I, Ripper

“You’re the music critic, no?” he asked me when the drifting of people and the vagaries of alcoholic imbibing brought us together on the flow of the currents. He was tall, and his tweed, I noted, was of fine quality. The tailoring was superb, a three-piece suit of very modern cut, with red four-in-hand instead of a black fluffy bow tie, and the whole effect was of a fellow who paid close attention to his clothes until he put them on.

“I was for a time,” I said.

“Hope you closed down all the concert halls,” he said. “Such puerile jibber-jabber. When are they going to have the guts to change one single thing about the classical canon? It’s mostly Wagner done poorly, since we treacle-slopping Brits don’t have the coldness of soul to do Wagner as he should be done, all savage and scary. We do him like Dion Boucicault doing Dumas with kettledrums and trombones. Not a damned thing for anybody with a brain, or at least the aspirations to thought. Music as social instrument is an alien concept to them.”

“I must say,” I said, “you speak like a critic yourself, sir. That’s a thought I’ve had many a time. Meanwhile, in Europe there’s some interesting work. The Russian Anton Rubinstein is using the baton to do something other than slop treacle for the pigs.”

“ ‘Treacle for the pigs,’ ” he said. “I like that. My name’s Dare.”

I told him mine.

“Of course,” he said. “I pretended I didn’t know you, but I’ve read your pieces in Charlie’s little rag. You were a boy worth watching, I thought. I watched, I watched, I watched. Where on earth did you go?”

“I wrote music under a nom de guerre for a year for the Star and then had an opportunity to try my hand at another part of the journo game. It’s been interesting, though without much glory.”

“Well, you had the divine spark. Don’t lose it in some larger outfit that wants to regulate all voices to the same modulation. But I have tenure, so I’m great with career advice, not having to worry about such things as food, board, and money.”

“You teach?”

“I yell at them. They pretend to listen. I grade the papers by throwing them down the steps and determining which land on the ninety step, which the eighty step, which the seventy. No one seems to care much, and I can never get in trouble with the department, since I’m also the department head. The corruption is blissfully total.”

I found this line very amusing, almost irresistible. I love it when those safely in the bosom of a comforting institution trash it savagely, pointing out its follies, brutal politics, bad behaviors, and utter tomfoolery, but with such good cheer and equanimity as to suggest that all they say will be so relentlessly honest.

“You have a dramatic way about you, sir,” I said. “I’m sure you entrance the students.”

“I’d like to entrance some of the girls into bed, I would. The beastly boys, I’d entrance them off to Afghanistan or the Crimea – say, are we still in the Crimea?”

“I believe we’ve moved onward in our Christian crusade.”

“Well, wherever there are too many wogs, the darker the better, all fuzzy and wuzzy at once. Every good English boy should spend a few years Gatling-gunning nig-nogs for queen, country, and the interests of the Birmingham steel lords. And to keep the price of silk for Charlie’s pater’s department stores down.”

Speaking of Charlie, he suddenly bore down upon us, holding a champagne bottle in each hand. He’d been pouring his way through his guests.

“I see you two have found each other,” he said. “I knew you would, as you’ve much the same temperament and scabrous insight. Tom does phonetics at the University of London.”

Good God, I thought. The Professor Thomas Dare!

“I was telling our young friend here the sad truth of academics today,” said Professor Dare. He had round black spectacles, wavy blond hair, and one of those aquiline profiles that seemed to make him the grandson of the Iron Duke. But his irony had no Wellington in it. “At least my lackadaisical approach to duty leaves me with enough time for my experiments, which are the real thrust of my life. I can tell you, if you want, why a tribe in Africa called the Xhosa speaks with a peculiar popping sound, like a short, dry belch; they literally communicate by burps.”

I laughed. Amusing fellow.

“And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for ‘Gatling gun’ literally translates into ‘mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?’ The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it’s quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.”

I laughed again, then sought to turn him on another course. “What experiments have you done?”

“Too many by half,” he said.