A Christmas Garland.
by Max Beerbohm.
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 repet.i.tion, 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 rea.s.sured 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 m.u.f.fled by the bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most telephonic of her s.e.x. 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. s.n.a.t.c.hes 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, a.n.a.lysis) 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 pa.s.sion, 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 "ill.u.s.tration." 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 s.e.x, 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 sh.e.l.l!"
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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 billic.o.c.k 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 h.o.a.ry 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 vertebrae.
"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.