A CHRISTMAS GARLAND

woven

by MAX BEERBOHM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOTE

Stevenson, in one of his essays, tells us how he "played
the sedulous ape" to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and
other writers of the past. And the compositors of all our
higher-toned newspapers keep the foregoing sentence set up in
type always, so constantly does it come tripping off the pens
of all higher-toned reviewers. Nor ever do I read it without a
fresh thrill of respect for the young Stevenson. I, in my own
very inferior boyhood, found it hard to revel in so much as a
single page of any writer earlier than Thackeray. This
disability I did not shake off, alas, after I left school.
There seemed to be so many live authors worth reading. I gave
precedence to them, and, not being much of a reader, never had
time to grapple with the old masters. Meanwhile, I was already
writing a little on my own account. I had had some sort of
aptitude for Latin prose and Latin verse. I wondered often
whether those two things, essential though they were (and are)
to the making of a decent style in English prose, sufficed for
the making of a style more than decent. I felt that I must have
other models. And thus I acquired the habit of aping, now and
again, quite sedulously, this or that live
writer—sometimes, it must be admitted, in the hope of
learning rather what to avoid. I acquired, too, the habit of
publishing these patient little efforts. Some of them appeared
in "The Saturday Review" many years ago; others appeared there
more recently. I have selected, by kind permission of the
Editor, one from the earlier lot, and seven from the later. The
other nine in this book are printed for the first time. The
book itself may be taken as a sign that I think my own style
is, at length, more or less formed.

M.B.

Rapallo, 1912.

CONTENTS

THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE, H*NRY
J*M*S

P.C., X, 36, R*D**RD K*PL*NG

OUT OF HARM'S WAY, A.C. B*NS*N

PERKINS AND MANKIND, H.G. W*LLS

SOME DAMNABLE ERRORS ABOUT CHRISTMAS, G.K.
CH*ST*RT*N

A SEQUELULA TO "THE DYNASTS", TH*M*S
H*RDY

SHAKESPEARE AND CHRISTMAS, FR*NK
H*RR*S

SCRUTS, ARN*LD B*NN*TT

ENDEAVOUR, J*HN G*LSW*RTHY

CHRISTMAS, G.S. STR**T

THE FEAST, J*S*PH C*NR*D

A RECOLLECTION, EDM*ND G*SSE

OF CHRISTMAS, H*L**RE B*LL*C

A STRAIGHT TALK, G**RG* B*RN*RD
SH*W

FOND HEARTS ASKEW, M**R*CE H*WL*TT

DICKENS, G**RGE M**RE

EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT, G**RGE
M*R*D*TH

THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE

By

H*NRY J*M*S

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable
something that he peered now into the immediate future, and
tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he
had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce
had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for
our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to
outline the figures on what she had called his "horizon,"
between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality
somewhat intimidating. He had run up, in the course of time,
against a good number of "teasers;" and the function of teasing
them back—of, as it were, giving them, every now and
then, "what for"—was in him so much a habit that he would
have been at a loss had there been, on the face of it, nothing
to lose. Oh, he always had offered rewards, of course—had
ever so liberally pasted the windows of his soul with staring
appeals, minute descriptions, promises that knew no bounds. But
the actual recovery of the article—the business of
drawing and crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with
tears of joy—had blankly appeared to him rather in the
light of a sacrilege, casting, he sometimes felt, a palpable
chill on the fervour of the next quest. It was just this
fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on his elbow,
he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused to rest
there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be
taken—was, even then, taken by Keith
Tantalus—as a hint of his recollection that after all the
phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus the exact repetition, at
the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous at the foot of
his was hardly enough to account for the fixity with
which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years
later, a motive in the (as it turned out) hardly generous fear
that Eva had already made the great investigation "on her own."
Her very regular breathing presently reassured him that, if she
had peeped into "her" stocking, she must have done so in
sleep. Whether he should wake her now, or wait for their nurse
to wake them both in due course, was a problem presently solved
by a new development. It was plain that his sister was now
watching him between her eyelashes. He had half expected that.
She really was—he had often told her that she really
was—magnificent; and her magnificence was never more
obvious than in the pause that elapsed before she all of a
sudden remarked "They so very indubitably are, you
know!"

It occurred to him as befitting Eva's remoteness, which was
a part of Eva's magnificence, that her voice emerged somewhat
muffled by the bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most
telephonic of her sex. In talking to Eva you always had, as it
were, your lips to the receiver. If you didn't try to meet her
fine eyes, it was that you simply couldn't hope to: there were
too many dark, too many buzzing and bewildering and all frankly
not negotiable leagues in between. Snatches of other voices
seemed often to intertrude themselves in the parley; and your
loyal effort not to overhear these was complicated by your fear
of missing what Eva might be twittering. "Oh, you certainly
haven't, my dear, the trick of propinquity!" was a thrust she
had once parried by saying that, in that case, he
hadn't—to which his unspoken rejoinder that she had
caught her tone from the peevish young women at the Central
seemed to him (if not perhaps in the last, certainly in the
last but one, analysis) to lack finality. With Eva, he had
found, it was always safest to "ring off." It was with a
certain sense of his rashness in the matter, therefore, that he
now, with an air of feverishly "holding the line," said "Oh, as
to that!"

Had she, he presently asked himself, "rung off"? It
was characteristic of our friend—was indeed "him all
over"—that his fear of what she was going to say was as
nothing to his fear of what she might be going to leave unsaid.
He had, in his converse with her, been never so conscious as
now of the intervening leagues; they had never so insistently
beaten the drum of his ear; and he caught himself in the act of
awfully computing, with a certain statistical passion, the
distance between Rome and Boston. He has never been able to
decide which of these points he was psychically the nearer to
at the moment when Eva, replying "Well, one does, anyhow, leave
a margin for the pretext, you know!" made him, for the first
time in his life, wonder whether she were not more magnificent
than even he had ever given her credit for being. Perhaps it
was to test this theory, or perhaps merely to gain time, that
he now raised himself to his knees, and, leaning with
outstretched arm towards the foot of his bed, made as though to
touch the stocking which Santa Claus had, overnight, left
dangling there. His posture, as he stared obliquely at Eva,
with a sort of beaming defiance, recalled to him something seen
in an "illustration." This reminiscence, however—if such
it was, save in the scarred, the poor dear old woebegone and so
very beguilingly not refractive mirror of the
moment—took a peculiar twist from Eva's behaviour. She
had, with startling suddenness, sat bolt upright, and looked to
him as if she were overhearing some tragedy at the other end of
the wire, where, in the nature of things, she was unable to
arrest it. The gaze she fixed on her extravagant kinsman was of
a kind to make him wonder how he contrived to remain, as he
beautifully did, rigid. His prop was possibly the reflection
that flashed on him that, if she abounded in
attenuations, well, hang it all, so did he! It was
simply a difference of plane. Readjust the "values," as
painters say, and there you were! He was to feel that he was
only too crudely "there" when, leaning further forward, he laid
a chubby forefinger on the stocking, causing that receptacle to
rock ponderously to and fro. This effect was more expected than
the tears which started to Eva's eyes, and the intensity with
which "Don't you," she exclaimed, "see?"

"The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever,
my dear, know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out
everything. It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's
the whole habitable globe. Oh, it's, believe me, of an
obsessiveness!" But his sense of the one thing it didn't
block out from his purview enabled him to launch at Eva a
speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had, for the
particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them, of this
seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in the
silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of
(presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain
extrusions stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And,
since Eva had set her heart on a doll of ample proportions and
practicable eyelids—had asked that most admirable of her
sex, their mother, for it with not less directness than he
himself had put into his demand for a sword and
helmet—her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at
indeed a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of
his patience. If she didn't want the doll, why the deuce had
she made such a point of getting it? He was perhaps on the
verge of putting this question to her, when, waving her hand to
include both stockings, she said "Of course, my dear, you
do see. There they are, and you know I know you know we
wouldn't, either of us, dip a finger into them." With a
vibrancy of tone that seemed to bring her voice quite close to
him, "One doesn't," she added, "violate the shrine—pick
the pearl from the shell!"

Even had the answering question "Doesn't one just?" which
for an instant hovered on the tip of his tongue, been uttered,
it could not have obscured for Keith the change which her
magnificence had wrought in him. Something, perhaps, of the
bigotry of the convert was already discernible in the way that,
averting his eyes, he said "One doesn't even peer." As to
whether, in the years that have elapsed since he said this
either of our friends (now adult) has, in fact, "peered," is a
question which, whenever I call at the house, I am tempted to
put to one or other of them. But any regret I may feel in my
invariable failure to "come up to the scratch" of yielding to
this temptation is balanced, for me, by my impression—my
sometimes all but throned and anointed certainty—that the
answer, if vouchsafed, would be in the
negative.

P.C., X, 36

By

R*D**RD K*PL*NG

POLICE STATION DITTIES.

I had spent Christmas Eve at the Club, listening to a grand
pow-wow between certain of the choicer sons of Adam. Then
Slushby had cut in. Slushby is one who writes to newspapers and
is theirs obediently "HUMANITARIAN." When Slushby cuts in, men
remember they have to be up early next morning.

Sharp round a corner on the way home, I collided with
something firmer than the regulation pillar-box. I righted
myself after the recoil and saw some stars that were very
pretty indeed. Then I perceived the nature of the
obstruction.

"Evening, Judlip," I said sweetly, when I had collected my
hat from the gutter. "Have I broken the law, Judlip? If so,
I'll go quiet."

"Time yer was in bed," grunted X, 36. "Yer Ma'll be lookin'
out for yer."

This from the friend of my bosom! It hurt. Many were the
night-beats I had been privileged to walk with Judlip, imbibing
curious lore that made glad the civilian heart of me. Seven
whole 8x5 inch note-books had I pitmanised to the brim with
Judlip. And now to be repulsed as one of the uninitiated! It
hurt horrid.

There is a thing called Dignity. Small boys sometimes stand
on it. Then they have to be kicked. Then they get down,
weeping. I don't stand on Dignity.

"What's wrong, Judlip?" I asked, more sweetly than ever.
"Drawn a blank to-night?"

"Yuss. Drawn a blank blank blank. 'Avent 'ad so much as a
kick at a lorst dorg. Christmas Eve ain't wot it was." I felt
for my note-book. "Lawd! I remembers the time when the drunks
and disorderlies down this street was as thick as flies on a
fly-paper. One just picked 'em orf with one's finger and thumb.
A bloomin' battew, that's wot it wos."

"The night's yet young, Judlip," I insinuated, with a jerk
of my thumb at the flaring windows of the "Rat and Blood
Hound." At that moment the saloon-door swung open, emitting a
man and woman who walked with linked arms and exceeding great
care.

Judlip eyed them longingly as they tacked up the street.
Then he sighed. Now, when Judlip sighs the sound is like unto
that which issues from the vent of a Crosby boiler when the
cog-gauges are at 260° F.

"Come, Judlip!" I said. "Possess your soul in patience.
You'll soon find someone to make an example of.
Meanwhile"—I threw back my head and smacked my
lips—"the usual, Judlip?"

In another minute I emerged through the swing-door, bearing
a furtive glass of that same "usual," and nipped down the mews
where my friend was wont to await these little tokens of
esteem.

"To the Majesty of the Law, Judlip!"

When he had honoured the toast, I scooted back with the
glass, leaving him wiping the beads off his beard-bristles. He
was in his philosophic mood when I rejoined him at the
corner.

"Wot am I?" he said, as we paced along. "A bloomin' cypher.
Wot's the sarjint? 'E's got the Inspector over 'im. Over above
the Inspector there's the Sooprintendent. Over above 'im's the
old red-tape-masticatin' Yard. Over above that there's the 'Ome
Sec. Wot's 'e? A cypher, like me. Why?" Judlip looked up at the
stars. "Over above 'im's We Dunno Wot. Somethin' wot issues its
horders an' regulations an' divisional injunctions,
inscrootable like, but p'remptory; an' we 'as ter see as 'ow
they're carried out, not arskin' no questions, but each man
goin' about 'is dooty.'

"''Is dooty,'" said I, looking up from my note-book. "Yes,
I've got that."

"Life ain't a bean-feast. It's a 'arsh reality. An' them as
makes it a bean-feast 'as got to be 'arshly dealt with
accordin'. That's wot the Force is put 'ere for from Above. Not
as 'ow we ain't fallible. We makes our mistakes. An' when we
makes 'em we sticks to 'em. For the honour o' the Force. Which
same is the jool Britannia wears on 'er bosom as a charm
against hanarchy. That's wot the brarsted old Beaks don't
understand. Yer remember Smithers of our Div?"

I remembered Smithers—well. As fine, upstanding,
square-toed, bullet-headed, clean-living a son of a gun as ever
perjured himself in the box. There was nothing of the softy
about Smithers. I took off my billicock to Smithers'
memory.

"Sacrificed to public opinion? Yuss," said Judlip, pausing
at a front door and flashing his 45 c.p. down the slot of a
two-grade Yale. "Sacrificed to a parcel of screamin' old women
wot ort ter 'ave gorn down on their knees an' thanked Gawd for
such a protector. 'E'll be out in another 'alf year. Wot'll 'e
do then, pore devil? Go a bust on 'is conduc' money an' throw
in 'is lot with them same hexperts wot 'ad a 'oly terror of
'im." Then Judlip swore gently.

"What should you do, O Great One, if ever it were your duty
to apprehend him?"

"Do? Why, yer blessed innocent, yer don't think I'd shirk a
fair clean cop? Same time, I don't say as 'ow I wouldn't 'andle
'im tender like, for sake o' wot 'e wos. Likewise cos 'e'd be a
stiff customer to tackle. Likewise 'cos—"

He had broken off, and was peering fixedly upwards at an
angle of 85° across the moonlit street. "Ullo!" he said in a
hoarse whisper.

Striking an average between the direction of his
eyes—for Judlip, when on the job, has a soul-stirring
squint—I perceived someone in the act of emerging from a
chimney-pot.

Judlip's voice clove the silence. "Wot are yer doin' hup
there?"

The person addressed came to the edge of the parapet. I saw
then that he had a hoary white beard, a red ulster with the
hood up, and what looked like a sack over his shoulder. He said
something or other in a voice like a concertina that has been
left out in the rain.

"I dessay," answered my friend. "Just you come down, an'
we'll see about that."

The old man nodded and smiled. Then—as I hope to be
saved—he came floating gently down through the moonlight,
with the sack over his shoulder and a young fir-tree clasped to
his chest. He alighted in a friendly manner on the curb beside
us.

Judlip was the first to recover himself. Out went his right
arm, and the airman was slung round by the scruff of the neck,
spilling his sack in the road. I made a bee-line for his
shoulder-blades. Burglar or no burglar, he was the best airman
out, and I was muchly desirous to know the precise nature of
the apparatus under his ulster. A back-hander from Judlip's
left caused me to hop quickly aside. The prisoner was squealing
and whimpering. He didn't like the feel of Judlip's knuckles at
his cervical vertebræ.

"Wot wos yer doin' hup there?" asked Judlip, tightening the
grip.

"I'm S-Santa Claus, Sir. P-please, Sir, let me g-go"

"Hold him," I shouted. "He's a German."

"It's my dooty ter caution yer that wotever yer say now may
be used in hevidence against yer, yer old sinner. Pick up that
there sack, an' come along o' me."

The captive snivelled something about peace on earth, good
will toward men.

"Yuss," said Judlip. "That's in the Noo Testament, ain't it?
The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin' for old
gents an' young ladies. But it ain't included in the librery o'
the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old
Testament—O.T., 'ot. An' 'ot you'll get it. Hup with that
sack, an' quick march!"

I have seen worse attempts at a neck-wrench, but it was just
not slippery enough for Judlip. And the kick that Judlip then
let fly was a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.

"Frog's-march him!" I shrieked, dancing. "For the love of
heaven, frog's-march him!"

Trotting by Judlip's side to the Station, I reckoned it out
that if Slushby had not been at the Club I should not have been
here to see. Which shows that even Slushbys are put into this
world for a purpose.

OUT OF HARM'S WAY

By

A.C. B*NS*N

Chapter XLII.—Christmas

More and more, as the tranquil years went by, Percy found
himself able to draw a quiet satisfaction from the regularity,
the even sureness, with which, in every year, one season
succeeded to another. In boyhood he had felt always a little
sad at the approach of autumn. The yellowing leaves of the lime
trees, the creeper that flushed to so deep a crimson against
the old grey walls, the chrysanthemums that shed so prodigally
their petals on the smooth green lawn—all these things,
beautiful and wonderful though they were, were somehow a little
melancholy also, as being signs of the year's decay. Once, when
he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he had overheard a friend
of the family say to his father "How the days are drawing
in!"—a remark which set him thinking deeply, with an
almost morbid abandonment to gloom, for quite a long time. He
had not then grasped the truth that in exactly the proportion
in which the days draw in they will, in the fullness of time,
draw out. This was a lesson that he mastered in later years.
And, though the waning of summer never failed to touch him with
the sense of an almost personal loss, yet it seemed to him a
right thing, a wise ordination, that there should be these
recurring changes. Those men and women of whom the poet tells
us that they lived in "a land where it was always
afternoon"—could they, Percy often wondered, have felt
quite that thankfulness which on a fine afternoon is felt by us
dwellers in ordinary climes? Ah, no! Surely it is because we
are made acquainted with the grey sadness of twilight, the
solemn majesty of the night-time, the faint chill of the dawn,
that we set so high a value on the more meridional hours. If
there were no autumn, no winter, then spring and summer would
lose, not all indeed, yet an appreciable part of their sweet
savour for us. Thus, as his mind matured, Percy came to be very
glad of the gradual changes of the year. He found in them a
rhythm, as he once described it in his diary; and this he liked
very much indeed. He was aware that in his own character, with
its tendency to waywardness, to caprice, to disorder, there was
an almost grievous lack of this rhythmic quality. In the
sure and seemly progression of the months, was there not for
him a desirable exemplar, a needed corrective? He was so liable
to moods in which he rebelled against the performance of some
quite simple duty, some appointed task—moods in which he
said to himself "H-ng it! I will not do this," or "Oh, b-th-r!
I shall not do that!" But it was clear that Nature herself
never spoke thus. Even as a passenger in a frail barque on the
troublous ocean will keep his eyes directed towards some
upstanding rock on the far horizon, finding thus inwardly for
himself, or hoping to find, a more stable equilibrium, a deeper
tranquillity, than is his, so did Percy daily devote a certain
portion of his time to quiet communion with the almanac.

There were times when he was sorely tempted to regret a
little that some of the feasts of the Church were "moveable."
True, they moved only within strictly prescribed limits, and in
accordance with certain unalterable, wholly justifiable rules.
Yet, in the very fact that they did move, there seemed—to
use an expressive slang phrase of the day—"something not
quite nice." It was therefore the fixed feasts that pleased
Percy best, and on Christmas Day, especially, he experienced a
temperate glow which would have perhaps surprised those who
knew him only slightly.

By reason of the athletic exercises of his earlier years,
Percy had retained in middle life a certain lightness and
firmness of tread; and this on Christmas morning, between his
rooms and the Cathedral, was always so peculiarly elastic that
he might almost have seemed to be rather running than walking.
The ancient fane, with its soarings of grey columns to the
dimness of its embowed roof, the delicate traceries of the
organ screen, the swelling notes of the organ, the mellow
shafts of light filtered through the stained-glass windows
whose hues were as those of emeralds and rubies and amethysts,
the stainless purity of the surplices of clergy and choir, the
sober richness of Sunday bonnets in the transept, the faint yet
heavy fragrance exhaled from the hot-water pipes—all
these familiar things, appealing, as he sometimes felt, almost
too strongly to that sensuous side of his nature which made him
so susceptible to the paintings of Mr. Leader, of Sir Luke
Fildes, were on Christmas morning more than usually affecting
by reason of that note of quiet joyousness, of peace and good
will, that pervaded the lessons of the day, the collect, the
hymns, the sermon.

It was this spiritual aspect of Christmas that Percy felt to
be hardly sufficiently regarded, or at least dwelt on,
nowadays, and he sometimes wondered whether the modern
Christmas had not been in some degree inspired and informed by
Charles Dickens. He had for that writer a very sincere
admiration, though he was inclined to think that his true
excellence lay not so much in faithful portrayal of the life of
his times, or in gift of sustained narration, or in those
scenes of pathos which have moved so many hearts in so many
quiet homes, as in the power of inventing highly fantastic
figures, such as Mr. Micawber or Mr. Pickwick. This view Percy
knew to be somewhat heretical, and, constitutionally averse
from the danger of being suspected of "talking for effect," he
kept it to himself; but, had anyone challenged him to give his
opinion, it was thus that he would have expressed himself. In
regard to Christmas, he could not help wishing that Charles
Dickens had laid more stress on its spiritual element. It was
right that the feast should be an occasion for good cheer, for
the savoury meats, the steaming bowl, the blazing log, the
traditional games. But was not the modern world, with its
almost avowed bias towards materialism, too little apt to think
of Christmas as also a time for meditation, for taking stock,
as it were, of the things of the soul? Percy had heard that in
London nowadays there was a class of people who sate down to
their Christmas dinners in public hotels. He did not condemn
this practice. He never condemned a thing, but wondered,
rather, whether it were right, and could not help feeling that
somehow it was not. In the course of his rare visits to London
he had more than once been inside of one of the large new
hotels that had sprung up—these "great caravanseries," as
he described them in a letter to an old school-fellow who had
been engaged for many years in Chinese mission work. And it
seemed to him that the true spirit of Christmas could hardly be
acclimatised in such places, but found its proper resting-place
in quiet, detached homes, where were gathered together only
those connected with one another by ties of kinship, or of long
and tested friendship.

He sometimes blamed himself for having tended more and more,
as the quiet, peaceful, tranquil years went by, to absent
himself from even those small domestic gatherings. And yet,
might it not be that his instinct for solitude at this season
was a right instinct, at least for him, and that to run counter
to it would be in some degree unacceptable to the Power that
fashioned us? Thus he allowed himself to go, as it were, his
own way. After morning service, he sate down to his Christmas
fare alone, and then, when the simple meal was over, would sit
and think in his accustomed chair, falling perhaps into one of
those quiet dozes from which, because they seemed to be so
natural a result, so seemly a consummation, of his thoughts, he
did not regularly abstain. Later, he sallied forth, with a
sense of refreshment, for a brisk walk among the fens, the
sedges, the hedgerows, the reed-fringed pools, the pollard
willows that would in due course be putting forth their tender
shoots of palest green. And then, once more in his rooms, with
the curtains drawn and the candles lit, he would turn to his
book-shelves and choose from among them some old book that he
knew and loved, or maybe some quite new book by that writer
whose works were most dear to him because in them he seemed
always to know so precisely what the author would say next, and
because he found in their fine-spun repetitions a singular
repose, a sense of security, an earnest of calm and continuity,
as though he were reading over again one of those wise
copy-books that he had so loved in boyhood, or were listening
to the sounds made on a piano by some modest, very
conscientious young girl with a pale red pig-tail, practising
her scales, very gently, hour after hour, next
door.

PERKINS AND MANKIND

By

H.G. W*LLS

Chapter XX

§1.

It was the Christmas party at Heighton that was one of the
turning-points in Perkins' life. The Duchess had sent him a
three-page wire in the hyperbolical style of her class,
conveying a vague impression that she and the Duke had arranged
to commit suicide together if Perkins didn't "chuck" any
previous engagement he had made. And Perkins had felt in a
slipshod sort of way—for at this period he was incapable
of ordered thought—he might as well be at Heighton as
anywhere....

The enormous house was almost full. There must have been
upwards of fifty people sitting down to every meal. Many of
these were members of the family. Perkins was able to recognise
them by their unconvoluted ears—the well-known Grifford
ear, transmitted from one generation to another. For the rest
there were the usual lot from the Front Benches and the
Embassies. Evesham was there, clutching at the lapels of his
coat; and the Prescotts—he with his massive mask of a
face, and she with her quick, hawk-like ways, talking about two
things at a time; old Tommy Strickland, with his monocle and
his dropped g's, telling you what he had once said to Mr.
Disraeli; Boubou Seaforth and his American wife; John Pirram,
ardent and elegant, spouting old French lyrics; and a score of
others.

Perkins had got used to them by now. He no longer wondered
what they were "up to," for he knew they were up to nothing
whatever. He reflected, while he was dressing for dinner on
Christmas night, how odd it was he had ever thought of Using
them. He might as well have hoped to Use the Dresden shepherds
and shepherdesses that grinned out in the last stages of
refinement at him from the glazed cabinets in the
drawing-rooms.... Or the Labour Members themselves....

True there was Evesham. He had shown an exquisitely open
mind about the whole thing. He had at once grasped the
underlying principles, thrown out some amazingly luminous
suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was a statesman, right enough. But
had even he ever really believed in the idea of a
Provisional Government of England by the Female Foundlings?

To Perkins the whole thing had seemed so simple, so
imminent—a thing that needed only a little general
good-will to bring it about. And now.... Suppose his Bill
had passed its Second Reading, suppose it had become
Law, would this poor old England be by way of functioning
decently—after all? Foundlings were sometimes
naughty....

What was the matter with the whole human race? He remembered
again those words of Scragson's that had had such a depressing
effect on him at the Cambridge Union—"Look here, you
know! It's all a huge nasty mess, and we're trying to swab it
up with a pocket handkerchief." Well, he'd given up trying to
do that....

§2.

During dinner his eyes wandered furtively up and down the
endless ornate table, and he felt he had been, in a sort of
way, right in thinking these people were the handiest
instrument to prise open the national conscience with. The
shining red faces of the men, the shining white necks and arms
of the women, the fearless eyes, the general free-and-easiness
and spaciousness, the look of late hours counteracted by fresh
air and exercise and the best things to eat and
drink—what mightn't be made of these people, if they'd
only Submit?

Perkins looked behind them, at the solemn young footmen
passing and repassing, noiselessly, in blue and white liveries.
They had Submitted. And it was just because they had
been able to that they were no good.

"Damn!" said Perkins, under his breath.

§3.

One of the big conifers from the park had been erected in
the hall, and this, after dinner, was found to be all lighted
up with electric bulbs and hung with packages in tissue
paper.

The Duchess stood, a bright, feral figure, distributing
these packages to the guests. Perkins' name was called out in
due course and the package addressed to him was slipped into
his hand. He retired with it into a corner. Inside the
tissue-paper was a small morocco leather case. Inside that was
a set of diamond and sapphire sleeve-links—large
ones.

He stood looking at them, blinking a little.

He supposed he must put them on. But something in him, some
intractably tough bit of his old self, rose up
protesting—frantically.

If he couldn't Use these people, at least they weren't going
to Use him!

"No, damn it!" he said under his breath, and, thrusting the
case into his pocket, slipped away unobserved.

§4.

He flung himself into a chair in his bedroom and puffed a
blast of air from his lungs.... Yes, it had been a narrow
escape. He knew that if he had put those beastly blue and white
things on he would have been a lost soul....

"You've got to pull yourself together, d'you hear?" he said
to himself. "You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless
thinking—now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself
somehow that, Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of
mankind business may still be set going—and by
you."

He paced up and down the room, fuming. How recapture the
generous certitudes that had one by one been slipping away from
him? He found himself staring vacantly at the row of books on
the little shelf by his bed. One of them seemed suddenly to
detach itself—he could almost have sworn afterwards that
he didn't reach out for it, but that it hopped down into his
hand....

"Sitting Up For The Dawn"! It was one of that sociological
series by which H.G. W*lls had first touched his soul to finer
issues when he was at the 'Varsity.

He opened it with tremulous fingers. Could it re-exert its
old sway over him now?

The page he had opened it at was headed "General Cessation
Day," and he began to read....

"The re-casting of the calendar on a decimal basis seems a
simple enough matter at first sight. But even here there are
details that will have to be thrashed out....

"Mr. Edgar Dibbs, in his able pamphlet 'Ten to the
Rescue,'¹
advocates a twenty-hour day, and has drawn up an ingenious
scheme for accelerating the motion of this planet by four in
every twenty-four hours, so that the alternations of light
and darkness shall be re-adjusted to the new reckoning. I
think such re-adjustment would be indispensable (though I
know there is a formidable body of opinion against me). But
I am far from being convinced of the feasibility of Mr.
Dibbs' scheme. I believe the twenty-four hour day has come
to stay—anomalous though it certainly will seem in the
ten-day week, the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day
year. I should like to have incorporated Mr. Dibbs' scheme
in my vision of the Dawn. But, as I have said, the scope of
this vision is purely practical....

"Mr. Albert Baker, in a paper²
read before the South Brixton Hebdomadals, pleads that the
first seven days of the decimal week should retain their old
names, the other three to be called provisionally Huxleyday,
Marxday, and Tolstoiday. But, for reasons which I have set
forth elsewhere,³
I believe that the nomenclature which I had originally
suggested⁴—Aday,
Bday, and so on to Jday—would be really the simplest
way out of the difficulty. Any fanciful way of naming the
days would be bad, as too sharply differentiating one day
from another. What we must strive for in the Dawn is that
every day shall be as nearly as possible like every other
day. We must help the human units—these little pink
slobbering creatures of the Future whose cradle we are
rocking—to progress not in harsh jerks, but with a
beautiful unconscious rhythm....

"There must be nothing corresponding to our Sunday. Sunday
is a canker that must be cut ruthlessly out of the social
organism. At present the whole community gets 'slack' on
Saturday because of the paralysis that is about to fall on it.
And then 'Black Monday'!—that day when the human brain
tries to readjust itself—tries to realise that the
shutters are down, and the streets are swept, and the
stove-pipe hats are back in their band-boxes....

"Yet of course there must be holidays. We can no more do
without holidays than without sleep. For every man there must
be certain stated intervals of repose—of recreation in
the original sense of the word. My views on the worthlessness
of classical education are perhaps pretty well known to you,
but I don't underrate the great service that my friend
Professor Ezra K. Higgins has rendered by his
discovery⁵
that the word recreation originally signified a
re-creating—i.e.,⁶
a time for the nerve-tissues to renew themselves in. The
problem before us is how to secure for the human units in
the Dawn—these giants of whom we are but the
foetuses—the holidays necessary for their full
capacity for usefulness to the State, without at the same
time disorganising the whole community—and them.

"The solution is really very simple. The community will be
divided into ten sections—Section A, Section B, and so on
to Section J. And to every section one day of the decimal week
will be assigned as a 'Cessation Day.' Thus, those people who
fall under Section A will rest on Aday, those who fall under
Section B will rest on Bday, and so on. On every day of the
year one-tenth of the population will be resting, but the other
nine-tenths will be at work. The joyous hum and clang of labour
will never cease in the municipal workshops....

"You figure the smokeless blue sky above London dotted all
over with airships in which the holiday-making tenth are
re-creating themselves for the labour of next
week—looking down a little wistfully, perhaps, at the
workshops from which they are temporarily banished. And here I
scent a difficulty. So attractive a thing will labour be in the
Dawn that a man will be tempted not to knock off work when his
Cessation Day comes round, and will prefer to work for no wage
rather than not at all. So that perhaps there will have to be a
law making Cessation Day compulsory, and the Overseers will be
empowered to punish infringement of this law by forbidding the
culprit to work for ten days after the first offence, twenty
after the second, and so on. But I don't suppose there will
often be need to put this law in motion. The children of the
Dawn, remember, will not be the puny self-ridden creatures that
we are. They will not say, 'Is this what I want to do?' but
'Shall I, by doing this, be (a) harming or (b)
benefiting—no matter in how infinitesimal a
degree—the Future of the Race?'

"Sunday must go. And, as I have hinted, the progress of
mankind will be steady proportionately to its own automatism.
Yet I think there would be no harm in having one—just
one—day in the year set aside as a day of universal
rest—a day for the searching of hearts. Heaven—I
mean the Future—forbid that I should be hide-bound by
dry-as-dust logic, in dealing with problems of flesh and blood.
The sociologists of the past thought the grey matter of their
own brains all-sufficing. They forgot that flesh is pink and
blood is red. That is why they could not convert people....

"The five-hundredth and last day of each year shall be a
General Cessation Day. It will correspond somewhat to our
present Christmas Day. But with what a difference! It will not
be, as with us, a mere opportunity for relatives to make up the
quarrels they have picked with each other during the past year,
and to eat and drink things that will make them ill well into
next year. Holly and mistletoe there will be in the Municipal
Eating Rooms, but the men and women who sit down there to
General Cessation High-Tea will be glowing not with a facile
affection for their kith and kin, but with communal anxiety for
the welfare of the great-great-grand-children of people they
have never met and are never likely to meet.

"The great event of the day will be the performance of the
ceremony of 'Making Way.'

"In the Dawn, death will not be the haphazard affair that it
is under the present anarchic conditions. Men will not be
stumbling out of the world at odd moments and for reasons over
which they have no control. There will always, of course, be a
percentage of deaths by misadventure. But there will be no
deaths by disease. Nor, on the other hand, will people die of
old age. Every child will start life knowing that (barring
misadventure) he has a certain fixed period of life before
him—so much and no more, but not a moment less.

"It is impossible to foretell to what average age the
children of the Dawn will retain the use of all their
faculties—be fully vigorous mentally and physically. We
only know they will be 'going strong' at ages when we have long
ceased to be any use to the State. Let us, for sake of
argument, say that on the average their facilities will have
begun to decay at the age of ninety—a trifle over
thirty-two, by the new reckoning. That, then, will be the
period of life fixed for all citizens. Every man on fulfilling
that period will avail himself of the Municipal Lethal Chamber.
He will 'make way'....

"I thought at one time that it would be best for every man
to 'make way' on the actual day when he reaches the age-limit.
But I see now that this would savour of private enterprise.
Moreover, it would rule out that element of sentiment which, in
relation to such a thing as death, we must do nothing to mar.
The children and friends of a man on the brink of death would
instinctively wish to gather round him. How could they
accompany him to the lethal chamber, if it were an ordinary
working-day, with every moment of the time mapped out for
them?

"On General Cessation Day, therefore, the gates of the
lethal chambers will stand open for all those who shall in the
course of the past year have reached the age-limit. You figure
the wide streets filled all day long with little solemn
processions—solemn and yet not in the least unhappy....
You figure the old man walking with a firm step in the midst of
his progeny, looking around him with a clear eye at this dear
world which is about to lose him. He will not be thinking of
himself. He will not be wishing the way to the lethal chamber
was longer. He will be filled with joy at the thought that he
is about to die for the good of the race—to 'make way'
for the beautiful young breed of men and women who, in simple,
artistic, antiseptic garments, are disporting themselves so
gladly on this day of days. They pause to salute him as he
passes. And presently he sees, radiant in the sunlight, the
pleasant white-tiled dome of the lethal chamber. You figure him
at the gate, shaking hands all round, and speaking perhaps a
few well-chosen words about the Future...."

§5.

It was enough. The old broom hadn't lost its snap. It had
swept clean the chambers of Perkins' soul—swished away
the whole accumulation of nasty little cobwebs and malignant
germs. Gone were the mean doubts that had formed in him, the
lethargy, the cheap cynicism. Perkins was himself again.

He saw now how very stupid it was of him to have despaired
just because his own particular panacea wasn't given a chance.
That Provisional Government plan of his had been good, but it
was only one of an infinite number of possible paths to the
Dawn. He would try others—scores of others....

He must get right away out of here—to-night. He must
have his car brought round from the garage—now—to a
side door....

But first he sat down to the writing-table, and wrote
quickly:

Dear Duchess,

I regret I am called away on urgent political
business....

Yours faithfully

J. Perkins....

He took the morocco leather case out of his pocket and
enclosed it, with the note, in a large envelope.

Then he pressed the electric button by his bedside, almost
feeling that this was a signal for the Dawn to rise without
more ado....

Footnote 1:
(return)

Published by the Young Self-Helpers' Press, Ipswich.

Footnote 2:
(return)

"Are We Going Too Fast?"

Footnote 3:
(return)

"A Midwife For The Millennium." H.G. W*lls.

Footnote 4:
(return)

"How To Be Happy Though Yet Unborn." H.G. W*lls.

Footnote 5:
(return)

"Words About Words." By Ezra K. Higgins, Professor of
Etymology, Abraham Z. Stubbins University, Padua, Pa.,
U.S.A. (2 vols.).

Footnote 6:
(return)

"Id est"—"That is."

SOME DAMNABLE ERRORS ABOUT CHRISTMAS

By

G.K. CH*ST*RT*N

That it is human to err is admitted by even the most
positive of our thinkers. Here we have the great difference
between latter-day thought and the thought of the past. If
Euclid were alive to-day (and I dare say he is) he would not
say, "The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal
to one another." He would say, "To me (a very frail and
fallible being, remember) it does somehow seem that these two
angles have a mysterious and awful equality to one another."
The dislike of schoolboys for Euclid is unreasonable in many
ways; but fundamentally it is entirely reasonable.
Fundamentally it is the revolt from a man who was either
fallible and therefore (in pretending to infallibility) an
impostor, or infallible and therefore not human.

Now, since it is human to err, it is always in reference to
those things which arouse in us the most human of all our
emotions—I mean the emotion of love—that we
conceive the deepest of our errors. Suppose we met Euclid on
Westminster Bridge, and he took us aside and confessed to us
that whilst he regarded parallelograms and rhomboids with an
indifference bordering on contempt, for isosceles triangles he
cherished a wild romantic devotion. Suppose he asked us to
accompany him to the nearest music-shop, and there purchased a
guitar in order that he might worthily sing to us the radiant
beauty and the radiant goodness of isosceles triangles. As men
we should, I hope, respect his enthusiasm, and encourage his
enthusiasm, and catch his enthusiasm. But as seekers after
truth we should be compelled to regard with a dark suspicion,
and to check with the most anxious care, every fact that he
told us about isosceles triangles. For adoration involves a
glorious obliquity of vision. It involves more than that. We do
not say of Love that he is short-sighted. We do not say of Love
that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic.
We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further and
say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and obvious truth.
We might go further still and say, Love is dumb. But that would
be a profound and obvious lie. For love is always an
extraordinarily fluent talker. Love is a wind-bag, filled with
a gusty wind from Heaven.

It is always about the thing that we love most that we talk
most. About this thing, therefore, our errors are something
more than our deepest errors: they are our most frequent
errors. That is why for nearly two thousand years mankind has
been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on
any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would
have understood it from the first. What would have happened
then, it is impossible to say. For that which is hated, and
therefore is persecuted, and therefore grows brave, lives on
for ever, whilst that which is understood dies in the moment of
our understanding of it—dies, as it were, in our awful
grasp. Between the horns of this eternal dilemma shivers all
the mystery of the jolly visible world, and of that still
jollier world which is invisible. And it is because Mr. Shaw
and the writers of his school cannot, with all their splendid
sincerity and, acumen, perceive that he and they and all of us
are impaled on those horns as certainly as the sausages I ate
for breakfast this morning had been impaled on the cook's
toasting-fork—it is for this reason, I say, that Mr. Shaw
and his friends seem to me to miss the basic principle that
lies at the root of all things human and divine. By the way,
not all things that are divine are human. But all things that
are human are divine. But to return to Christmas.

I select at random two of the more obvious fallacies that
obtain. One is that Christmas should be observed as a time of
jubilation. This is (I admit) quite a recent idea. It never
entered into the tousled heads of the shepherds by night, when
the light of the angel of the Lord shone about them and they
arose and went to do homage to the Child. It never entered into
the heads of the Three Wise Men. They did not bring their gifts
as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into the
heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of
the Middle Ages. Looking back across the years, they saw in
that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a
brooding man, and a child born to sorrow. The philomaths of the
eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all. It is not
the least of the glories of the Victorian Era that it
rediscovered Christmas. It is not the least of the mistakes of
the Victorian Era that it supposed Christmas to be a feast.

The splendour of the saying, "I have piped unto you, and you
have not danced; I have wept with you, and you have not
mourned" lies in the fact that it might have been uttered with
equal truth by any man who had ever piped or wept. There is in
the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always
pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are
reasonably expected to go. At a funeral, the slightest thing,
not in the least ridiculous at any other time, will convulse us
with internal laughter. At a wedding, we hover mysteriously on
the brink of tears. So it is with the modern Christmas. I find
myself in agreement with the cynics in so far that I admit that
Christmas, as now observed, tends to create melancholy. But the
reason for this lies solely in our own misconception. Christmas
is essentially a dies iræ. If the cynics will only make
up their minds to treat it as such, even the saddest and most
atrabilious of them will acknowledge that he has had a
rollicking day.

This brings me to the second fallacy. I refer to the belief
that "Christmas comes but once a year." Perhaps it does,
according to the calendar—a quaint and interesting
compilation, but of little or no practical value to anybody. It
is not the calendar, but the Spirit of Man that regulates the
recurrence of feasts and fasts. Spiritually, Christmas Day
recurs exactly seven times a week. When we have frankly
acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise
the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it is only
every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their
wonder and their splendour. A man who happens one day to be
knocked down by a motor-bus merely utters a curse and instructs
his solicitor, but a man who has been knocked down by a
motor-bus every day of the year will have begun to feel that he
is taking part in an august and soul-cleansing ritual. He will
await the diurnal stroke of fate with the same lowly and pious
joy as animated the Hindoos awaiting Juggernaut. His bruises
will be decorations, worn with the modest pride of the veteran.
He will cry aloud, in the words of the late W.E. Henley, "My
head is bloody but unbowed." He will add, "My ribs are broken
but unbent."

I look for the time when we shall wish one another a Merry
Christmas every morning; when roast turkey and plum-pudding
shall be the staple of our daily dinner, and the holly shall
never be taken down from the walls, and everyone will always be
kissing everyone else under the mistletoe. And what is right as
regards Christmas is right as regards all other so-called
anniversaries. The time will come when we shall dance round the
Maypole every morning before breakfast—a meal at which
hot-cross buns will be a standing dish—and shall make
April fools of one another every day before noon. The profound
significance of All Fool's Day—the glorious lesson that
we are all fools—is too apt at present to be lost. Nor is
justice done to the sublime symbolism of Shrove
Tuesday—the day on which all sins are shriven. Every day
pancakes shall be eaten, either before or after the
plum-pudding. They shall be eaten slowly and sacramentally.
They shall be fried over fires tended and kept for ever bright
by Vestals. They shall be tossed to the stars.

I shall return to the subject of Christmas next
week.

A SEQUELULA TO "THE DYNASTS"⁷

By

TH*M*S H*RDY

The Void is disclosed. Our own Solar System is visible,
distant by some two million miles.

Enter the Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the
Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Spirit Ironic, the
Spirit Sinister, Rumours, Spirit-Messengers, and the
Recording Angel.

A pause. Enter Spirit-Messenger, with copy of "The
Dynasts."

Exit Spirit-Messenger. The Recording Angel reads "The
Dynasts" aloud.

Just as the reading draws to a close, enter the Spirit
of Mr. Clement Shorter and Chorus of Subtershorters. They
are visible as small grey transparencies swiftly
interpenetrating the brains of the spatial Spirits.

The Spirit of Mr. Clement Shorter and Chorus of
Subtershorters are detected and expelled.

The Recording Angel reads aloud the Complete Works of
Charles Dickens.

The Spirit and Chorus of the Years traject themselves,
closely followed by the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities,
the Spirits and Choruses Sinister and Ironic, Rumours,
Spirit Messengers, and the Recording Angel.

There is the sound of a rushing wind. The Solar System
is seen for a few instants growing larger and
larger—a whorl of dark, vastening orbs careering
round the sun. All but one of these is lost to sight. The
convex seas and continents of our planet spring into
prominence.

The Spirit of Mr. Hardy is visible as a grey
transparency swiftly interpenetrating the brain of the
Spirit of the Years, and urging him in a particular
direction, to a particular point.

The Aerial Visitants now hover in mid-air on the
outskirts of Casterbridge, Wessex, immediately above the
County Gaol.

The roof of the gaol becomes transparent, and the whole
interior is revealed, like that of a beehive under glass.
Warders are marching mechanically round the corridors of
white stone, unlocking and clanging open the iron doors of
the cells. Out from every door steps a convict, who stands
at attention, his face to the wall.

At a word of command the convicts fall into gangs of
twelve, and march down the stone stairs, out into the yard,
where they line up against the walls.

Another word of command, and they file mechanically, but
not more mechanically than their warders, into the
Chapel.

He re-trajects himself into Space, followed closely by
his Chorus, and by the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the
Spirits Sinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours,
Spirit Messengers, and the Recording Angel.

Footnote 7:
(return)

This has been composed from a scenario thrust on me
by some one else. My philosophy of life saves me from sense
of responsibility for any of my writings; but I venture to
hold myself specially irresponsible for this
one.—TH*M*S H*RDY.

SHAKESPEARE AND CHRISTMAS

By

FR*NK H*RR*S

That Shakespeare hated Christmas—hated it with a venom
utterly alien to the gentle heart in him—I take to be a
proposition that establishes itself automatically. If there is
one thing lucid-obvious in the Plays and Sonnets, it is
Shakespeare's unconquerable loathing of Christmas. The
Professors deny it, however, or deny that it is proven. With
these gentlemen I will deal faithfully. I will meet them on
their own parched ground, making them fertilise it by shedding
there the last drop of the water that flows through their
veins.

If you find, in the works of a poet whose instinct is to
write about everything under the sun, one obvious theme
untouched, or touched hardly at all, then it is at least
presumable that there was some good reason for that abstinence.
Such a poet was Shakespeare. It was one of the divine frailties
of his genius that he must be ever flying off at a tangent from
his main theme to unpack his heart in words about some
frivolous-small irrelevance that had come into his head. If it
could be shown that he never mentioned Christmas, we should
have proof presumptive that he consciously avoided doing so.
But if the fact is that he did mention it now and again, but in
grudging fashion, without one spark of illumination—he,
the arch-illuminator of all things—then we have proof
positive that he detested it.

I see Dryasdust thumbing his Concordance. Let my memory save
him the trouble. I will reel him off the one passage in which
Shakespeare spoke of Christmas in words that rise to the level
of mediocrity.

So says Marcellus at Elsinore. This is the best our
Shakespeare can vamp up for the birthday of the Man with whom
he of all men had the most in common. And Dryasdust, eternally
unable to distinguish chalk from cheese, throws up his hands in
admiration of the marvellous poetry. If Dryasdust had written
it, it would more than pass muster. But as coming from
Shakespeare, how feeble-cold—aye, and sulky-sinister! The
greatest praiser the world will ever know!—and all he can
find in his heart to sing of Christmas is a stringing-together
of old women's superstitions! Again and again he has painted
Winter for us as it never has been painted since—never by
Goethe even, though Goethe in more than one of the
Winter-Lieder touched the hem of his garment. There was
every external reason why he should sing, as only he could have
sung, of Christmas. The Queen set great store by it. She and
her courtiers celebrated it year by year with lusty-pious
unction. And thus the ineradicable snob in Shakespeare had the
most potent of all inducements to honour the feast with the
full power that was in him. But he did not, because he would
not. What is the key to the enigma?

For many years I hunted it vainly. The second time that I
met Carlyle I tried to enlist his sympathy and aid. He sat
pensive for a while and then said that it seemed to him "a
goose-quest." I replied, "You have always a phrase for
everything, Tom, but always the wrong one." He covered his
face, and presently, peering at me through his gnarled fingers,
said "Mon, ye're recht." I discussed the problem with Renan,
with Emerson, with Disraeli, also with Cetewayo—poor
Cetewayo, best and bravest of men, but intellectually a
Professor, like the rest of them. It was borne in on me that if
I were to win to the heart of the mystery I must win alone.

The solution, when suddenly it dawned on me, was so
simple-stark that I was ashamed of the ingenious-clever ways I
had been following. (I learned then—and perhaps it is the
one lesson worth the learning of any man—that truth may
be approached only through the logic of the heart. For the
heart is eye and ear, and all excellent understanding abides
there.) On Christmas Day, assuredly, Anne Hathaway was
born.

In what year she was born I do not know nor care. I take it
she was not less than thirty-eight when she married
Shakespeare. This, however, is sheer conjecture, and in no way
important-apt to our inquiry. It is not the year, but the day
of the year, that matters. All we need bear in mind is that on
Christmas Day that woman was born into the world.

If there be any doubting Thomas among my readers, let him
not be afraid to utter himself. I am (with the possible
exception of Shakespeare) the gentlest man that ever breathed,
and I do but bid him study the Plays in the light I have given
him. The first thing that will strike him is that Shakespeare's
thoughts turned constantly to the birthdays of all his
Fitton-heroines, as a lover's thoughts always do turn to the
moment at which the loved one first saw the light. "There was a
star danced, and under that" was born Beatrice. Juliet was born
"on Lammas Eve." Marina tells us she derived her name from the
chance of her having been "born at sea." And so on, throughout
the whole gamut of women in whom Mary Fitton was bodied forth
to us. But mark how carefully Shakespeare says never a word
about the birthdays of the various shrews and sluts in whom,
again and again, he gave us his wife. When and were was born
Queen Constance, the scold? And Bianca? And Doll Tearsheet, and
"Greasy Jane" in the song, and all the rest of them? It is of
the last importance that we should know. Yet never a hint is
vouchsafed us in the text. It is clear that Shakespeare cannot
bring himself to write about Anne Hathaway's
birthday—will not stain his imagination by thinking of
it. That is entirely human-natural. But why should he loathe
Christmas Day itself with precisely the same loathing? There is
but one answer—and that inevitable-final. The two days
were one.

Some soul-secrets are so terrible that the most hardened
realist of us may well shrink from laying them bare. Such a
soul-secret was this of Shakespeare's. Think of it! The
gentlest spirit that ever breathed, raging and fuming endlessly
in impotent-bitter spleen against the prettiest of festivals!
Here is a spectacle so tragic-piteous that, try as we will, we
shall not put it from us. And it is well that we should not,
for in our plenary compassion we shall but learn to love the
man the more.

[Mr. Fr*nk H*rr*s is very much a man of genius, and I
should be sorry if this adumbration of his manner made any
one suppose that I do not rate his writings about
Shakespeare higher than those of all "the Professors"
together.—M.B.]

SCRUTS

By

ARN*LD B*NN*TT

I

Emily Wrackgarth stirred the Christmas pudding till her
right arm began to ache. But she did not cease for that. She
stirred on till her right arm grew so numb that it might have
been the right arm of some girl at the other end of Bursley.
And yet something deep down in her whispered "It is your
right arm! And you can do what you like with it!"

She did what she liked with it. Relentlessly she kept it
moving till it reasserted itself as the arm of Emily
Wrackgarth, prickling and tingling as with red-hot needles in
every tendon from wrist to elbow. And still Emily Wrackgarth
hardened her heart.

Presently she saw the spoon no longer revolving, but
wavering aimlessly in the midst of the basin. Ridiculous! This
must be seen to! In the down of dark hairs that connected her
eyebrows there was a marked deepening of that vertical cleft
which, visible at all times, warned you that here was a young
woman not to be trifled with. Her brain despatched to her hand
a peremptory message—which miscarried. The spoon wabbled
as though held by a baby. Emily knew that she herself as a baby
had been carried into this very kitchen to stir the Christmas
pudding. Year after year, as she grew up, she had been allowed
to stir it "for luck." And those, she reflected, were the only
cookery lessons she ever got. How like Mother!

Mrs. Wrackgarth had died in the past year, of a complication
of ailments.⁸
Emily still wore on her left shoulder that small tag of
crape which is as far as the Five Towns go in the way of
mourning. Her father had died in the year previous to that,
of a still more curious and enthralling complication of
ailments.⁹
Jos, his son, carried on the Wrackgarth Works, and Emily
kept house for Jos. She with her own hand had made this
pudding. But for her this pudding would not have been.
Fantastic! Utterly incredible! And yet so it was. She was
grown-up. She was mistress of the house. She could make or
unmake puddings at will. And yet she was Emily Wrackgarth.
Which was absurd.

She would not try to explain, to reconcile. She abandoned
herself to the exquisite mysteries of existence. And yet in her
abandonment she kept a sharp look-out on herself, trying
fiercely to make head or tail of her nature. She thought
herself a fool. But the fact that she thought so was for her a
proof of adult sapience. Odd! She gave herself up. And yet it
was just by giving herself up that she seemed to glimpse
sometimes her own inwardness. And these bleak revelations
saddened her. But she savoured her sadness. It was the wine of
life to her. And for her sadness she scorned herself, and in
her conscious scorn she recovered her self-respect.

It is doubtful whether the people of southern England have
even yet realised how much introspection there is going on all
the time in the Five Towns.

Visible from the window of the Wrackgarths' parlour was that
colossal statue of Commerce which rears itself aloft at the
point where Oodge Lane is intersected by Blackstead Street.
Commerce, executed in glossy Doultonware by some sculptor or
sculptors unknown, stands pointing her thumb over her shoulder
towards the chimneys of far Hanbridge. When I tell you that the
circumference of that thumb is six inches, and the rest to
scale, you will understand that the statue is one of the prime
glories of Bursley. There were times when Emily Wrackgarth
seemed to herself as vast and as lustrously impressive as it.
There were other times when she seemed to herself as trivial
and slavish as one of those performing fleas she had seen at
the Annual Ladies' Evening Fête organised by the Bursley Mutual
Burial Club. Extremist!

She was now stirring the pudding with her left hand. The
ingredients had already been mingled indistinguishably in that
rich, undulating mass of tawniness which proclaims perfection.
But Emily was determined to give her left hand, not less than
her right, what she called "a doing." Emily was like that.

At mid-day, when her brother came home from the Works, she
was still at it.

"Brought those scruts with you?" she asked, without looking
up.

"That's a fact," he said, dipping his hand into the sagging
pocket of his coat.

It is perhaps necessary to explain what scruts are. In the
daily output of every potbank there are a certain proportion of
flawed vessels. These are cast aside by the foreman, with a
lordly gesture, and in due course are hammered into fragments.
These fragments, which are put to various uses, are called
scruts; and one of the uses they are put to is a sentimental
one. The dainty and luxurious Southerner looks to find in his
Christmas pudding a wedding-ring, a gold thimble, a
threepenny-bit, or the like. To such fal-lals the Five Towns
would say fie. A Christmas pudding in the Five Towns contains
nothing but suet, flour, lemon-peel, cinnamon, brandy, almonds,
raisins—and two or three scruts. There is a world of
poetry, beauty, romance, in scruts—though you have to
have been brought up on them to appreciate it. Scruts have
passed into the proverbial philosophy of the district. "Him's a
pudden with more scruts than raisins to 'm" is a criticism not
infrequently heard. It implies respect, even admiration. Of
Emily Wrackgarth herself people often said, in reference to her
likeness to her father, "Her's a scrut o' th' owd basin."

Jos had emptied out from his pocket on to the table a good
three dozen of scruts. Emily laid aside her spoon, rubbed the
palms of her hands on the bib of her apron, and proceeded to
finger these scruts with the air of a connoisseur, rejecting
one after another. The pudding was a small one, designed merely
for herself and Jos, with remainder to "the girl"; so that it
could hardly accommodate more than two or three scruts. Emily
knew well that one scrut is as good as another. Yet she did not
want her brother to feel that anything selected by him would
necessarily pass muster with her. For his benefit she
ostentatiously wrinkled her nose.

"By the by," said Jos, "you remember Albert Grapp? I've
asked him to step over from Hanbridge and help eat our snack on
Christmas Day."

Emily gave Jos one of her looks. "You've asked that Mr.
Grapp?"

"No objection, I hope? He's not a bad sort. And he's
considered a bit of a ladies' man, you know."

She gathered up all the scruts and let them fall in a
rattling shower on the exiguous pudding. Two or three fell wide
of the basin. These she added.

"Steady on!" cried Jos. "What's that for?"

"That's for your guest," replied his sister. "And if you
think you're going to palm me off on to him, or on to any other
young fellow, you're a fool, Jos Wrackgarth."

The young man protested weakly, but she cut him short.

"Don't think," she said, "I don't know what you've been
after, just of late. Cracking up one young sawny and then
another on the chance of me marrying him! I never heard of such
goings on. But here I am, and here I'll stay, as sure as my
name's Emily Wrackgarth, Jos Wrackgarth!"

She was the incarnation of the adorably feminine. She was
exquisitely vital. She exuded at every pore the pathos of her
young undirected force. It is difficult to write calmly about
her. For her, in another age, ships would have been launched
and cities besieged. But brothers are a race apart, and blind.
It is a fact that Jos would have been glad to see his sister
"settled"—preferably in one of the other four Towns.

She took up the spoon and stirred vigorously. The scruts
grated and squeaked together around the basin, while the
pudding feebly wormed its way up among them.

II.

Albert Grapp, ladies' man though he was, was humble of
heart. Nobody knew this but himself. Not one of his fellow
clerks in Clither's Bank knew it. The general theory in
Hanbridge was "Him's got a stiff opinion o' hisself." But this
arose from what was really a sign of humility in him. He made
the most of himself. He had, for instance, a way of his own in
the matter of dressing. He always wore a voluminous frock-coat,
with a pair of neatly-striped vicuna trousers, which he placed
every night under his mattress, thus preserving in perfection
the crease down the centre of each. His collar was of the
highest, secured in front with an aluminium stud, to which was
attached by a patent loop a natty bow of dove-coloured sateen.
He had two caps, one of blue serge, the other of shepherd's
plaid. These he wore on alternate days. He wore them in a way
of his own—well back from his forehead, so as not to hide
his hair, and with the peak behind. The peak made a sort of
half-moon over the back of his collar. Through a fault of his
tailor, there was a yawning gap between the back of his collar
and the collar of his coat. Whenever he shook his head, the
peak of his cap had the look of a live thing trying to
investigate this abyss. Dimly aware of the effect, Albert Grapp
shook his head as seldom as possible.

On wet days he wore a mackintosh. This, as he did not yet
possess a great-coat, he wore also, but with less glory, on
cold days. He had hoped there might be rain on Christmas
morning. But there was no rain. "Like my luck," he said as he
came out of his lodgings and turned his steps to that corner of
Jubilee Avenue from which the Hanbridge-Bursley trams start
every half-hour.

Since Jos Wrackgarth had introduced him to his sister at the
Hanbridge Oddfellows' Biennial Hop, when he danced two
quadrilles with her, he had seen her but once. He had nodded to
her, Five Towns fashion, and she had nodded back at him, but
with a look that seemed to say "You needn't nod next time you
see me. I can get along well enough without your nods." A
frightening girl! And yet her brother had since told him she
seemed "a bit gone, like" on him. Impossible! He, Albert Grapp,
make an impression on the brilliant Miss Wrackgarth! Yet she
had sent him a verbal invite to spend Christmas in her own
home. And the time had come. He was on his way. Incredible that
he should arrive! The tram must surely overturn, or be struck
by lightning. And yet no! He arrived safely.

The small servant who opened the door gave him another
verbal message from Miss Wrackgarth. It was that he must wipe
his feet "well" on the mat. In obeying this order he
experienced a thrill of satisfaction he could not account for.
He must have stood shuffling his boots vigorously for a full
minute. This, he told himself, was life. He, Albert Grapp, was
alive. And the world was full of other men, all alive; and yet,
because they were not doing Miss Wrackgarth's bidding, none of
them really lived. He was filled with a vague melancholy. But
his melancholy pleased him.

In the parlour he found Jos awaiting him. The table was laid
for three.

"So you're here, are you?" said the host, using the Five
Towns formula. "Emily's in the kitchen," he added. "Happen
she'll be here directly."

"I hope she's tol-lol-ish?" asked Albert.

"She is," said Jos. "But don't you go saying that to her.
She doesn't care about society airs and graces. You'll make no
headway if you aren't blunt."

"Oh, right you are," said Albert, with the air of a man who
knew his way about.

A moment later Emily joined them, still wearing her kitchen
apron. "So you're here, are you?" she said, but did not shake
hands. The servant had followed her in with the tray, and the
next few seconds were occupied in the disposal of the beef and
trimmings.

The meal began, Emily carving. The main thought of a man
less infatuated than Albert Grapp would have been "This girl
can't cook. And she'll never learn to." The beef, instead of
being red and brown, was pink and white. Uneatable beef! And
yet he relished it more than anything he had ever tasted. This
beef was her own handiwork. Thus it was because she had made it
so.... He warily refrained from complimenting her, but the idea
of a second helping obsessed him.

"Happen I could do with a bit more, like," he said.

Emily hacked off the bit more and jerked it on to the plate
he had held out to her.

"Thanks," he said; and then, as Emily's lip curled, and Jos
gave him a warning kick under the table, he tried to look as if
he had said nothing.

Only when the second course came on did he suspect that the
meal was a calculated protest against his presence. This a
Christmas pudding? The litter of fractured earthenware was
hardly held together by the suet and raisins. All his pride of
manhood—and there was plenty of pride mixed up with
Albert Grapp's humility—dictated a refusal to touch that
pudding. Yet he soon found himself touching it, though
gingerly, with his spoon and fork.

In the matter of dealing with scruts there are two
schools—the old and the new. The old school pushes its
head well over its plate and drops the scrut straight from its
mouth. The new school emits the scrut into the fingers of its
left hand and therewith deposits it on the rim of the plate.
Albert noticed that Emily was of the new school. But might she
not despise as affectation in him what came natural to herself?
On the other hand, if he showed himself as a prop of the old
school, might she not set her face the more stringently against
him? The chances were that whichever course he took would be
the wrong one.

It was then that he had an inspiration—an idea of the
sort that comes to a man once in his life and finds him, likely
as not, unable to put it into practice. Albert was not sure he
could consummate this idea of his. He had indisputably fine
teeth—"a proper mouthful of grinders" in local phrase.
But would they stand the strain he was going to impose on them?
He could but try them. Without a sign of nervousness he raised
his spoon, with one scrut in it, to his mouth. This scrut he
put between two of his left-side molars, bit hard on it,
and—eternity of that moment!—felt it and heard it
snap in two. Emily also heard it. He was conscious that at
sound of the percussion she started forward and stared at him.
But he did not look at her. Calmly, systematically, with
gradually diminishing crackles, he reduced that scrut to
powder, and washed the powder down with a sip of beer. While he
dealt with the second scrut he talked to Jos about the Borough
Council's proposal to erect an electric power-station on the
site of the old gas-works down Hillport way. He was aware of a
slight abrasion inside his left cheek. No matter. He must be
more careful. There were six scruts still to be negotiated. He
knew that what he was doing was a thing grandiose, unique,
epical; a history-making thing; a thing that would outlive
marble and the gilded monuments of princes. Yet he kept his
head. He did not hurry, nor did he dawdle. Scrut by scrut, he
ground slowly but he ground exceeding small. And while he did
so he talked wisely and well. He passed from the power-station
to a first edition of Leconte de Lisle's "Parnasse
Contemporain" that he had picked up for sixpence in Liverpool,
and thence to the Midland's proposal to drive a tunnel under
the Knype Canal so as to link up the main-line with the
Critchworth and Suddleford loop-line. Jos was too amazed to put
in a word. Jos sat merely gaping—a gape that merged by
imperceptible degrees into a grin. Presently he ceased to watch
his guest. He sat watching his sister.

Not once did Albert himself glance in her direction. She was
just a dim silhouette on the outskirts of his vision. But there
she was, unmoving, and he could feel the fixture of her unseen
eyes. The time was at hand when he would have to meet those
eyes. Would he flinch? Was he master of himself?

The last scrut was powder. No temporising! He jerked his
glass to his mouth. A moment later, holding out his plate to
her, he looked Emily full in the eyes. They were Emily's eyes,
but not hers alone. They were collective eyes—that was
it! They were the eyes of stark, staring womanhood. Her face
had been dead white, but now suddenly up from her throat, over
her cheeks, through the down between her eyebrows, went a rush
of colour, up over her temples, through the very parting of her
hair.

"Happen," he said without a quaver in his voice, "I'll have
a bit more, like."

She flung her arms forward on the table and buried her face
in them. It was a gesture wild and meek. It was the gesture
foreseen and yet incredible. It was recondite, inexplicable,
and yet obvious. It was the only thing to be done—and
yet, by gum, she had done it.

Her brother had risen from his seat and was now at the door.
"Think I'll step round to the Works," he said, "and see if they
banked up that furnace aright."

NOTE.—The author has in preparation a series of
volumes dealing with the life of Albert and Emily
Grapp.

Footnote 8:
(return)

See "The History of Sarah Wrackgarth," pp. 345-482.

Footnote 9:
(return)

See "The History of Sarah Wrackgarth," pp. 231-344.

ENDEAVOUR

By

J*HN G*LSW*RTHY

The dawn of Christmas Day found London laid out in a shroud
of snow. Like a body wasted by diseases that had triumphed over
it at last, London lay stark and still now, beneath a sky that
was as the closed leaden shell of a coffin. It was what is
called an old-fashioned Christmas.

Nothing seemed to be moving except the Thames, whose
embanked waters flowed on sullenly in their eternal act of
escape to the sea. All along the wan stretch of Cheyne Walk the
thin trees stood exanimate, with not a breath of wind to stir
the snow that pied their soot-blackened branches. Here and
there on the muffled ground lay a sparrow that had been frozen
in the night, its little claws sticking up heavenward. But here
and there also those tinier adventurers of the London air,
smuts, floated vaguely and came to rest on the snow—signs
that in the seeming death of civilisation some housemaids at
least survived, and some fires had been lit.

One of these fires, crackling in the grate of one of those
dining-rooms which look fondly out on the river and tolerantly
across to Battersea, was being watched by the critical eye of
an aged canary. The cage in which this bird sat was hung in the
middle of the bow-window. It contained three perches, and also
a pendent hoop. The tray that was its floor had just been
cleaned and sanded. In the embrasure to the right was a fresh
supply of hemp-seed; in the embrasure to the left the bath-tub
had just been refilled with clear water. Stuck between the bars
was a large sprig of groundsel. Yet, though all was thus in
order, the bird did not eat nor drink, nor did he bathe. With
his back to Battersea, and his head sunk deep between his
little sloping shoulders, he watched the fire. The windows had
for a while been opened, as usual, to air the room for him; and
the fire had not yet mitigated the chill. It was not his custom
to bathe at so inclement an hour; and his appetite for food and
drink, less keen than it had once been, required to be whetted
by example—he never broke his fast before his master and
mistress broke theirs. Time had been when, for sheer joy in
life, he fluttered from perch to perch, though there were none
to watch him, and even sang roulades, though there were none to
hear. He would not do these things nowadays save at the fond
instigation of Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Berridge. The housemaid who
ministered to his cage, the parlourmaid who laid the Berridges'
breakfast table, sometimes tried to incite him to perform for
their own pleasure. But the sense of caste, strong in his
protuberant little bosom, steeled him against these
advances.

While the breakfast-table was being laid, he heard a faint
tap against the window-pane. Turning round, he perceived on the
sill a creature like to himself, but very different—a
creature who, despite the pretensions of a red waistcoat in the
worst possible taste, belonged evidently to the ranks of the
outcast and the disinherited. In previous winters the sill had
been strewn every morning with bread-crumbs. This winter, no
bread-crumbs had been vouchsafed; and the canary, though he did
not exactly understand why this was so, was glad that so it
was. He had felt that his poor relations took advantage of the
Berridges' kindness. Two or three of them, as pensioners, might
not have been amiss. But they came in swarms, and they gobbled
their food in a disgusting fashion, not trifling coquettishly
with it as birds should. The reason for this, the canary knew,
was that they were hungry; and of that he was sorry. He hated
to think how much destitution there was in the world; and he
could not help thinking about it when samples of it were thrust
under his notice. That was the principal reason why he was glad
that the window-sill was strewn no more and seldom visited.

He would much rather not have seen this solitary applicant.
The two eyes fixed on his made him feel very uncomfortable. And
yet, for fear of seeming to be outfaced, he did not like to
look away.

The subdued clangour of the gong, sounded for breakfast,
gave him an excuse for turning suddenly round and watching the
door of the room.

A few moments later there came to him a faint odour of
Harris tweed, followed immediately by the short, somewhat stout
figure of his master—a man whose mild, fresh, pink, round
face seemed to find salvation, as it were, at the last moment,
in a neatly-pointed auburn beard.

Adrian Berridge paused on the threshold, as was his wont,
with closed eyes and dilated nostrils, enjoying the aroma of
complex freshness which the dining-room had at this hour.
Pathetically a creature of habit, he liked to savour the
various scents, sweet or acrid, that went to symbolise for him
the time and the place. Here were the immediate scents of dry
toast, of China tea of napery fresh from the wash, together
with that vague, super-subtle scent which boiled eggs give out
through their unbroken shells. And as a permanent base to these
there was the scent of much-polished Chippendale, and of
bees'-waxed parquet, and of Persian rugs. To-day, moreover,
crowning the composition, there was the delicate pungency of
the holly that topped the Queen Anne mirror and the Mantegna
prints.

Coming forward into the room, Mr. Berridge greeted the
canary. "Well, Amber, old fellow," he said, "a happy Christmas
to you!" Affectionately he pushed the tip of a plump white
finger between the bars. "Tweet!" he added.

"Tweet!" answered the bird, hopping to and fro along his
perch.

"Quite an old-fashioned Christmas, Amber!" said Mr.
Berridge, turning to scan the weather. At sight of the robin, a
little spasm of pain contracted his face. A shine of tears came
to his prominent pale eyes, and he turned quickly away. Just at
that moment, heralded by a slight fragrance of old lace and of
that peculiar, almost unseizable odour that uncut turquoises
have, Mrs. Berridge appeared.

"What is the matter, Adrian?" she asked quickly. She glanced
sideways into the Queen Anne mirror, her hand fluttering, like
a pale moth, to her hair, which she always wore braided in a
fashion she had derived from Pollaiuolo's St. Ursula.

"Nothing, Jacynth—nothing," he answered with a
lightness that carried no conviction; and he made behind his
back a gesture to frighten away the robin.

"Amber isn't unwell, is he?" She came quickly to the cage.
Amber executed for her a roulade of great sweetness. His voice
had not perhaps the fullness for which it had been noted in
earlier years; but the art with which he managed it was as
exquisite as ever. It was clear to his audience that the
veteran artist was hale and hearty.

But Jacynth, relieved on one point, had a misgiving on
another. "This groundsel doesn't look very fresh, does it?" she
murmured, withdrawing the sprig from the bars. She rang the
bell, and when the servant came in answer to it said, "Oh
Jenny, will you please bring up another piece of groundsel for
Master Amber? I don't think this one is quite fresh."

This formal way of naming the canary to the servants always
jarred on her principles and on those of her husband. They
tried to regard their servants as essentially equals of
themselves, and lately had given Jenny strict orders to leave
off calling them "Sir" and "Ma'am," and to call them simply
"Adrian" and "Jacynth." But Jenny, after one or two efforts
that ended in faint giggles, had reverted to the crude old
nomenclature—as much to the relief as to the
mortification of the Berridges. They did, it is true, discuss
the possibility of redressing the balance by calling the
parlourmaid "Miss." But, when it came to the point, their lips
refused this office. And conversely their lips persisted in the
social prefix to the bird's name.

Somehow that anomaly seemed to them symbolic of their lives.
Both of them yearned so wistfully to live always in accordance
to the nature of things. And this, they felt, ought surely to
be the line of least resistance. In the immense difficulties it
presented, and in their constant failures to surmount these
difficulties, they often wondered whether the nature of things
might not be, after all, something other than what they thought
it. Again and again it seemed to be in as direct conflict with
duty as with inclination; so that they were driven to wonder
also whether what they conceived to be duty were not also a
mirage—a marsh-light leading them on to disaster.

The fresh groundsel was brought in while Jacynth was pouring
out the tea. She rose and took it to the cage; and it was then
that she too saw the robin, still fluttering on the sill. With
a quick instinct she knew that Adrian had seen it—knew
what had brought that look to his face. She went and, bending
over him, laid a hand on his shoulder. The disturbance of her
touch caused the tweed to give out a tremendous volume of
scent, making her feel a little dizzy.

"Adrian," she faltered, "mightn't we for once—it is
Christmas Day—mightn't we, just to-day, sprinkle some
bread-crumbs?"

He rose from the table, and leaned against the mantelpiece,
looking down at the fire. She watched him tensely. At length,
"Oh Jacynth," he groaned, "don't—don't tempt me."

"But surely, dear, surely—"

"Jacynth, don't you remember that long talk we had last
winter, after the annual meeting of the Feathered Friends'
League, and how we agreed that those sporadic doles could do no
real good—must even degrade the birds who received
them—and that we had no right to meddle in what ought to
be done by collective action of the State?"

"Yes, and—oh my dear, I do still agree, with all my
heart. But if the State will do
nothing—nothing—"

"It won't, it daren't, go on doing nothing, unless we
encourage it to do so. Don't you see, Jacynth, it is just
because so many people take it on themselves to feed a few
birds here and there that the State feels it can afford to
shirk the responsibility?"

"All that is fearfully true. But just now—Adrian, the
look in that robin's eyes—"

Berridge covered his own eyes, as though to blot out from
his mind the memory of that look. But Jacynth was not silenced.
She felt herself dragged on by her sense of duty to savour, and
to make her husband savour, the full bitterness that the
situation could yield for them both. "Adrian," she said, "a
fearful thought came to me. Suppose—suppose it had been
Amber!"

Even before he shuddered at the thought, he raised his
finger to his lips, glancing round at the cage. It was clear
that Amber had not overheard Jacynth's remark, for he threw
back his head and uttered one of his blithest trills. Adrian,
thus relieved, was free to shudder at the thought just
suggested.

"Sometimes," murmured Jacynth, "I wonder if we, holding the
views we hold, are justified in keeping Amber."

"Ah, dear, we took him in our individualistic days. We
cannot repudiate him now. It wouldn't be fair. Besides, you
see, he isn't here on a basis of mere charity. He's not a
parasite, but an artist. He gives us of his art."

"Yes, dear, I know. But you remember our doubts about the
position of artists in the community—whether the State
ought to sanction them at all."

"True. But we cannot visit those doubts on our old friend
yonder, can we, dear? At the same time, I admit that
when—when—Jacynth, if ever anything happens to
Amber, we shall perhaps not be justified in keeping another
bird."

"Don't, please don't talk of such things." She moved to the
window. Snow, a delicate white powder, was falling on the
coverlet of snow.

Outside, on the sill, the importunate robin lay supine, his
little heart beating no more behind the shabby finery of his
breast, but his glazing eyes half-open as though even in death
he were still questioning. Above him and all around him brooded
the genius of infinity, dispassionate, inscrutable, grey.

Jacynth turned and mutely beckoned her husband to the
window.

They stood there, these two, gazing silently down.

Presently Jacynth said: "Adrian, are you sure that we, you
and I, for all our theories, and all our efforts, aren't
futile?"

"No, dear. Sometimes I am not sure. But—there's a
certain comfort in not being sure. To die for what one knows to
be true, as many saints have done—that is well. But to
live, as many of us do nowadays, in service of what may, for
aught we know, be only a half-truth or not true at
all—this seems to me nobler still."

"Because it takes more out of us?"

"Because it takes more out of us."

Standing between the live bird and the dead, they gazed
across the river, over the snow-covered wharves, over the dim,
slender chimneys from which no smoke came, into the grey-black
veil of the distance. And it seemed to them that the genius of
infinity did not know—perhaps did not even
care—whether they were futile or not, nor how much and to
what purpose, if to any purpose, they must go on
striving.

CHRISTMAS

By

G.S. STR**T

One likes it or not. This said, there is plaguey little else
to say of Christmas, and I (though I doubt my sentiments touch
you not at all) would rather leave that little unsaid. Did I
confess a distaste for Christmas, I should incur your enmity.
But if I find it, as I protest I do, rather agreeable than
otherwise, why should I spoil my pleasure by stringing vain
words about it? Swift and the broomstick—yes. But that
essay was done at the behest of a clever woman, and to annoy
the admirers of Robert Boyle. Besides, it was hardly—or
do you think it was?—worth the trouble of doing it. There
was no trouble involved? Possibly. But I am not the Dean. And
anyhow the fact that he never did anything of the kind again
may be taken to imply that he would not be bothered. So would
not I, if I had a deanery.

That is an hypothesis I am tempted to pursue. I should like
to fill my allotted space before reaching the tiresome theme I
have set myself ... A deanery, the cawing of rooks, their
effect on the nervous system, Trollope's delineations of deans,
the advantages of the Mid-Victorian novel ... But your
discursive essayist is a nuisance. Best come to the point. The
bore is in finding a point to come to. Besides, the chances are
that any such point will have long ago been worn blunt by a
score of more active seekers. Alas!

Since I wrote the foregoing words, I have been out for a
long walk, in search of inspiration, through the streets of
what is called the West End. Snobbishly so called. Why draw
these crude distinctions? We all know that Mayfair happens to
lie a few miles further west than Whitechapel. It argues a lack
of breeding to go on calling attention to the fact. If the
people of Whitechapel were less beautiful or less well-mannered
or more ignorant than we, there might be some excuse. But they
are not so. True, themselves talk about the East End, but this
only makes the matter worse. To a sensitive ear their phrase
has a ring of ironic humility that jars not less than our own
coarse boastfulness. Heaven knows they have a right to be
ironic, and who shall blame them for exercising it? All the
same, this sort of thing worries me horribly.

I said that I found Christmas rather agreeable than
otherwise. But I was speaking as one accustomed to live mostly
in the past. The walk I have just taken, refreshing in itself,
has painfully reminded me that I cannot hit it off with the
present. My life is in the later days of the eighteenth and the
earlier days of the nineteenth century. This twentieth affair
is as a vision, dimly foreseen at odd moments, and put from me
with a slight shudder. My actual Christmases are spent (say) in
Holland House, which has but recently been built. Little
Charles Fox is allowed by his father to join us for the earlier
stages of dessert. I am conscious of patting him on the head
and predicting for him a distinguished future. A very bright
little fellow, with his father's eyes! Or again, I am down at
Newstead. Byron is in his wildest spirits, a shade too
uproarious. I am glad to escape into the park and stroll a
quiet hour on the arm of Mr. Hughes Ball. Years pass. The
approach of Christmas finds one loth to leave one's usual
haunts. One is on one's way to one's club to dine with Postumus
and dear old "Wigsby" Pendennis, quietly at one's consecrated
table near the fireplace. As one is crossing St. James's Street
an ear-piercing grunt causes one to reel back just in time to
be not run over by a motor-car. Inside is a woman who scowls
down at one through the window—"Serve you right if we'd
gone over you." Yes, I often have these awakenings to
fact—or rather these provisions of what life might be if
I survived into the twentieth century. Alas!

I have mentioned that woman in the motor-car because she is
germane to my theme. She typifies the vices of the modern
Christmas. For her, by the absurd accident of her wealth, there
is no distinction between people who have not motor-cars and
people who might as well be run over. But I wrong her. If we
others were all run over, there would be no one before whom she
could flaunt her loathsome air of superiority. And what would
she do then, poor thing? I doubt she would die of
boredom—painfully, one hopes. In the same way, if the
shop-keepers in Bond Street knew there was no one who could not
afford to buy the things in their windows, there would be an
end to the display that makes those windows intolerable (to you
and me) during the month of December. I had often suspected
that the things there were not meant to be bought by people who
could buy them, but merely to irritate the rest. This afternoon
I was sure of it. Not in one window anything a sane person
would give to any one not an idiot, but everywhere a general
glossy grin out at people who are not plutocrats. This sort of
thing lashes me to ungovernable fury. The lion is roused, and I
recognise in myself a born leader of men. Be so good as to
smash those windows for me.

One does not like to think that Christmas has been snapped
up, docked of its old-world kindliness, and pressed into the
service of an odious ostentation. But so it has. Alas! The
thought of Father Christmas trudging through the snow to the
homes of gentle and simple alike (forgive that stupid, snobbish
phrase) was agreeable. But Father Christmas in red plush
breeches, lounging on the doorstep of Sir Gorgius
Midas—one averts one's eyes.

I have—now I come to think of it—another
objection to the modern Christmas. It would be affectation to
pretend not to know that there are many Jews living in England,
and in London especially. I have always had a deep respect for
that race, their distinction in intellect and in character.
Being not one of them, I may in their behalf put a point which
themselves would be the last to suggest. I hope they will
acquit me of impertinence in doing this. You, in your turn,
must acquit me of sentimentalism. The Jews are a minority, and
as such must take their chances. But may not a majority refrain
from pressing its rights to the utmost? It is well that we
should celebrate Christmas heartily, and all that. But we could
do so without an emphasis that seems to me, in the
circumstances, 'tother side good taste. "Good taste" is a
hateful phrase. But it escaped me in the heat of the moment.
Alas!

THE FEAST

By

J*S*PH C*NR*D

The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing
between the forest and the river. Silence, the silence
murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut
that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the
cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at
the hut's mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along the polished
surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were
reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are
illusions.

The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of
agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty
silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper
by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that,
irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed
unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in
creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous,
frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush
herbage went through the farce of growth—that farce old
and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.

Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and
pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory
like everything else, only more so. Flying squadrons of
mosquitoes inside its meshes flickered and darted over him,
working hard, but keeping silence so as not to excite him from
sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him against cohorts of
purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another in thousands.
The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such warning as
it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over the
horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back
into their camps.

The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his
eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged
man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he
plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton
cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not
been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful
servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own
interests. He regarded himself, passing his hands over his
skin.

"Hi! Mahamo!" he shouted. "I've been eaten up."

The islander, with one sinuous motion, sprang from the
ground, through the mouth of the hut. Then, after a glance, he
threw high his hands in thanks to such good and evil spirits as
had charge of his concerns. In a tone half of reproach, half of
apology, he murmured—

"You white men sometimes say strange things that deceive the
heart."

"Reach me that ammonia bottle, d'you hear?" answered the
white man. "This is a pretty place you've brought me to!" He
took a draught. "Christmas Day, too! Of all the ——
But I suppose it seems all right to you, you funny blackamoor,
to be here on Christmas Day?"

"We are here on the day appointed, Mr. Williams. It is a
feast-day of your people?"

Mr. Williams had lain back, with closed eyes, on his mat.
Nostalgia was doing duty to him for imagination. He was wafted
to a bedroom in Marylebone, where in honour of the Day he lay
late dozing, with great contentment; outside, a slush of snow
in the street, the sound of church-bells; from below a savour
of especial cookery. "Yes," he said, "it's a feast-day of my
people."

"Of mine also," said the islander humbly.

"Is it though? But they'll do business first?"

"They must first do that."

"And they'll bring their ivory with them?"

"Every man will bring ivory," answered the islander, with a
smile gleaming and wide.

"How soon'll they be here?"

"Has not the sun risen? They are on their way."

"Well, I hope they'll hurry. The sooner we're off this
cursed island of yours the better. Take all those things out,"
Mr. Williams added, pointing to the merchandise, "and arrange
them—neatly, mind you!"

In certain circumstances it is right that a man be humoured
in trifles. Mahamo, having borne out the merchandise, arranged
it very neatly.

While Mr. Williams made his toilet, the sun and the forest,
careless of the doings of white and black men alike, waged
their warfare implacable and daily. The forest from its inmost
depths sent forth perpetually its legions of shadows that fell
dead in the instant of exposure to the enemy whose rays heroic
and absurd its outposts annihilated. There came from those
inilluminable depths the equable rumour of myriads of winged
things and crawling things newly roused to the task of killing
and being killed. Thence detached itself, little by little, an
insidious sound of a drum beaten. This sound drew more
near.

Mr. Williams, issuing from the hut, heard it, and stood
gaping towards it.

"Is that them?" he asked.

"That is they," the islander murmured, moving away towards
the edge of the forest.

Sounds of chanting were a now audible accompaniment to the
drum.

"What's that they're singing?" asked Mr. Williams.

"They sing of their business," said Mahamo.

"Oh!" Mr. Williams was slightly shocked. "I'd have thought
they'd be singing of their feast."

"It is of their feast they sing."

It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative.
But a few years of life in climates alien and intemperate had
disordered his nerves. There was that in the rhythms of the
hymn which made bristle his flesh.

Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased,
leaving a legacy of silence more sinister than themselves. And
now the black spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of
white that were the eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo's
brethren.

"It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang," said
Mahamo.

"Look here," cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to
be trifled with. "Look here, if you've—"

He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young
sapling sprung up from the ground within a yard of him—a
young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel. Then a
thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and another spear came
impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.

As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly
arranged at his orders, and there flashed through him, even in
the thick of the spears, the thought that he would be a grave
loss to his employers. This—for Mr. Williams was, not
less than the goods, of a kind easily replaced—was an
illusion. It was the last of Mr. Williams
illusions.

A RECOLLECTION

By

EDM*ND G*SSE

WALLER.

One out of many Christmas Days abides with peculiar
vividness in my memory. In setting down, however clumsily, some
slight record of it, I feel that I shall be discharging a duty
not only to the two disparately illustrious men who made it so
very memorable, but also to all young students of English and
Scandinavian literature. My use of the first person singular,
delightful though that pronoun is in the works of the truly
gifted, jars unspeakably on me; but reasons of space baulk my
sober desire to call myself merely the present writer, or the
infatuated go-between, or the cowed and imponderable young
person who was in attendance.

In the third week of December, 1878, taking the opportunity
of a brief and undeserved vacation, I went to Venice. On the
morning after my arrival, in answer to a most kind and cordial
summons, I presented myself at the Palazzo Rezzonico. Intense
as was the impression he always made even in London, I think
that those of us who met Robert Browning only in the stress and
roar of that metropolis can hardly have gauged the fullness of
his potentialities for impressing. Venice, "so weak, so quiet,"
as Mr. Ruskin had called her, was indeed the ideal setting for
one to whom neither of those epithets could by any possibility
have been deemed applicable. The steamboats that now wake the
echoes of the canals had not yet been imported; but the
vitality of the imported poet was in some measure a preparation
for them. It did not, however, find me quite prepared for
itself, and I am afraid that some minutes must have elapsed
before I could, as it were, find my feet in the torrent of his
geniality and high spirits, and give him news of his friends in
London.

He was at that time engaged in revising the proof-sheets of
"Dramatic Idylls," and after luncheon, to which he very kindly
bade me remain, he read aloud certain selected passages. The
yellow haze of a wintry Venetian sunshine poured in through the
vast windows of his salone, making an aureole around his
silvered head. I would give much to live that hour over again.
But it was vouchsafed in days before the Browning Society came
and made everything so simple for us all. I am afraid that
after a few minutes I sat enraptured by the sound rather than
by the sense of the lines. I find, in the notes I made of the
occasion, that I figured myself as plunging through some
enchanted thicket on the back of an inspired bull.

That evening, as I was strolling in Piazza San Marco, my
thoughts of Browning were all of a sudden scattered by the
vision of a small, thick-set man seated at one of the tables in
the Café Florian. This was—and my heart leapt like a
young trout when I saw that it could be none other
than—Henrik Ibsen. Whether joy or fear was the
predominant emotion in me, I should be hard put to it to say.
It had been my privilege to correspond extensively with the
great Scandinavian, and to be frequently received by him, some
years earlier than the date of which I write, in Rome. In that
city haunted by the shades of so many Emperors and Popes I had
felt comparatively at ease even in Ibsen's presence. But seated
here in the homelier decay of Venice, closely buttoned in his
black surcoat and crowned with his uncompromising top-hat, with
the lights of the Piazza flashing back wanly from his
gold-rimmed spectacles, and his lips tight-shut like some steel
trap into which our poor humanity had just fallen, he seemed to
constitute a menace under which the boldest might well quail.
Nevertheless, I took my courage in both hands, and laid it as a
kind of votive offering on the little table before him.

My reward was in the surprising amiability that he then and
afterwards displayed. My travelling had indeed been doubly
blessed, for, whilst my subsequent afternoons were spent in
Browning's presence, my evenings fell with regularity into the
charge of Ibsen. One of these evenings is for me "prouder, more
laurel'd than the rest" as having been the occasion when he
read to me the MS. of a play which he had just completed. He
was staying at the Hôtel Danieli, an edifice famous for having
been, rather more than forty years previously, the socket in
which the flame of an historic grande passion had
finally sunk and guttered out with no inconsiderable
accompaniment of smoke and odour. It was there, in an upper
room, that I now made acquaintance with a couple very different
from George Sand and Alfred de Musset, though destined to
become hardly less famous than they. I refer to Torvald and
Nora Helmer. My host read to me with the utmost vivacity,
standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in
the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator
instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.

During those days I felt very much as might a minnow
swimming to and fro between Leviathan on the one hand and
Behemoth on the other—a minnow tremulously pleased, but
ever wistful for some means of bringing his two enormous
acquaintances together. On the afternoon of December 24th I
confided to Browning my aspiration. He had never heard of this
brother poet and dramatist, whose fame indeed was at that time
still mainly Boreal; but he cried out with the greatest
heartiness, "Capital! Bring him round with you at one o'clock
to-morrow for turkey and plum-pudding!"

I betook myself straight to the Hôtel Danieli, hoping
against hope that Ibsen's sole answer would not be a
comminatory grunt and an instant rupture of all future
relations with myself. At first he was indeed resolute not to
go. He had never heard of this Herr Browning. (It was one of
the strengths of his strange, crustacean genius that he never
had heard of anybody.) I took it on myself to say that Herr
Browning would send his private gondola, propelled by his two
gondoliers, to conduct Herr Ibsen to the scene of the
festivity. I think it was this prospect that made him gradually
unbend, for he had already acquired that taste for pomp and
circumstance which was so notable a characteristic of his later
years. I hastened back to the Palazzo Rezzonico before he could
change his mind. I need hardly say that Browning instantly
consented to send the gondola. So large and lovable was his
nature that, had he owned a thousand of those conveyances, he
would not have hesitated to send out the whole fleet in honour
of any friend of any friend of his.

Next day, as I followed Ibsen down the Danielian water-steps
into the expectant gondola, my emotion was such that I was
tempted to snatch from him his neatly-furled umbrella and
spread it out over his head, like the umbrella beneath which
the Doges of days gone by had made their appearances in public.
It was perhaps a pity that I repressed this impulse. Ibsen
seemed to be already regretting that he had unbent. I could not
help thinking, as we floated along the Riva Schiavoni, that he
looked like some particularly ruthless member of the Council of
Ten. I did, however, try faintly to attune him in some sort to
the spirit of our host and of the day of the year. I adumbrated
Browning's outlook on life, translating into Norwegian, I well
remember, the words "God's in His heaven, all's right with the
world." In fact I cannot charge myself with not having done
what I could. I can only lament that it was not enough.

When we marched into the salone, Browning was seated
at the piano, playing (I think) a Toccata of Galuppi's. On
seeing us, he brought his hands down with a great crash on the
keyboard, seemed to reach us in one astonishing bound across
the marble floor, and clapped Ibsen loudly on either shoulder,
wishing him "the Merriest of Merry Christmases."

Ibsen, under this sudden impact, stood firm as a rock, and
it flitted through my brain that here at last was solved the
old problem of what would happen if an irresistible force met
an immoveable mass. But it was obvious that the rock was not
rejoicing in the moment of victory. I was tartly asked whether
I had not explained to Herr Browning that his guest did not
understand English. I hastily rectified my omission, and
thenceforth our host spoke in Italian. Ibsen, though he
understood that language fairly well, was averse to speaking
it. Such remarks as he made in the course of the meal to which
we presently sat down were made in Norwegian and translated by
myself.

Browning, while he was carving the turkey, asked Ibsen
whether he had visited any of the Venetian theatres. Ibsen's
reply was that he never visited theatres. Browning laughed his
great laugh, and cried "That's right! We poets who write plays
must give the theatres as wide a berth as possible. We aren't
wanted there!" "How so?" asked Ibsen. Browning looked a little
puzzled, and I had to explain that in northern Europe Herr
Ibsen's plays were frequently performed. At this I seemed to
see on Browning's face a slight shadow—so swift and
transient a shadow as might be cast by a swallow flying across
a sunlit garden. An instant, and it was gone. I was glad,
however, to be able to soften my statement by adding that Herr
Ibsen had in his recent plays abandoned the use of verse.

The trouble was that in Browning's company he seemed
practically to have abandoned the use of prose too. When,
moreover, he did speak, it was always in a sense contrary to
that of our host. The Risorgimento was a theme always very near
to the great heart of Browning, and on this occasion he hymned
it with more than his usual animation and resource (if indeed
that were possible). He descanted especially on the vast
increase that had accrued to the sum of human happiness in
Italy since the success of that remarkable movement. When Ibsen
rapped out the conviction that what Italy needed was to be
invaded and conquered once and for all by Austria, I feared
that an explosion was inevitable. But hardly had my translation
of the inauspicious sentiment been uttered when the
plum-pudding was borne into the room, flaming on its dish. I
clapped my hands wildly at sight of it, in the English fashion,
and was intensely relieved when the yet more resonant applause
of Robert Browning followed mine. Disaster had been averted by
a crowning mercy. But I am afraid that Ibsen thought us both
quite mad.

The next topic that was started, harmless though it seemed
at first, was fraught with yet graver peril. The world of
scholarship was at that time agitated by the recent discovery
of what might or might not prove to be a fragment of Sappho.
Browning proclaimed his unshakeable belief in the authenticity
of these verses. To my surprise, Ibsen, whom I had been
unprepared to regard as a classical scholar, said positively
that they had not been written by Sappho. Browning challenged
him to give a reason. A literal translation of the reply would
have been "Because no woman ever was capable of writing a
fragment of good poetry." Imagination reels at the effect this
would have had on the recipient of "Sonnets from the
Portuguese." The agonised interpreter, throwing honour to the
winds, babbled some wholly fallacious version of the words.
Again the situation had been saved; but it was of the kind that
does not even in furthest retrospect lose its power to freeze
the heart and constrict the diaphragm.

I was fain to thank heaven when, immediately after the
termination of the meal, Ibsen rose, bowed to his host, and
bade me express his thanks for the entertainment. Out on the
Grand Canal, in the gondola which had again been placed at our
disposal, his passion for "documents" that might bear on his
work was quickly manifested. He asked me whether Herr Browning
had ever married. Receiving an emphatically affirmative reply,
he inquired whether Fru Browning had been happy. Loth though I
was to cast a blight on his interest in the matter, I conveyed
to him with all possible directness the impression that
Elizabeth Barrett had assuredly been one of those wives who do
not dance tarantellas nor slam front-doors. He did not, to the
best of my recollection, make further mention of Browning,
either then or afterwards. Browning himself, however, thanked
me warmly, next day, for having introduced my friend to him. "A
capital fellow!" he exclaimed, and then, for a moment, seemed
as though he were about to qualify this estimate, but ended by
merely repeating "A capital fellow!"

Ibsen remained in Venice some weeks after my return to
London. He was, it may be conjectured, bent on a specially
close study of the Bride of the Adriatic because her marriage
had been not altogether a happy one. But there appears to be no
evidence whatsoever that he went again, either of his own
accord or by invitation, to the Palazzo
Rezzonico.

OF CHRISTMAS

By

H*L**RE B*LL*C

There was a man came to an Inn by night, and after he had
called three times they should open him the door—though
why three times, and not three times three, nor thirty times
thirty, which is the number of the little stone devils that
make mows at St. Aloesius of Ledera over against the marshes
Gué-la-Nuce to this day, nor three hundred times three hundred
(which is a bestial number), nor three thousand times
three-and-thirty, upon my soul I know not, and nor do
you—when, then, this jolly fellow had three times cried
out, shouted, yelled, holloa'd, loudly besought, caterwauled,
brayed, sung out, and roared, he did by the same token set
himself to beat, hammer, bang, pummel, and knock at the door.
Now the door was Oak. It had been grown in the forest of
Boulevoise, hewn in Barre-le-Neuf, seasoned in South Hoxton,
hinged nowhere in particular, and panelled—and that most
abominably well—in Arque, where the peasants sell their
souls for skill in such handicraft. But our man knew nothing of
all this, which, had he known it, would have mattered little
enough to him, for a reason which I propose to tell in the next
sentence. The door was opened. As to the reasons why it was not
opened sooner, these are most tediously set forth in Professor
Sir T.K. Slibby's "Half-Hours With Historic Doors," as also in
a fragment at one time attributed to Oleaginus Silo but now
proven a forgery by Miss Evans. Enough for our purpose, merry
reader of mine, that the door was opened.

The man, as men will, went in. And there, for God's sake and
by the grace of Mary Mother, let us leave him; for the truth of
it is that his strength was all in his lungs, and himself a
poor, weak, clout-faced, wizen-bellied, pin-shanked bloke
anyway, who at Trinity Hall had spent the most of his time in
reading Hume (that was Satan's lackey) and after taking his
degree did a little in the way of Imperial Finance. Of him it
was that Lord Abraham Hart, that far-seeing statesman, said,
"This young man has the root of the matter in him." I quote the
epigram rather for its perfect form than for its truth. For
once, Lord Abraham was deceived. But it must be remembered that
he was at this time being plagued almost out of his wits by the
vile (though cleverly engineered) agitation for the compulsory
winding-up of the Rondoosdop Development Company. Afterwards,
in Wormwood Scrubbs, his Lordship admitted that his estimate of
his young friend had perhaps been pitched too high. In Dartmoor
he has since revoked it altogether, with that manliness for
which the Empire so loved him when he was at large.

Now the young man's name was Dimby—"Trot"
Dimby—and his mother had been a Clupton, so
that—but had I not already dismissed him? Indeed I only
mentioned him because it seemed that his going to that Inn
might put me on track of that One Great Ultimate and Final True
Thing I am purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet
what that Thing is. Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast
you must hunt as you may in the forests that are round about
the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby curse, gibbet, and
denounce in execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam the
man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way—as, lying
low, nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling
noiselessly till he shall come near to his quarry and then
taking careful aim. Here's to him who hunts Truth in the honest
fashion of men, which is, going blindly at it, following his
first scent (if such there be) or (if none) none, scrambling
over boulders, fording torrents, winding his horn, plunging
into thickets, skipping, firing off his gun in the air
continually, and then ramming in some more ammunition anyhow,
with a laugh and a curse if the charge explode in his own jolly
face. The chances are he will bring home in his bag nothing but
a field-mouse he trod on by accident. Not the less his is the
true sport and the essential stuff of holiness.

As touching Christmas—but there is nothing like verse
to clear the mind, heat the blood, and make very humble the
heart. Rouse thee, Muse!

That's what I shall sing (please God) at dawn to-morrow,
standing on the high, green barrow at Storrington, where the
bones of Athelstan's men are. Yea,

This too I shall sing, and other songs that are yet to
write. In Pagham I shall sing them again, and again in Little
Dewstead. In Hornside I shall rewrite them, and at the Scythe
and Turtle in Liphook (if I have patience) annotate them. At
Selsey they will be very damnably in the way, and I don't at
all know what I shall do with them at Selsey.

Such then, as I see it, is the whole pith, mystery, outer
form, common acceptation, purpose, usage usual, meaning and
inner meaning, beauty intrinsic and extrinsic, and right
character of Christmas Feast. Habent urbs atque orbis
revelationem. Pray for my soul.

A STRAIGHT TALK

By

G**RGE B*RN*RD SH*W

(Preface to "Snt George. A Christmas Play")

When a public man lays his hand on his heart and declares
that his conduct needs no apology, the audience hastens to put
up its umbrellas against the particularly severe downpour of
apologies in store for it. I wont give the customary warning.
My conduct shrieks aloud for apology, and you are in for a
thorough drenching.

Flatly, I stole this play. The one valid excuse for the
theft would be mental starvation. That excuse I shant plead. I
could have made a dozen better plays than this out of my own
head. You don't suppose Shakespeare was so vacant in the upper
storey that there was nothing for it but to rummage through
cinquecento romances, Townley Mysteries, and suchlike
insanitary rubbishheaps, in order that he might fish out enough
scraps for his artistic fangs to fasten on. Depend on it, there
were plenty of decent original notions seething behind yon
marble brow. Why didn't our William use them? He was too lazy.
And so am I. It is easier to give a new twist to somebody
else's story that you take readymade than to perform that
highly-specialised form of skilled labor which consists in
giving artistic coherence to a story that you have conceived
roughly for yourself. A literary gentleman once hoisted a
theory that there are only thirty-six possible stories in the
world. This—I say it with no deference at all—is
bosh. There are as many possible stories in the world as there
are microbes in the well-lined shelves of a literary
gentleman's "den." On the other hand, it is perfectly true that
only a baker's dozen of these have got themselves told. The
reason lies in that bland, unalterable resolve to shirk honest
work, by which you recognise the artist as surely as you
recognise the leopard by his spots. In so far as I am an
artist, I am a loafer. And if you expect me, in that line, to
do anything but loaf, you will get the shock your romantic
folly deserves. The only difference between me and my rivals
past and present is that I have the decency to be ashamed of
myself. So that if you are not too bemused and bedevilled by my
"brilliancy" to kick me downstairs, you may rely on me to
cheerfully lend a foot in the operation. But, while I have my
share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going to
talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better
Man of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would
thieve again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good
as to listen to the evidence on the present charge.

In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I
had to go down to Dorsetshire. In those days the more
enterprising farm-laborers used still to annually dress
themselves up in order to tickle the gentry into disbursing the
money needed to supplement a local-minimum wage. They called
themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed a play entitled
Snt George. As my education had been of the typical Irish kind,
and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely the
ideas that once in Tara's Hall were regarded as dangerous
novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being
suddenly bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of
the time I had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a
matter of five hundred years old, it would have the same effect
to-day on the average London playgoer if it was produced in a
west end theatre.) The plot was simple. It is set forth in
Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native"; but, as the people who
read my books have no energy left over to cope with other
authors, I must supply an outline of it myself.

Entered, first of all, the English Knight, announcing his
determination to fight and vanquish the Turkish Knight, a
vastly superior swordsman, who promptly made mincemeat of him.
After the Saracen had celebrated his victory in verse, and
proclaimed himself the world's champion, entered Snt George,
who, after some preliminary patriotic flourishes, promptly made
mincemeat of the Saracen—to the blank amazement of an
audience which included several retired army officers. Snt
George, however, saved his face by the usual expedient of the
victorious British general, attributing to Providence a result
which by no polite stretch of casuistry could have been traced
to the operations of his own brain. But here the dramatist was
confronted by another difficulty: there being no curtain to
ring down, how were the two corpses to be got gracefully rid
of? Entered therefore the Physician, and brought them both to
life. (Any one objecting to this scene on the score of romantic
improbability is hereby referred to the Royal College of
Physicians, or to the directors of any accredited medical
journal, who will hail with delight this opportunity of proving
once and for all that re-vitalisation is the child's-play of
the Faculty.)

Such then is the play that I have stolen. For all the many
pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic
inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and
the like—you must bless the original author: of these
things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing
but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed
in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that
makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play a
masterpiece.

Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some one
else) than to perform my task in that
God-rest-you-merry-gentlemen-may-nothing-you-dismay spirit
which so grossly flatters the sensibilities of the average
citizen by its assumption that he is sharp enough to be
dismayed by what stares him in the face. Charles Dickens had
lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses
around him; but his spasmodic efforts to expose these brought
him into contact with realities so agonising to his highstrung
literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of
unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of
the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in
the social machine which had been working with tolerable
smoothness under the prosaic guidance of Henry 8. The time was
out of joint; and the Swan, recognising that he was the last
person to ever set it right, consoled himself by offering the
world a soothing doctrine of despair. Not for me, thank you,
that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly to fuddle myself in
the shop of "W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as to stimulate myself
with the juicy joints of "C. Dickens, Family Butcher." Of these
and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage consists in
weaving round the shop-door a barbed-wire entanglement of
dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the
customers.

In this devilish function I have, as you know, acquired by
practice a tremendous technical skill; and but for the more or
less innocent pride I take in showing off my accomplishment to
all and sundry, I doubt whether even my iron nerves would be
proof against the horrors that have impelled me to thus perfect
myself. In my nonage I believed humanity could be reformed if
only it were intelligently preached at for a sufficiently long
period. This first fine careless rapture I could no more
recapture, at my age, than I could recapture hoopingcough or
nettlerash. One by one, I have flung all political nostra
overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific
breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I
believe in the future; but this only makes the
present—which I foresee as going strong for a couple of
million of years or so—all the more excruciating by
contrast.

For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my
indictments of the present from a purely political standpoint,
the old play of Snt George occurred to me as having exactly the
framework I needed. In the person of the Turkish Knight I could
embody that howling chaos which does duty among us for a
body-politic. The English Knight would accordingly be the
Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the
electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign
politics the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in
home politics the spirited attitudinisings of a Garibaldi or
Cavor, are foredoomed to the failure which its inherent
oldmaidishness must always win for the Liberal Party in all
undertakings whatsoever. Snt George is, of course, myself. But
here my very aptitude in controversy tripped me up as
playwright. Owing to my nack of going straight to the root of
the matter in hand and substituting, before you can say Jack
Robinson, a truth for every fallacy and a natural law for every
convention, the scene of Snt George (Bernard Shaw)'s victory
over the Turkish Knight came out too short for theatrical
purposes. I calculated that the play as it stood would not
occupy more than five hours in performance. I therefore
departed from the original scheme so far as to provide the
Turkish Knight with three attendant monsters, severally named
the Good, the Beyootiful, and the Ter-rew, and representing in
themselves the current forms of Religion, Art, and Science.
These three Snt George successively challenges, tackles, and
flattens out—the first as lunacy, the second as harlotry,
the third as witchcraft. But even so the play would not be long
enough had I not padded a good deal of buffoonery into the
scene where the five corpses are brought back to life.

The restorative Physician symbolises that irresistible force
of human stupidity by which the rottenest and basest
institutions are enabled to thrive in the teeth of the logic
that has demolished them. Thus, for the author, the close of
the play is essentially tragic. But what is death to him is fun
to you, and my buffooneries wont offend any of you.
Bah!

FOND HEARTS ASKEW

By

M**R*CE H*WL*TT

TO

WILLIAM ROBERTSON NICOLL

SAGE AND REVEREND

AND A TRUE KNIGHT

THIS ROMAUNT

OF DAYS EDVARDIAN

PROLOGUE.

Too strong a wine, belike, for some stomachs, for there's
honey in it, and a dibbet of gore, with other condiments. Yet
Mistress Clio (with whom, some say, Mistress Thalia, that sweet
hoyden) brewed it: she, not I, who do but hand the cup round by
her warrant and good favour. Her guests, not mine, you shall
take it or leave it—spill it untasted or quaff a
bellyful. Of a hospitable temper, she whose page I am; but a
great lady, over self-sure to be dudgeoned by wry faces in the
refectory. As for the little sister (if she did have finger in
the concoction)—no fear of offence there! I dare vow, who
know somewhat the fashion of her, she will but trill a pretty
titter or so at your qualms.

BENEDICTUS BENEDICAT.

I cry you mercy for a lacuna at the outset. I know not what
had knitted and blackened the brows of certain two speeding
eastward through London, enhansomed, on the night of the feast
of St. Box: alter, Geoffrey Dizzard, called "The
Honourable," lieu-tenant in the Guards of Edward the
Peace Getter; altera, the Lady Angelica Plantagenet, to
him affianced. Devil take the cause of the bicker: enough that
they were at sulks. Here's for a sight of the girl!

Johannes Sargent, that swift giant from the New World, had
already flung her on canvas, with a brace of sisters. She
outstands there, a virgin poplar-tall; hair like ravelled flax
and coiffed in the fashion of the period; neck like a
giraffe's; lips shaped for kissing rather than smiling; eyes
like a giraffe's again; breasts like a boy's, and something of
a dressed-up boy in the total aspect of her. She has arms a
trifle long even for such height as hers; fingers very long,
too, with red-pink nails trimmed to a point. She looks out
slantwise, conscious of her beauty, and perhaps of certain
other things. Fire under that ice, I conjecture—red
corpuscles rampant behind that meek white mask of hers.
"Forsitan in hoc anno pulcherrima debutantium" is the
verdict of a contemporary journal. For "forsitan" read
"certe." No slur, that, on the rest of the bevy.

Very much as Johannes had seen her did she appear now to the
cits, as the cabriolet swung past them. Paramount there, she
was still more paramount here. Yet this Geoffrey was not
ill-looking. In the secret journal of Mary Jane, serving-wench
in the palace of Geoffrey's father (who gat his barony by beer)
note is made of his "lovely blue eyes; complexion like a blush
rose; hands like a girl's; lips like a girl's again; yellow
curls close cropped; and for moustachio (so young is he yet)
such a shadow as amber might cast on water."

Here, had I my will, I would limn you Mary Jane herself,
that parched nymph. Time urges, though. The cabrioleteer
thrashes his horse (me with it) to a canter, and plunges into
Soho. Some wagon athwart the path gives pause. Angelica,
looking about her, bites lip. For this is the street of
Wardour, wherein (say all the chronicles most absolutely) she
and Geoffrey had first met and plit their troth.

"Methinks," cries she, loud and clear to the wagoner, and
pointing finger at Geoffrey, "the Devil must be between your
shafts, to make a mock of me in this conjunction, the which is
truly of his own doing."

"Sweet madam," says Geoffrey (who was also called "The
Ready"), "shall I help harness you at his side? Though, for my
part, I doubt 'twere supererogant, in that he buckled you to
his service or ever the priest dipped you."

A bitter jest, this; and the thought of it still tingled on
the girl's cheek and clawed her heart when Geoffrey handed her
down at the portico of Drury Lane Theatre. A new pantomime was
afoot. Geoffrey's father (that bluff red baron) had chartered a
box, was already there with his lady and others.

Lily among peonies, Angelica sat brooding, her eyes fastened
on the stage, Geoffrey behind her chair, brooding by the same
token. Presto, he saw a flood of pink rush up her shoulders to
her ears. The "principal boy" had just skipped on to the stage.
No boy at all (God be witness), but one Mistress Tina
Vandeleur, very apt in masquerado, and seeming true boy enough
to the guileless. Stout of leg, light-footed, with a tricksy
plume to his cap, and the swagger of one who would beard the
Saints for a wager, this Aladdin was just such a galliard as
Angelica had often fondled in her dreams. He lept straight into
the closet of her heart, and "Deus!" she cried, "maugre my
maidenhood, I will follow those pretty heels round the
earth!"

Cried Geoffrey "Yea! and will not I presently string his ham
to save your panting?"

"Tacete!" cried the groundlings.

A moment after, Geoffrey forgot his spleen. Cupid had noosed
him—bound him tight to the Widow Twankey. This was a
woman most unlike to Angelica: poplar-tall, I grant you; but
elm-wide into the bargain; deep-voiced, robustious, and puffed
bravely out with hot vital essences. Seemed so to Geoffrey, at
least, who had no smattering of theatres and knew not his
cynosure to be none other than Master Willie Joffers, prime
buffo of the day. Like Angelica, he had had fond visions; and
lo here, the very lady of them!

Says he to Angelica, "I am heartset on this widow."

"By so much the better!" she laughs. "I to my peacock, you
to your peahen, with a Godspeed from each to other."

How to snare the birds? A pretty problem: the fowling was
like to be delicate. So hale a strutter as Aladdin could not
lack for bonamies. "Will he deign me?" wondered meek Angelica.
"This widow," thought Geoffrey, "is belike no widow at all, but
a modest wife with a yea for no man but her lord." Head to head
they took counsel, cudgelled their wits for some proper
vantage. Of a sudden, Geoffrey clapped hand to thigh. Student
of Boccaccio, Heveletius, and other sages, he had the clue in
his palm. A whisper from him, a nod from Angelica, and the
twain withdrew from the box into the corridor without.

There, back to back, they disrobed swiftly, each tossing to
other every garment as it was doffed. Then a flurried toilet,
and a difficult, for the man especially; but hotness of desire
breeds dexterity. When they turned and faced each other,
Angelica was such a boy as Aladdin would not spurn as page,
Geoffrey such a girl as the widow might well covet as
body-maid.

Out they hied under the stars, and sought way to the postern
whereby the mummers would come when their work were done.
Thereat they stationed themselves in shadow. A bitter night,
with a lather of snow on the cobbles; but they were heedless of
that: love and their dancing hearts warmed them.

They waited long. Strings of muffled figures began to file
out, but never an one like to Aladdin or the Widow. Midnight
tolled. Had these two had wind of the ambuscado and crept out
by another door? Nay, patience!

At last! A figure showed in the doorway—a figure
cloaked womanly, but topped with face of Aladdin. Trousered
Angelica, with a cry, darted forth from the shadow. To Mistress
Vandeleur's eyes she was as truly man as was Mistress Vandeleur
to hers. Thus confronted, Mistress Vandeleur shrank back,
blushing hot.

"Nay!" laughs Angelica, clipping her by the wrists. "Cold
boy, you shall not so easily slip me. A pretty girl you make,
Aladdin; but love pierces such disguise as a rapier might
pierce lard."

"Madman! Unhandle me!" screams the actress.

"No madman I, as well you know," answers Angelica, "but a
maid whom spurned love may yet madden. Kiss me on the
lips!"

While they struggle, another figure fills the postern, and
in an instant Angelica is torn aside by Master Willie Joffers
(well versed, for all his mumming, in matters of chivalry).
"Kisses for such coward lips?" cries he. "Nay, but a swinge to
silence them!" and would have struck trousered Angelica full on
the mouth. But décolleté Geoffrey Dizzard, crying at him "Sweet
termagant, think not to baffle me by these airs of manhood!"
had sprung in the way and on his own nose received the
blow.

He staggered and, spurting blood, fell. Up go the buffo's
hands, and "Now may the Saints whip me," cries he, "for a
tapster of girl's blood!" and fled into the night, howling like
a dog. Mistress Vandeleur had fled already. Down on her knees
goes Angelica, to stanch Geoffrey's flux.

Thus far, straight history. Apocrypha, all the rest: you
shall pick your own sequel. As for instance, some say Geoffrey
bled to the death, whereby stepped Master Joffers to the
scaffold, and Angelica (the Vandeleur too, like as not) to a
nunnery. Others have it he lived, thanks to nurse Angelica,
who, thereon wed, suckled him twin Dizzards in due season.
Joffers, they say, had wife already, else would have wed the
Vandeleur, for sake of symmetry.

DICKENS

By

G**RGE M**RE

I had often wondered why when people talked to me of
Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of Turgéneff. It
seemed to me strange that I should think of Turgéneff instead
of thinking of Tintoretto; for at first sight nothing can be
more far apart than the Slav mind and the Flemish. But one
morning, some years ago, while I was musing by my fireplace in
Victoria Street, Dolmetsch came to see me. He had a soiled roll
of music under his left arm. I said, "How are you?" He said, "I
am well. And you?" I said, "I, too, am well. What is that, my
dear Dolmetsch, that you carry under your left arm?" He
answered, "It is a Mass by Palestrina." "Will you read me the
score?" I asked. I was afraid he would say no. But Dolmetsch is
not one of those men who say no, and he read me the score. He
did not read very well, but I had never heard it before, so
when he finished I begged of him he would read it to me again.
He said, "Very well, M**re, I will read it to you again." I
remember his exact words, because they seemed to me at the time
to be the sort of thing that only Dolmetsch could have said. It
was a foggy morning in Victoria Street, and while Dolmetsch
read again the first few bars, I thought how Renoir would have
loved to paint in such an atmosphere the tops of the plane
trees that flaccidly show above the wall of Buckingham
Palace.... Why had I never been invited to Buckingham Palace? I
did not want to go there, but it would have been nice to have
been asked.... How brave gaillard was Renoir, and how
well he painted from that subfusc palette!...

My roving thoughts were caught back to the divine score
which Arnold Dolmetsch was reading to me. How well placed they
were, those semibreves! Could anyone but Palestrina have placed
them so nicely? I wondered what girl Palestrina was courting
when he conceived them. She must have been blonde, surely, and
with narrow flanks.... There are moments when one does not
think of girls, are there not, dear reader? And I swear to you
that such a moment came to me while Dolmetsch mumbled the last
two bars of that Mass. The notes were "do, la, sol, do, fa, do,
sol, la," and as he mumbled them I sat upright and stared into
space, for it had become suddenly plain to me why when people
talked of Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of
Turgéneff.

I do not say that this story that I have told to you is a
very good story, and I am afraid that I have not well told it.
Some day, when I have time, I should like to re-write it. But
meantime I let it stand, because without it you could not
receive what is upmost in my thoughts, and which I wish you to
share with me. Without it, what I am yearning to say might seem
to you a hard saying; but now you will understand me.

There never was a writer except Dickens. Perhaps you have
never heard say of him? No matter, till a few days past he was
only a name to me. I remember that when I was a young man in
Paris, I read a praise of him in some journal; but in those
days I was kneeling at other altars, I was scrubbing other
doorsteps.... So has it been ever since; always a false god,
always the wrong doorstep. I am sick of the smell of the
incense I have swung to this and that false god—Zola,
Yeats, et tous ces autres. I am angry to have got
housemaid's knee, because I got it on doorsteps that led to
nowhere. There is but one doorstep worth scrubbing. The
doorstep of Charles Dickens....

Did he write many books? I know not, it does not greatly
matter, he wrote the "Pickwick Papers"; that suffices. I have
read as yet but one chapter, describing a Christmas party in a
country house. Strange that anyone should have essayed to write
about anything but that! Christmas—I see it now—is
the only moment in which men and women are really alive, are
really worth writing about. At other seasons they do not exist
for the purpose of art. I spit on all seasons except
Christmas.... Is he not in all fiction the greatest figure,
this Mr. Wardell, this old "squire" rosy-cheeked, who
entertains this Christmas party at his house? He is more
truthful, he is more significant, than any figure in Balzac. He
is better than all Balzac's figures rolled into one.... I used
to kneel on that doorstep. Balzac wrote many books. But now it
behoves me to ask myself whether he ever wrote a good book. One
knows that he used to write for fifteen hours at a stretch,
gulping down coffee all the while. But it does not follow that
the coffee was good, nor does it follow that what he wrote was
good. The Comédie Humaine is all chicory.... I had wished for
some years to say this, I am glad d'avoir débarrassé ma
poitrine de ça.

To have described divinely a Christmas party is something,
but it is not everything. The disengaging of the erotic motive
is everything, is the only touchstone. If while that is being
done we are soothed into a trance, a nebulous delirium of the
nerves, then we know the novelist to be a supreme novelist. If
we retain consciousness, he is not supreme, and to be less than
supreme in art is to not exist.... Dickens disengages the
erotic motive through two figures, Mr. Winkle, a sportman, and
Miss Arabella, "a young lady with fur-topped boots." They go
skating, he helps her over a stile. Can one not well see her?
She steps over the stile and her shin defines itself through
her balbriggan stocking. She is a knock-kneed girl, and she
looks at Mr. Winkle with that sensual regard that sometimes
comes when the wind is north-west. Yes, it is a north-west wind
that is blowing over this landscape that Hals or Winchoven
might have painted—no, Winchoven would have fumbled it
with rose-madder, but Hals would have done it well. Hals would
have approved—would he not?—the pollard aspens,
these pollard aspens deciduous and wistful, which the rime
makes glistening. That field, how well ploughed it is, and are
they not like petticoats, those clouds low-hanging? Yes, Hals
would have stated them well, but only Manet could have stated
the slope of the thighs of the girl—how does she call
herself?—Arabella—it is a so hard name to
remember—as she steps across the stile. Manet would have
found pleasure in her cheeks also. They are a little chapped
with the north-west wind that makes the pollard aspens to
quiver. How adorable a thing it is, a girl's nose that the
north-west wind renders red! We may tire of it sometimes,
because we sometimes tire of all things, but Winkle does not
know this. Is Arabella his mistress? If she is not, she has
been, or at any rate she will be. How full she is of
temperament, is she not? Her shoulder-blades seem a little
carelessly modelled, but how good they are in intention! How
well placed that smut on her left cheek!

Strange thoughts of her surge up vaguely in me as I watch
her—thoughts that I cannot express in English.... Elle
est plus vieille que les roches entre lesquelles elle s'est
assise; comme le vampire elle a été fréquemment morte, et a
appris les secrets du tombeau; et s'est plongée dans des mers
profondes, et conserve autour d'elle leur jour ruiné; et, comme
Lède, était mère d'Hélène de Troie, et, comme Sainte-Anne, mère
de Maria; et tout cela n'a été pour elle que.... I desist, for
not through French can be expressed the thoughts that surge in
me. French is a stale language. So are all the European
languages, one can say in them nothing fresh.... The stalest of
them all is Erse....

Deep down in my heart a sudden voice whispers me that there
is only one land wherein art may reveal herself once more. Of
what avail to await her anywhere else than in Mexico? Only
there can the apocalypse happen. I will take a ticket for
Mexico, I will buy a Mexican grammar, I will be a Mexican....
On a hillside, or beside some grey pool, gazing out across
those plains poor and arid, I will await the first pale
showings of the new dawn....

EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT¹⁰

AN IMITATION OF MEREDITH

In the heart of insular Cosmos, remote by some scores of
leagues of Hodge-trod arable or pastoral, not more than a
snuff-pinch for gaping tourist nostrils accustomed to
inhalation of prairie winds, but enough for perspective, from
those marginal sands, trident-scraped, we are to fancy, by a
helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs of current
bronze—price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of
Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer
palates—stands Clashthought Park, a house of some
pretension, mentioned at Runnymede, with the spreading
exception of wings given to it in later times by Daedalean
masters not to be baulked of billiards or traps for
Terpsichore, and owned for unbroken generations by a healthy
line of procreant Clashthoughts, to the undoing of collateral
branches eager for the birth of a female. Passengers through
cushioned space, flying top-speed or dallying with obscure
stations not alighted at apparently, have had it pointed out to
them as beheld dimly for a privileged instant before they sink
back behind crackling barrier of instructive paper with a
"Thank you, Sir," or "Madam," as the case may be. Guide-books
praise it. I conceive they shall be studied for a cock-shy of
rainbow epithets slashed in at the target of Landed Gentry,
premonitorily. The tintinnabulation's enough. Periodical
footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, signalled
by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian
caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to
spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of
housekeeper guideship—scramble for a chuck of the
dainties, dog fashion. There is something to be said for the
rope's twist. Wisdom skips.

It is recorded that the goblins of this same Lady Wisdom
were all agog one Christmas morning between the doors of the
house and the village church, which crouches on the outskirt of
the park, with something of a lodge in its look, you might say,
more than of celestial twinkles, even with Christmas hoar-frost
bleaching the grey of it in sunlight, as one sees imaged on
seasonable missives for amity in the trays marked "sixpence and
upwards," here and there, on the counters of barter.

Be sure these goblins made obeisance to Sir Peter
Clashthought, as he passed by, starched beacon of squirearchy,
wife on arm, sons to heel. After him, certain members of the
household—rose-chapped males and females, bearing books
of worship. The pack of goblins glance up the drive with
nudging elbows and whisperings of "Where is daughter Euphemia?
Where Sir Rebus, her affianced?"

Off they scamper for a peep through the windows of the
house. They throng the sill of the library, ears acock and
eyelids twittering admiration of a prospect. Euphemia was in
view of them—essence of her. Sir Rebus was at her side.
Nothing slips the goblins.

"Nymph in the Heavy Dragoons" was Mrs. Cryptic-Sparkler's
famous definition of her. The County took it for final—an
uncut gem with a fleck in the heart of it. Euphemia condoned
the imagery. She had breadth. Heels that spread ample curves
over the ground she stood on, and hands that might floor you
with a clench of them, were hers. Grey eyes looked out lucid
and fearless under swelling temples that were lost in a
ruffling copse of hair. Her nose was virginal, with hints of
the Iron Duke at most angles. Square chin, cleft centrally,
gave her throat the look of a tower with a gun protrudent at
top. She was dressed for church evidently, but seemed no slave
to Time. Her bonnet was pushed well back from her head, and she
was fingering the ribbons. One saw she was a woman. She
inspired deference.

"Forefinger for Shepherd's Crook" was what Mrs.
Cryptic-Sparkler had said of Sir Rebus. It shall stand at
that.

"You have Prayer Book?" he queried.

She nodded. Juno catches the connubial trick.

"Hymns?"

"Ancient and Modern."

"I may share with you?"

"I know by heart. Parrots sing."

"Philomel carols," he bent to her.

"Complaints spoil a festival."

He waved hand to the door. "Lady, your father has
started."

"He knows the adage. Copy-books instil it."

"Inexorable truth in it."

"We may dodge the scythe."

"To be choked with the sands?"

She flashed a smile. "I would not," he said, "that my
Euphemia were late for the Absolution."

She cast eyes to the carpet. He caught them at the
rebound.

"It snows," she murmured, swimming to the window.

"A flake, no more. The season claims it."

"I have thin boots."

"Another pair?"

"My maid buttons. She is at church."

"My fingers?"

"Ten on each."

"Five," he corrected.

"Buttons."

"I beg your pardon."

She saw opportunity. She swam to the bell-rope and grasped
it for a tinkle. The action spread feminine curves to her
lover's eyes. He was a man.

Obsequiousness loomed in the doorway. Its mistress flashed
an order for port—two glasses. Sir Rebus sprang a pair of
eyebrows on her. Suspicion slid down the banisters of his mind,
trailing a blue ribbon. Inebriates were one of his hobbies. For
an instant she was sunset.

"Medicinal," she murmured.

"Forgive me, Madam. A glass, certainly. 'Twill warm us for
worshipping."

The wine appeared, seemed to blink owlishly through the
facets of its decanter, like some hoary captive dragged forth
into light after years of subterraneous
darkness—something querulous in the sudden liberation of
it. Or say that it gleamed benignant from its tray,
steady-borne by the hands of reverence, as one has seen
Infallibility pass with uplifting of jewelled fingers through
genuflexions to the Balcony. Port has this in it: that it
compels obeisance, master of us; as opposed to brother and
sister wines wooing us with a coy flush in the gold of them to
a cursory tope or harlequin leap shimmering up the veins with a
sly wink at us through eyelets. Hussy vintages swim to a
cosset. We go to Port, mark you!

Sir Rebus sipped with an affectionate twirl of thumb at the
glass's stem. He said "One scents the cobwebs."

"Catches in them," Euphemia flung at him.

"I take you. Bacchus laughs in the web."

"Unspun but for Pallas."

"A lady's jealousy."

"Forethought, rather."

"Brewed in the paternal pate. Grant it!"

"For a spring in accoutrements."

Sir Rebus inclined gravely. Port precludes prolongment of
the riposte.

She replenished glasses. Deprecation yielded. "A step," she
said, "and we are in time for the First Lesson."

"This," he agreed, "is a wine."

"There are blasphemies in posture. One should sit to
it."

"Perhaps." He sank to commodious throne of leather indicated
by her finger.

Again she filled for him. "This time, no heel-taps," she was
imperative. "The Litany demands basis."

"True." He drained, not repelling the decanter placed at his
elbow.

"It is a wine," he presently repeated with a rolling tongue
over it.

"Laid down by my great-grandfather. Cloistral."

"Strange," he said, examining the stopper, "no date.
Antediluvian. Sound, though."

He drew out his note-book. "The senses" he wrote,
"are internecine. They shall have learned esprit de corps
before they enslave us." This was one of his happiest
flings to general from particular. "Visual distraction cries
havoc to ultimate delicacy of palate" would but have pinned
us a butterfly best a-hover; nor even so should we have had
truth of why the aphorist, closing note-book and nestling back
of head against that of chair, closed eyes also.

As by some such law as lurks in meteorological toy for our
guidance in climes close-knit with Irony for bewilderment,
making egress of old woman synchronise inevitably with old
man's ingress, or the other way about, the force that closed
the aphorist's eye-lids parted his lips in degree according.
Thus had Euphemia, erect on hearth-rug, a cavern to gaze down
into. Outworks of fortifying ivory cast but denser shadows into
the inexplorable. The solitudes here grew murmurous. To and fro
through secret passages in the recesses leading up deviously to
lesser twin caverns of nose above, the gnomes Morphean went
about their business, whispering at first, but presently bold
to wind horns in unison—Roland-wise, not less.

Euphemia had an ear for it; whim also to construe lord and
master relaxed but reboant and soaring above the verbal to
harmonic truths of abstract or transcendental, to be hummed
subsequently by privileged female audience of one bent on a
hook-or-crook plucking out of pith for salvation.

She caught tablets pendent at her girdle. "How long,"
queried her stilus, "has our sex had humour? Jael
hammered."

She might have hitched speculation further. But Mother
Earth, white-mantled, called to her.

Casting eye of caution at recumbence, she paddled across the
carpet and anon swam out over the snow.

Pagan young womanhood, six foot of it, spanned eight miles
before luncheon.

Footnote 10:
(return)

It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after
a man's death the skit you made of his work while he lived.
Meredith, however, was so transcendent that such skits must
ever be harmless, and so lasting will his fame be that they
can never lose what freshness they may have had at first.
So I have put this thing in with the others, making
improvements that were needed.—M.B.