A Family Affair Read Free

‘However,’ he added, ‘the use may doubtless be inferred.’
    ‘Don’t the best practical jokes tend to be disinterested?’ Appleby asked. It was plain that the Patriarchs’ guest must utter in the course of the evening.
    ‘Do you mean without a victim, sir?’ somebody said. ‘I don’t see that that’s possible.’
    ‘Well, I admit that a practical joke is always, broadly speaking, a hoax; and that in any hoax there has to be somebody to be taken in. But it need scarcely be a specific somebody. Swinburne – at least, I think it was Swinburne – once invented an obscure French poet – I believe it was a poet – and published a substantial essay on him. The victim was something quite vague; say, the literary world at large. Or there were the people who dressed up as navvies and dug an enormous hole in the middle of Bond Street. Or think of some of the most famous impersonations carried off by practical jokers. More often than not, any element of malice was minimal in them.’
    ‘A joke may be disinterested,’ Mr Moyle said. ‘But it can’t be unmotivated. And that’s what I rather wanted to go on to: what may be called the psychology of the joker. I have come to the conclusion that the typical practical joker labours under a sense of inferiority and insecurity. So he has to prove himself sharper-witted than other people. For example, there was a real man not long ago who forged things rather as that scholar in Kipling’s story does.’
    ‘T J Wise,’ somebody said.
    ‘That’s right. He was quite a well-heeled business gent with cultivated interests. He collected books in a big way, with the result that he was much run after by scholars. But he wasn’t himself a scholar. I don’t think he’d even had the kind of education that is the privilege of everybody in this room.’
    ‘A deprivation painful to think of,’ the Patriarchs’ host of the evening said. He was still going conscientiously round with the port.
    ‘As a consequence, Wise inclined to feel these learned hangers-on really had a patronizing attitude to him. So he did all his forgeries, and took all these chaps in. Probably they hadn’t really been laughing at him at all. But he felt they had. And now – without their knowing it – he was in a position to laugh at them.’
    ‘He sounds a bit of a special case to me,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t believe many people would respond with practical jokes to some embittered sense that they hadn’t themselves made a grade. Wasn’t there a chap who hired the Oxford Town Hall, and gave a very successful lecture in the character of some eminent continental philosopher? I don’t believe for a moment that he was a failed philosopher himself. He was from some quite different walk of life, and just out for a little quiet fun.’
    ‘Isn’t this whole topic one of merely antiquarian interest?’ A fresh voice asked this from the back of the room. It belonged to a young man who was reclining in an armchair with a great air of elderly ease. ‘Think of rags, for instance. You mayn’t even know what I mean. Not what the Welfare State compels undergraduates to dress in, but how they used to behave when feeling a bit bored. Just doesn’t happen nowadays. Has any of you ever seen a rag taking place?’
    ‘Perhaps not here,’ the man with the decanter said. ‘But the Redbrick places have rags. They’re usually on a day appointed in advance by a Vice-Chancellor or somebody. Rather pitiful. Running about in fancy dress, kidnapping gratified leading citizens in aid of charity.’
    ‘But that isn’t a real rag,’ somebody protested. ‘And I don’t know that even real rags have much to do with practical jokes. Dictionary, please.’ A fat volume was promptly pitched across the room, and the speaker fielded it neatly. He flicked through its pages. ‘Here you are. The OED gives, as you might expect, very much a don’s definition. “Rag: an extensive display of noisy disorderly conduct, carried