Chapter 1

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PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI

VOL. 158

APRIL 7, 1920

CHARIVARIA.

"Do the British people," asks Mr. BLATCHFORD, "understand the nature of the monster modern military science has created?" We hope to hear later what name Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL has found for Mr. BLATCHFORD.

* * *

Agitation for a Federal Divorce Law is being revived in the United States. It appears that there are still some backward States where the expenses of a divorce suit mount up to something like ten dollars and the parties often have to wait as long as three weeks before the knot is untied.

* * *

"It has now been decided definitely," says _The Daily Express_, "that Sir AUCKLAND GEDDES will leave England on April 10th." This disposes finally of the rumour that he intended taking it with him.

* * *

The natives of the Andaman Islands average about seventy pounds each in weight. They are so short in stature that their feet only just reach the ground in time.

* * *

M. LOUCHEUR suggests that France should build houses similar to those which are not being built in England.

* * *

"Sergeant R. Pernotte," says a student of human endeavour, "last week punched a ball for fifty hours without a break." It is presumed that the ball must have done something to annoy him.

* * *

Thirty thousand years ago, says a weekly journal, the seas around England were at a higher level than at present. It is difficult to know what can be done about it, but it is just as well that the matter should be mentioned.

* * *

According to Mr. M. T. SIMM, M.P., there are many wayside inns of a passable nature. The trouble, of course, is that so many people have a difficulty in passing them.

* * *

We understand that Mr. Justice ----'s question, "Who is Mr. LLOYD GEORGE?" has been postponed to a date to be fixed later.

* * *

A trade journal advertises a new calculating machine which will total up stupendous figures without any human help at all. A correspondent writes to say that in his house he has the identical gas meter which gave the inventor his idea.

* * *

The contemporary which refers to the discovery of a gold ring inside a cod-fish as extraordinary evidently cannot be aware that many profiteers who go in for fishing are nowadays using such articles as bait.

* * *

A purse containing nearly a hundred pounds in treasury notes, picked up by a policeman in South Wales, has not yet been claimed. It is now thought probable that a local miner may have dropped his week's wages whilst entering his car and that his secretary has not yet called his attention to the deficit.

* * *

"The way some newsboys dodge in and out of the moving traffic is most dangerous and a serious accident is sure to result before very long," complains a writer in an evening paper. For ourselves we cannot but admire this attempt on the boys' part to make history while in the act of selling it.

* * *

We learn from an evening paper that a large woollen warehouse in London was completely destroyed by fire the other day. We cannot understand why some people use such inflammable material for building purposes.

* * *

An old pleasure-boat proprietor at Yarmouth has stated in an interview that, although all his skiffs and dinghies are ten to fifteen years old, they are much more trustworthy than those being built at the present time. We await, fearfully, the comments of Lord FISHER.

* * *

Dutch wasps, says a news item, are very much like British. Only the finished expert can tell the difference on being stung.

* * *

It is said that the Dutch are the most religious race of to-day. Of course it is well known that the Chinese pray more than the Dutch, but then nobody understands what they are saying.

* * *

The Ascot Fire Brigade went on strike last week and several important fires had to be postponed at the last moment.

* * *

The Bolsheviks, it appears, may not, after all, be as black as they are painted. It is reported that TROTSKY has caused one of his Chinese guards to be executed for calling another an Irishman.

* * *

Senator BORAH recently informed the American Press that the Presidential election campaign was becoming a Saturnalia of public corruption. In one flagrant case it appears that a man who was given the money to buy ten dollars' worth of Irish Republic went and bought a box of cigars instead.

* * *

"To keep cats off the seed beds," says _Home Chat_, "bury a small bottle up to the neck and fill it with liquid ammonia." The old practice of burying the cat up to the neck in the seed bedding and keeping the ammonia for subsequent use is considered obsolete.

* * *

During the past year in London 2,886 persons were knocked down by horsed vehicles, as compared with 8,388 who were knocked down by motor vehicles. The popularity of the latter, it seems, is still unchallenged.

* * *

A weekly paper has an article on "Bad Manners Among Fish." We have ourselves noticed a tendency to ignore the old adage that fish, like little children, should be seen and not heard.

* * * * *

* * * * *

"Young lady requires daily work as Cook-general; work not objected to."

_Provincial Paper._

Very obliging of her.

* * * * *

POSSESSION.

The dear old home has been let to strangers. An interloper occupies the messuage. A foreign master controls the demesne.

To-day especially, when as I write the air is balmy and the skies are blue, it is agonising to feel that our own spring rhubarb is growing crimson only to be toyed with by alien lips, and that the thrush on our pear-tree bough----But no, I am wrong; the pear-tree bough is in the garden of No. 9; it is only the trunk that stands in the garden of No. 10. That, by the way, is an accident that frequently occurs to estate-owners. Consider critically for a moment those well-known lines in which BROWNING says--

"Hark where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field,"

and then goes on to speak of "the wise thrush" on "the bent spray's edge" as "singing his song twice over." It is pretty obvious that the reason the poet assigns to this action on the bird's part is not the correct one. Evidently the part of the tree on which it was sitting was on the other side of the hedge in the next-door fellow's garden, and it was conscientiously trying to allot one performance to each of the two rival householders. But I seem to have wandered a little from the ancient home.

Come with me in imagination, reader, and let us have a look at it together. The fourth house to the left in this winding road that fringes the common, you see it standing there gazing a little wistfully, yet with a quiet air of semi-detachment, out over the wide expanse of green. Half right and half left are two monstrous blocks of red brick flats overlooking it with a thousand envious eyes. The middle distance is dotted pleasantly with hawthorn bushes and the pretty pieces of sandwich-paper that are always the harbingers of London's Spring. Beyond these things, and far away to the front, you may detect on clear days a white church-tower nestling like Swiss milk amongst immemorial trees. And this view is mine--mine, like the old home. If we linger for a moment in the road we shall probably see the scornful face of the proud usurper at one of the windows calmly enjoying this view of mine, all unconscious that I, the rightful owner, am standing beneath. Does it not remind you of the films?--

"_Charles Carruthers_, an outcast from his ancestral halls, eyes mournfully the scene of merry junketing within. _Charles Carruthers_--_blick! blick!_"--and you see him eyeing mournfully outside--"_blick! blick!_"--and you see the junketers eating his junket within.

On looking back in a calmer mood on the lines which I have just written, I feel it possible that I may have let my emotions run away with me and conveyed a slightly false impression. I may have suggested that the old home has belonged to my family since Domesday Book or dear-knows-when or some other historic date in our island story. That would not be strictly true. As a matter of fact I have never lived in the house, nor have any of my relations either. It has belonged to me, to be quite accurate, since March 25th, 1920, and the interloper was interloping on a short lease when I bought the long lease over his head. It is also true that by an awkward and absurd convention I have to restore the old home to the ground landlord in 1941. But who cares about what is going to happen in 1941? The Coalition may have come to an end by that time, and the first Labour Government, under Lord NORTHCLIFFE or Mr. JACK JONES, may be in power. Some bricklayer, in a mood of artistic frenzy, may have designed the plan of a new brick and had it passed by the Ministry of Housing. DEMPSEY may have met CARPENTIER.

No, the trouble is about the interloper. It appears that, having the remainder of a lease to run, he can go on anteloping (you know what I mean) for two years more if he likes. To do him justice he admits that the place is mine and wants to leave it. He has no real love for the priceless old spot. All that he asks is somewhere better to go to. So I am gladly doing my best to help him. I send him notices of forty-roomed Tudor mansions, which seem to abound in the market, mansions with timbered parks, ornamental waters, Grecian temples, ha-has, gazebos, herds of graceful bounding gazebos, and immediate possession. I do more than this. I send him extravagant eulogies of lands across the seas, where the grapes grow larger, the pear-trees blossom all the year round and separate thrushes laid on to each estate never cease to sing. I suggest the advantages of the mercantile marine and a life on the rolling main, of big game shooting, polar exploration, and the residential attractions of Constantinople, Berlin, Dublin and Vladivostok.

Concurrently with this I try hard to cultivate in him a certain distaste for the dear old home. I walk up and down the road in front of it with a pair of field-glasses, and, if I see that a little chip has fallen off anywhere or the paint on the gate has been scratched, I call on him at once.

"I happened to be passing the demesne," I say, "when I noticed a rather serious item of dilapidation," or "A word with you about the messuage; it looks a trifle off colour to-day. Have you had it blistered lately?" And this worries him a good deal, because he is responsible for all repairs.

I do not fail to point out to my friends, either, that this is my well-known family seat, and I persuade them from time to time to go and ask for me at the door. "What, isn't he living here _yet_?" I get them to say, with a well-feigned surprise. "It is his house, isn't it?" I frequently have letters addressed to myself sent there, and every morning and afternoon the nurse takes the children past it for a walk. The children are well drilled.

"Look, Priscilla, that's our garden," says Richard in a high penetrating treble; and

"There's a darlin' little buttercup. I want to go in," Priscilla replies.

All this quiet steady pressure is bound to have its due effect in time. Gradually I think he will begin to feel that a shadow haunts the ancestral halls (the front one, you know, and the back passage), that a footstep not his own treads behind him on the stair, that the dear old home will never be happy until it is occupied by its rightful lord.

I shall send him a marked copy of this article.

EVOE.

* * * * *

_VERS TRÈS LIBRE._

(_Arabesque on a field of blue_).

These are the things, or gorgeous or delicate, Imposing, intime, dazzling or repellent, That sing--better than music's self, Better than rhyme-- The praise and liberty of blue: The turquoise and the peacock's neck, The blood of kings, the deeps Of Southern lakes, the sky That bends over the Azores, The language of the links, the eyes Of fair-haired angels, the Policeman's helmet and the backs Of books issued by the Government, Also the Bird of Happiness (MAETERLINCK) And many other things such as The Varsity colours, various kinds Of pottery and limelight, Some things by SWINBURNE, BURNS and EZRA POUND, The speedwell in the glade, and, oh! The little cubes they put in wash-tubs.

REFRAIN.

These are the things, or gorgeous or delicate, And so on down to "liberty of blue."

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

TOOLS OF TRADE.

I am sorry for the man who took his typewriter on the Underground and was made to buy a bicycle-ticket for it. But I have no doubt he deserved it. I am sure that he did it in spiritual pride. He was trying to make himself equal to the manual labourer who carries large bags of tools on the Tube and sighs heavily as he lays them on your foot. I am sure that he was tired of being scornfully regarded by manual labourers, and was determined to make it quite clear that he too had done, or was about to do, a day's labour, and manual labour at that. It was a sinful motive and it deserved to be punished; but it was natural. Nowadays we all feel like that. We caught it from the War, when the great thing was to show that you were doing more work than anybody else.

I take from a recent copy of _Hansard_[1] the following brisk and delicate piece of dialogue:--

"Mr. MACQUISTEN: You Labour men have forgotten what sweat is.

Mr. W. THORNE: I have never seen many lawyers sweat, anyhow.

Mr. SPEAKER: This discussion is becoming intemperate.

AN HON. MEMBER: The Hon. Member for Springburn never sweated in his life.

Mr. MACQUISTEN: Yes, I have laboured in the docks."

That is it, you see. Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day. If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a moment or two. Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a harsh employment and industrial fatigue. I take great pains about this; I walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus, wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.

Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why everybody else in the Tube carries an "attaché-case." It has been calculated that if all the attaché-cases which get on to the train at Hammersmith at 9 A.M. were left on the platform, six men or twelve women or three horses could take their place in every car. That means about ninety more men or one-hundred-and-eighty more women or forty-five more horses could leave Hammersmith between 9 A.M. and 9.30. So that if attaché-cases were forbidden the traffic problem would be practically solved.

Why shouldn't they be forbidden? It depends, of course, on what is inside the cases; and nobody knows that for certain. But one can guess. I have been guessing for a long time. At first I thought they were full of very confidential papers. In the old days the attaché-case was the peculiar trademark of private secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like that. Even attachés carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an attaché-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attaché-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attaché-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, so that theory is no good.

Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attaché-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on my own experience.

I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before; and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great deal of fluff and a pipe or two and four or five stamped letters which it is now too late to post. That is all there is in my case.

But I carry it backwards and forwards, in and out, to and fro, day after day; and the only time it is ever opened at either end of the journey is when, in addition to the articles previously mentioned, it contains bottles. But I do not carry it for the sake of bottles; far from it. I am one of those men who do not mind going about with a comparatively naked bottle. I carry it simply because it is the tool of my trade, and because, if you don't carry a tool of some kind on the Underground, at any moment you may be taken for an idle rich, if not actually a parasite, who never sweated in his life.

And that, I am persuaded, is why everybody else carries theirs.

But this is a very serious conclusion. It will be a terrible thing if everyone is going to carry the tools of his trade about with him to show that he has a trade; the barrister his briefs, the doctor his stethoscope or his shiny black bag; the butcher his chopper; the dentist--but no, we cannot have that. There must be other ways. We might wear badges, as we did in the War, only they would be office badges and trade badges, instead of regimental badges or discharged badges. Then we should have again the dear old war-game of trying to read what was on them without being rude. That is what one really misses in public places in these days of Peace--that and the uniforms.

It was easy to make conversation in a restaurant in the old days, when people kept on coming in in curious uniforms, and the ladies wondered what they were and the men pretended they knew all about them. But all that is dead now, and I think these sweat-badges would supply a serious want.

But what will the author wear? And who will believe that he ever breaks into beads of perspiration at his labour?

A. P. H.

[Footnote 1: February 24th, col. 1638.]

* * * * *

* * * * *

"CAN EUROPE BE SAVED?

By LOVAT FRASER."

_Daily Mail._

We don't know; but there can be no harm in his trying.

* * * * *

Commercial Candour.

"Your Soil needs a tonic. Send 2s. 6d. for 40 lb. Ground Lime in a Government twill bag, worth half the money."--_Local Paper._

"Antique Copper Fire-irons and Dogs, almost new."--_Local Paper._

* * * * *

THE PACKET RAT.

"When I leave this Western Ocean, to the South'ard I will steer, In a tall Colonial clipper far an' far enough from here, Down the Channel on a bowline, through the Tropics runnin' free, When I'm done with this 'ere ocean ... an' when it's done with me.

"An' I'll run my ship in Sydney, an' then I'll work my way To them smilin' South Seas Islands where there's sunshine all the day, An' I'll sell my chest an' gear there as soon's I hit the shore, An' sling my last discharge away, an' go to sea no more.

"It's a pleasant time they have there--they've easy quiet lives; They wear no clothes to speak on; they've a bunch of browny wives; They're bathin' all the day long or baskin' on the sand, With the jolly brown Kanakas as naked as your hand.

"An' I'll lay there in the palm-shade, an' take my ease all day, An' look across the harbour at the shippin' in the bay, An' watch the workin' sailormen--the bloomin' same as me In the workin' Western Ocean afore I left the sea.

"I'll hear them at the capstan, a-heavin' good an' hard; I'll hear them tallyin' on the fall or sweatin' up the yard; Hear them lift a halliard shanty, hear the bosun swear and shout, An' the thrashin' o' the headsheets as the vessel goes about.

"An', if the fancy takes me, as it's like enough it may, For to smell the old ship-smells again an' taste the salt an' spray, I can take a spell o' pearlin' or a tradin' cruise or two Where there's none but golden weather an' a sky that's always blue.

"But I'll do no sailorisin' jobs--I'll walk or lay at ease, Like a blessed packet-captain, just as lordly as you please, With a steward for my table an' a boy to bring my beer, An' a score or so Kanakas for to reef an' haul an' steer.

"An' when I'm tired o' cruisin', up an' down an' here an' there, There'll be kind Kanaka women wi' the red flowers in their hair All a-waiting for to meet me there a-comin' in from sea, When I'm through with this here ocean ... an' that'll never be!

"For I'd hear the parrots screamin' an' the palm-trees' drowsy tune, But I'd want the Banks in winter an' the smell of ice in June, An' the hard-case mates a-bawlin', an' the strikin' o' the bell ... God! I've cursed it oft an' cruel ... but I'd miss it all like Hell.

"Yes, I'd miss the Western Ocean where the packets come an' go, An' the grey gulls wheelin', callin', an' the grey sky hangin' low, An' the blessed lights o' Liverpool a-winkin' through the rain To welcome us poor packet-rats come back to port again.

"An' if I took an' died out there my soul'd never stay In them sunny Southern latitudes to wait the Judgment Day, For acrost the seas from England, oh, I'd hear the old life call, An' the bloomin' Western Ocean it'd get me after all.