A CHRISTMAS GARLAND
_woven by_
MAX BEERBOHM
LONDON MCMXXI
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
First printed, October, 1912.
New Impressions, October, 1912; December, 1912; December, 1912; July,
1918; September, 1918; March, 1931.
Copyright, 1912.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE WORKS OF MAX BEERBOHM
MORE
YET AGAIN
A CHRISTMAS GARLAND
THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE
ZULIEKA DOBSON
SEVEN MEN
AND EVEN NOW
CARICATURES OF TWENTY-FIVE GENTLEMEN
THE POETS' CORNER
THE SECOND CHILDHOOD OF JOHN BULL
A BOOK OF CARICATURES
FIFTY CARICATURES
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
Then it's collar 'im tight,
In the name o' the Lawd!
'Ustle 'im, shake 'im till 'e's sick!
Wot, 'e _would_, would 'e? Well,
Then yer've got ter give 'im 'Ell,
An' it's trunch, trunch, truncheon does the trick
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....
[Footnote 1: Published by the Young Self-Helpers' Press, Ipswich.]
"Mr. Albert Baker, in a paper[2] 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 suggested[4]--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....
[Footnote 2: "Are We Going Too Fast?"]
[Footnote 3: "A Midwife For The Millennium." H.G. W*lls.]
[Footnote 4: "How To Be Happy Though Yet Unborn." H.G. W*lls.]
"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 discovery[5]
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.
[Footnote 5: "Words About Words." By Ezra K. Higgins, Professor of
Etymology, Abraham Z. Stubbins University, Padua, Pa., U.S.A. (2
vols.).]
[Footnote 6: "_Id est_"--"That is."]
"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....
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.