The Prince and BettyWodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
General
The Prince and Betty
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
Humorous stories
If the first number of the series had not staggered humanity, it had at
least caused a certain amount of comment. The warm weather had begun,
and there was nothing much going on in New York. The papers were
consequently free to take notice of the change in the policy of
_Peaceful Moments_. Through the agency of Smith's newspaper
friends, it received some very satisfactory free advertisement, and the
sudden increase in the sales enabled Smith to bear up with fortitude
against the numerous letters of complaint from old subscribers who did
not know what was good for them. Visions of a large new public which
should replace these Brooklyn and Flatbush ingrates filled his mind.
The sporting section of the paper pleased him most. The personality of
Kid Brady bulked large in it. A photograph of the ambitious pugilist,
looking moody and important in an attitude of self-defense, filled half
a page, and under the photograph was the legend, "Jimmy Garvin must
meet this boy." Jimmy was the present holder of the light-weight title.
He had won it a year before, and since then had confined himself to
smoking cigars as long as walking sticks and appearing nightly in a
vaudeville sketch entitled, "A Fight for Honor." His reminiscences were
being published in a Sunday paper. It was this that gave Smith the idea
of publishing Kid Brady's autobiography in _Peaceful Moments_, an
idea which won the Kid's whole-hearted gratitude. Like most pugilists
he had a passion for bursting into print. Print is the fighter's
accolade. It signifies that he has arrived. He was grateful to Smith,
too, for not editing his contributions. Jimmy Garvin groaned under the
supervision of a member of the staff of his Sunday paper, who deleted
his best passages and altered the rest into Addisonian English. The
readers of _Peaceful Moments_ got their Brady raw.
"Comrade Brady," said Smith meditatively to Betty one morning, "has a
singularly pure and pleasing style. It is bound to appeal powerfully to
the many-headed. Listen to this. Our hero is fighting one Benson in the
latter's home town, San Francisco, and the audience is rooting hard for
the native son. Here is Comrade Brady on the subject: 'I looked around
that house, and I seen I hadn't a friend in it. And then the gong goes,
and I says to myself how I has one friend, my old mother down in
Illinois, and I goes in and mixes it, and then I seen Benson losing his
goat, so I gives him a half-scissor hook, and in the next round I picks
up a sleep-producer from the floor and hands it to him, and he takes
the count.' That is what the public wants. Crisp, lucid, and to the
point. If that does not get him a fight with some eminent person,
nothing will."
He leaned back in his chair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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