CLXIV
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt,—The news of Hazel’s engagement has prostrated me and also filled me with a kind of despair about life in general. That a lawn-tennis player should, for a permanency, be preferred to a man of ideas is so essentially wrong that one is left gasping. Lawn-tennis is a frivolous capering game for a few fine days in summer and then not again till next year, while ideas go on for ever.
Now that you are so much better again, you will probably be intent upon spending your superfluity in your own way, but I want you to listen to one more project of mine. It will show you too how my mind has been working. You know the old joke about men going out fishing or shooting and expecting to bring trout or game back to their wives, but, through want of sport, having to stop at the fishmonger’s or poulterer’s on their way home? Well, it suddenly occurred to me while I was shaving yesterday that here is the germ of a very successful business. You know how every traveller promises his family or his friends that he will bring back something. If he is going to the East, he generally promises a parrot or a shawl or a string of amber beads. If he is going to Africa, he promises, say, ostrich feathers or assegais. But in any case he promises something and—this is the point—probably forgets, and therefore comes back empty-handed and is in consequence despised. Now, my idea is that great emporiums should be stocked and opened somewhere near the points of disembarkation from abroad. The ships from foreign parts disgorge their passengers at Liverpool or Southampton or London, and I should establish a great bazaar close to the harbour at each spot where everything that had been promised and forgotten could be purchased—parrots, shawls, beads, ostrich feathers, assegais, everything. The returning traveller would see it, his face would brighten, he would dash in and buy and be no longer ashamed or afraid to meet his wife. Don’t you think that a good notion?
All that is needed is a clever fellow—an ex-P. & O. officer, say, who knows the world and travellers’ ways—to be put in control, and enough capital to give the show a real start, and the result would be easy. Would you not care to invest?—I am, yours sincerely,
Horace Mun-Brown