me.

And after that she was all right. At least, you would have said so. She talked a lot at dinner, and chaffed Bobbie, and played us rag-time on the piano afterwards, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Quite a jolly little party it was—not. I’m no lynx-eyed sleuth, and all that sort of thing, but I had seen her face at the beginning, and I knew that she was working the whole time, and working hard, to keep herself in hand, and that she would have given that diamond what’s-its-name in her hair and everything else she possessed to have one good scream—just one. I’ve sat through some pretty thick evenings in my time, but that one had the rest beaten in a canter. At the very earliest moment I grabbed my hat and got away.

Having seen what I did, I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet Bobbie at the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a lonely gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.

He started in straightaway. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to about it.

“Do you know how long I’ve been married?” he said.

I didn’t exactly.

“About a year, isn’t it?”

“Not about a year,” he said, sadly. “Exactly a year—yesterday!”

Then I understood. I saw light—a regular flash of light.

“Yesterday was——?”

“The anniversary of the wedding. I’d arranged to take Mary to the Savoy, and on to Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to hear Caruso. I had the ticket for the box in my pocket. Do you know, all through dinner I had a kind of rummy idea that there was something I’d forgotten, but I couldn’t think what?”

“Till your wife mentioned it?”

He nodded.

“She—mentioned it,” he said, thoughtfully.

I didn’t ask for details. Women with hair and chins like Mary’s may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren’t half-hearted about it.

“To be absolutely frank, old top,” said poor old Bobbie, in a broken sort of way, “my stock’s pretty low at home.”

There didn’t seem much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat there. He didn’t want to talk. Presently he went out. I stood at the window of our upper smoking-room, which looks out on to Piccadilly, and watched him. He walked slowly along for a few yards, stopped, then walked on again, and finally turned into a jeweller’s. Which was an instance of what I meant when I said that deep down in him there was a certain stratum of sense.

 

It was from now on that I began to be really interested in this problem of Bobbie’s married life. Of course, one’s always mildly interested in one’s friends’ marriages, hoping they’ll turn out well and all that; but this was different. The average man isn’t like Bobbie, and the average girl isn’t like Mary. It was that old business of the immovable mass and the irresistible force. There was Bobbie, ambling gently through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly a chump of the first water.

And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump. And Nature, mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.

For about a week, perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that quiet little domestic evening bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants, I read somewhere, are champions at the memory business, but they were fools to Bobbie during that week. But bless you, the shock wasn’t nearly big enough. It had dinted the armour, but it hadn’t made a hole in it. Pretty soon he was back at the old game.

It was pathetic, don’t you know. The poor girl loved him, and she was frightened. It was the thin end of the wedge, you see, and she knew it. A man who forgets what day he was married, when he’s been married one year, will forget, at about the end of the fourth, that he’s married at all. If she meant to get him in hand at all, she had got to do it now, before he began to drift away.

I saw that clearly enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it, when he was by way of pouring out his troubles to me one afternoon. I can’t remember what it was that he had forgotten the day before, but it was something she had asked him to bring home for her—it may have been a book.

“It’s such a little thing to make a fuss about,” said Bobbie. “And she knows that it’s simply because I’ve got such an infernal memory about everything. I can’t remember anything. Never could.”

He talked on for a while, and, just as he was going, he pulled out a couple of sovereigns.

“Oh, by the way,” he said.

“What’s this for?” I asked, though I knew.

“I owe it you.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Why, that bet on Tuesday. In the billiard-room. Murray and Brown were playing a hundred up, and I gave you two to one that Brown would win, and Murray beat him by twenty odd.”

“So you do remember some things?” I said.

He got quite excited. Said that if I thought he was the sort of rotter who forgot to pay when he lost a bet, it was pretty rotten of me after knowing him all these years, and a lot more like that.

“Subside, laddie,” I said.

Then I spoke to him like a father.

“What you’ve got to do, my old college chum,” I said, “is to pull yourself together, and jolly quick, too. As things are shaping, you’re due for a nasty knock before you know what’s hit you. You’ve got to make an effort. Don’t say you can’t. This two quid business shows that, even if your memory is rocky, you can remember some things. What you’ve got to do is to see that wedding anniversaries and so on are included in the list. It may be a brain-strain, but you can’t get out of it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Bobbie. “But it beats me why she thinks such a lot of these rotten little dates. What’s it matter if I forget what day we were married on or what day she was born on or what day the cat had the measles? She knows I love her just as much as if I were a memorizing freak at the halls.”

“That’s not enough for a woman,” I said. “They want to be shown. Bear that in mind, and you’re all right. Forget it, and there’ll be trouble.”

He chewed the knob of his stick.

“Women are frightfully rummy,” he said, gloomily.

“You should have thought of that before you married one,” I said.

 

I don’t see that I could have done any more. I had put the whole thing in a nutshell for him. You would have thought he’d have seen the point, and that it would have made him brace up and get a hold on himself. But, no. Off he went again in the same old way. I gave up arguing with him. I had a good deal of time on my hands, but not enough to amount to anything when it was a question of reforming dear old Bobbie by argument. If you see a man asking for trouble, and insisting on getting it, the only thing to do is to stand by and wait till it comes to him. After that you may get a chance. But till then there’s nothing to be done. But I thought a lot about him.

Bobbie didn’t get into the soup all at once. Weeks went by, and months, and still nothing happened. Now and then he’d come into the club with a kind of cloud on his shining morning face, and I’d know that there had been doings in the home; but it wasn’t till well on in the spring that he got the thunderbolt just where he had been asking for it—in the thorax.

I was smoking a quiet cigarette one morning in the window looking out over Piccadilly, and watching the buses and motors going up one way and down the other—most interesting it is; I often do it—when in rushed Bobbie, with his eyes bulging and his face the colour of an oyster, waving a piece of paper in his hand.

“Reggie,” he said. “Reggie, old top, she’s gone!”

“Gone!” I said. “Who?”

“Mary, of course! Gone! Left me! Gone!”

“Where?” I said.

Silly question? Perhaps you’re right. Anyhow, dear old Bobbie nearly foamed at the mouth.

“Where? How should I know where? Here, read this.”

He pushed the paper into my hand. It was a letter.

“Go on,” said Bobbie. “Read it.”

So I did. It certainly was quite a letter. There was not much of it, but it was all to the point.

This is what it said :—

“My dear Bobbie,—I am going away. When you care enough about me to remember to wish me many happy returns on my birthday, I will come back. My address will be Box 341, London Morning News.”

I read it twice, then I said, “Well, why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Why don’t you wish her many happy returns? It doesn’t seem much to ask.”

“But she says on her birthday.”

“Well, when is her birthday?”

“Can’t you understand?” said Bobbie. “I’ve forgotten.”

“Forgotten!” I said.

“Yes,” said Bobbie. “Forgotten.”

“How do you mean, forgotten?” I said. “Forgotten whether it’s the twentieth or the twenty-first, or what? How near do you get to it?”

“I know it came somewhere between the first of January and the thirty-first of December. That’s how near I get to it.”

“Think.”

“Think? What’s the use of saying ‘Think’? Think I haven’t thought? I’ve been knocking sparks out of my brain ever since I opened that letter.”

“And you can’t remember?”

“No.”

I rang the bell and ordered restoratives.

“Well, Bobbie,” I said, “it’s a pretty hard case to spring on an untrained amateur like me. Suppose someone had come to Sherlock Holmes and said, ‘Mr. Holmes, here’s a case for you. When is my wife’s birthday?’ Wouldn’t that have given Sherlock a jolt? However, I know enough about the game to understand that a fellow can’t shoot off his deductive theories unless you start him with a clue, so rouse yourself out of that pop-eyed trance and come across with two or three. For instance, can’t you remember the last time she had a birthday? What sort of weather was it? That might fix the month.”

Bobbie shook his head.

“It was just ordinary weather, as near as I can recollect.”

“Warm?”

“Warmish.”

“Or cold?”

“Well, fairly cold, perhaps. I can’t remember.”

I ordered two more of the same. They seemed indicated in the Young Detective’s Manual. “You’re a great help, Bobbie,” I said. “An invaluable assistant. Once of those indispensable adjuncts without which no home is complete.”

Bobbie seemed to be thinking.

“I’ve got it,” he said suddenly. “Look here. I gave her a present on her last birthday. All we have to do is to go to the shop, hunt up the date when it was bought, and the thing’s done.”

“Absolutely. What did you give her?”

He sagged.

“I can’t remember,” he said.

Getting ideas is like golf. Some days you are right off it, others it’s as easy as falling off a log. I don’t suppose dear old Bobbie had ever had two ideas in the same morning before in his life; but now he did it without an effort. He just loosed another dry Martini into the undergrowth, and before you could turn round it had flushed quite a brain-wave.

Do you know those little books called “When were you born?” There’s one for each month. They tell you your character, your talents, your strong points, and your weak points at fourpence-half-penny a go. Bobbie’s idea was to buy the whole twelve, and go through them till we found out which month hit off Mary’s character. That would give us the month, and narrow it down a whole lot.

A pretty hot idea for a non-thinker like dear old Bobbie. We sallied out at once. He took half and I took half, and we settled down to work. As I say, it sounded good. But when we came to go into the thing, we saw that there was a flaw. There was plenty of information all right, but there wasn’t a single month that didn’t have something that exactly hit off Mary. For instance, in the December book it said, “December people are apt to keep their own secrets. They are extensive travelers.” Well, Mary had certainly kept her secret, and she had travelled quite extensively enough for Bobbie’s needs. Then, October people were “born with original ideas” and “loved moving.” You couldn’t have summed up Mary’s little jaunt more neatly. February people had “wonderful memories”—Mary’s speciality.

We took a bit of a rest, then had another go at the thing.

Bobbie was all for May, because the book said that women born in that month were “inclined to be capricious, which is always a barrier to a happy married life”; but I plumped for February, because February women “are unusually determined to have their own way, are very earnest, and expect a full return in their companions or mates.” Which he owned was about as like Mary as anything could be.

In the end he tore the books up, stamped on them, burnt them, and went home.

 

It was wonderful what a change the next few days made in dear old Bobbie. Have you ever seen that picture, “The Soul’s Awakening”? It represents a flapper of sorts gazing in a startled sort of way into the middle distance with a look in her eyes that seems to say, “Surely that is George’s step I hear on the mat! Can this be love?” Well, Bobbie had a soul’s awakening too. I don’t suppose he had ever troubled to think in his life before—not really think. But now he was wearing his brain to the bone. It was painful in a way, of course, to see a fellow human being so thoroughly in the soup, but I felt strongly that it was all for the best. I could see as plainly as possible that all these brain-storms were improving Bobbie out of knowledge. When it was all over he might possibly become a rotter again of a sort, but it would only be a pale reflection of the rotter he had been. It bore out the idea I had always had that what he needed was a real good jolt.

I saw a great deal of him these days. I was his best friend, and he came to me for sympathy. I gave it him, too, with both hands, but I never failed to hand him the Moral Lesson when I had him weak.

One day he came to me as I was sitting in the club, and I could see that he had had an idea. He looked happier than he had done in weeks.

“Reggie,” he said, “I’m on the trail. This time I’m convinced that I shall pull it off. I’ve remembered something of vital importance.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I remember distinctly,” he said, “that on Mary’s last birthday we went together to the Coliseum. How does that hit you?”

“It’s a fine bit of memorizing,” I said; “but how does it help?”

“Why, they change the programme every week there.”

“Ah!” I said. “Now you are talking.”

“And the week we went one of the turns was Professor Someone’s Terpsichorean Cats. I recollect them distinctly. Now, are we narrowing it down, or aren’t we? Reggie, I’m going round to the Coliseum this minute, and I’m going to dig the date of those Terpsichorean Cats out of them, if I have to use a crowbar.”

So that got him within six days; for the management treated us like brothers; brought out the archives, and ran agile fingers over the pages till they treed the cats in the middle of May.

“I told you it was May,” said Bobbie. “Maybe you’ll listen to me another time.”

“If you’ve any sense,” I said, “there won’t be another time.”

And Bobbie said that there wouldn’t.

Once you get your memory on the run, it parts as if it enjoyed doing it. I had just got off to sleep that night when my telephone-bell rang. It was Bobbie, of course. He didn’t apologize.

“Reggie,” he said, “I’ve got it now for certain. It’s just come to me. We saw those Terpsichorean Cats at a matinée, old man.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, don’t you see that that brings it down to two days? It must have been either Wednesday the seventh or Saturday the tenth.”

“Yes,” I said, “if they didn’t have daily matinées at the Coliseum.”

I heard him give a sort of howl.

“Bobbie,” I said. My feet were freezing, but I was fond of him.

“Well?”

“I’ve remembered something too. It’s this. The day you went to the Coliseum I lunched with you both at the Ritz. You had forgotten to bring any money with you, so you wrote a cheque.”

“But I’m always writing cheques.”

“You are. But this was for a tenner, and made out to the hotel. Hunt up your cheque-book and see how many cheques for ten pounds payable to the Ritz Hotel you wrote out between May the fifth and May the tenth.”

He gave a kind of gulp.

“Reggie,” he said, “you’re a genius. I’ve always said so. I believe you’ve got it. Hold the line.”

Presently he came back again.

“Halloa!” he said.

“I’m here,” I said.

“It was the eighth. Reggie, old man, I——”

“Topping,” I said. “Good night.”

It was working along into the small hours now, but I thought I might as well make a night of it and finish the thing up, so I rang up an hotel near the Strand.

“Put me through to Mrs. Cardew,” I said.

“It’s late,” said the man at the other end.

“And getting later every minute,” I said. “Buck along, laddie.”

I waited patiently. I had missed my beauty-sleep, and my feet had frozen hard, but I was past regrets.

“What is the matter?” said Mary’s voice.

“My feet are cold,” I said. “But I didn’t call you up to tell you that particularly. I’ve just been chatting with Bobbie, Mrs. Cardew.”

“Oh! Is that Mr. Pepper?”

“Yes. He’s remembered it, Mrs. Cardew.”

She gave a sort of scream. I’ve often thought how interesting it must be to be one of those Exchange girls. The things they must hear, don’t you know. Bobbie’s howl and gulp and Mrs. Bobbie’s scream and all about my feet and all that. Most interesting it must be.

“He’s remembered it!” she gasped. “Did you tell him?”

“No.”

Well, I hadn’t.

“Mr. Pepper.”

“Yes?”

“Was he—has he been—was he very worried?”

I chuckled. This was where I was billed to be the life and soul of the party.

“Worried! He was about the most worried man between here and Edinburgh. He has been worrying as if he was paid to do it by the nation. He has started out to worry after breakfast, and——”

Oh, well, you can never tell with women. My idea was that we should pass the rest of the night slapping each other on the back across the wire, and telling each other what bally brainy conspirators we were, don’t you know, and all that. But I’d got just as far as this, when she bit at me. Absolutely! I heard the snap. And then she said “Oh!” in that choked kind of way. And when a woman says “Oh!” like that, it means all the bad words she’d love to say if she only knew them.

And then she began.

“What brutes men are! What horrid brutes! How you could stand by and see poor dear Bobbie worrying himself into a fever, when a word from you would have put everything right, I can’t——”

“But——”

“And you call yourself his friend! His friend!” (Metallic laugh, most unpleasant.) “It shows how one can be deceived. I used to think you a kind-hearted man.”

“But, I say, when I suggested the thing, you thought it perfectly——”

“I thought it hateful, abominable.”

“But you said it was absolutely top——”

“I said nothing of the kind. And if I did, I didn’t mean it. I don’t wish to be unjust, Mr. Pepper, but I must say that to me there seems to be something positively fiendish in a man who can go out of his way to separate a husband from his wife, simply in order to amuse himself by gloating over his agony——”

“But——!”

“When one single word would have——”

“But you made me promise not to——” I bleated.

“And if I did, do you suppose I didn’t expect you to have the sense to break your promise?”

I had finished. I had no further observations to make. I hung up the receiver, and crawled into bed.

 

I still see Bobbie when he comes to the club, but I do not visit the old homestead. He is friendly, but he stops short of issuing invitations. I ran across Mary at the Academy last week, and her eyes went through me like a couple of bullets through a pat of butter. And as they came out of the other side, and I limped off to piece myself together again, there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this: “He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.”

 


 

Notes:
  This, the first of the Reggie Pepper stories, is not only a corking tale in itself; it also can be used as a lesson in how the Wodehouse stories (especially in these early years of his career) were differently edited for magazine readers in the UK and the USA. Book collections have always used the above British text of the story. [Even Enter Jeeves, which claims to reprint the Collier’s version, uses the British text.]
  I’ve prepared a web transcription of the British text with dynamic footnotes showing the American version of passages with significant differences. The American version by itself, with illustrations from Collier’s and new endnotes for its variants, is online here as well. Note that Reggie not only lives in New York in the American magazine versions, but as the series progresses we get more clues that Reggie was intentionally portrayed as an American for US readers, including using up-to-date American turns of phrase which will be new to today’s readers who know only the familiar British text from book collections.

Notes for the British version:
Absent Treatment: the doctrine that a Christian Science practitioner need not be physically present to be of healing benefit to a patient. Famously satirized by Mark Twain in Christian Science (1899).
rotter: Though typically referring to a scoundrel, a morally bad man, here it seems to indicate a fool; US text uses “chump” instead. UK slang from 1879 till today.
four-mile radius: Central London, as defined by cab regulations allowing higher fares outside a circle drawn four miles from Charing Cross.
silly ass: Not just a foolish person, but one of some social status; an “upper-class twit” in Monty Pythonesque terms.
plus four: Averaging a golf score four strokes lower than par for the course; better than the usual excellent player; hence, a champion
handicap was about six: Averaging a golf score about six strokes over par for the course; hence, much better than the average player but not quite up to professional status
polo: the kind played on horseback with long mallets; a very expensive sport to keep up, showing that Bobbie is not only wealthy enough not to have to work, but also has a hefty disposable income for luxurious recreations
registrar’s: an office where civil marriages can be performed and recorded
admire anyone who earns a living, especially a girl: Wodehouse’s positive attitudes toward working women were remarkably feminist for his time (see especially Joan Valentine in Something New/Something Fresh). Some have attributed this to his marriage to Ethel in 1914, a widow who had had to support herself and her daughter. But this earlier story shows that he had this point of view before meeting her.
off her own bat: by her own efforts (a cricketing allusion)
love’s young dream: a reference to Thomas Moore’s poem of that title; “But there’s nothing half so sweet in life / As love’s young dream.”
’phone down to the kitchen: This tells us that Bobbie and Mary live in a service flat: an apartment house for the well-to-do who want to be cared for by maids, valets, and cooks employed by the building management to serve the residents.
beaten in a canter: horse-racing jargon for a win so much outdistancing the other horses that the leading horse need not even gallop at the end of the race, but can cross the finish line at an easier pace
gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party: Allegedly, Dr. Frederick Cook’s Arctic expeditions of 1908 found that gumdrops were rare treats for Eskimos and were useful in gaining assistance from these natives. (Lippincott’s Magazine, December 1909) Since his basic claim to have reached the North Pole has been widely doubted, one may be forgiven for questioning the veracity of this suggestion.
size in hats … number nine: having a skull so large that a custom-made hat will be needed; even Lock only gives a chart up to 8 inches (US 8⅛) or 65 cm circumference, corresponding to a double-extra-large.
couple of sovereigns, two quid: Two one-pound gold coins. The Bank of England inflation calculator suggests that this (in money terms, not in precious metal value) might be the equivalent of £223 in 2017, or US$298.
into the soup: The OED finds this phrase for “into difficulties” first in the US, from 1889 but in British usage by 1898. Interestingly, the US magazine version of this story uses other idioms here (Trouble didn’t hit Bobbie all at once; painful…to see [him] so thoroughly up against it).
shining morning face: From Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, also known as the Seven Ages of Man: “Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school.”
restoratives: alcoholic drinks
dry Martini: The history of cocktails is widely disputed, but this is at least a fairly early use of this term, with the earliest Google Books citation being from 1901.
fourpence-half-penny: In decimal terms, 0.01875 of a pound sterling; a couple of pounds or almost three dollars in today’s values.
Soul’s Awakening: A sentimental portrait by James Sant (1820–1916) of his young niece (or great niece) Annie Kathleen Rendle, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888 and widely reproduced in engravings and prints.
flapper: We may be surprised to find this term in the UK version this early, if we are accustomed to the post-World-War-One Zelda Fitzgerald type with bobbed hair and short skirts. But the term was used earlier for young women of late teen age whose hair was still braided in pigtails rather than put “up” in a mature woman’s coiffure.
Coliseum: a theatre in St. Martin’s Lane, Westminster, built for variety performances in 1904; now the home of English National Opera
Ritz: a luxury London hotel at 150 Piccadilly, opened by Swiss hotelier César Ritz in 1906
Academy: the Royal Academy, where the works of the fashionable painters of the day would be seen by the fashionable people of the day (who were also observing each other at least as much as the art, by some accounts)
there is one born every minute: In P. T. Barnum’s phrase, there is a sucker born every minute.

Neil Midkiff