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Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Vol. 158 1920-04-28 by Various Seaman Owen Editor
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Ebook has 192 lines and 17428 words, and 4 pages
SAFETY PLAY.
MEN there may be so immune from timidity Never a spectre could fill them with fright, Men who could keep their accustomed placidity Were they to meet in the gloom of the night Lady Hermione tramping the corridor, Wicked Sir Guy with his fetters adrag, Or a plebeian who shrieked something horrid or Carried his head in a vanity bag.
MASCULINE MODES.
BY BEAU BRUMMEL.
THE news that the price of lounge suits will have risen to twenty-four pounds by the autumn has created something of a sartorial panic in the City and the West End.
Famous old wardrobes are being broken up on all sides by owners anxious to acquire fresh clothing before it is too late, whilst the small properties thus created find eager tenants amongst those who cannot afford a new outfit at all.
Many tailors who have built new suits are beginning to dispose of them on three or five year repairing leases, and possession of these may sometimes be secured from the present occupiers on payment of a substantial premium.
Gentlemen possessing both town and country sets of suitings are in many cases letting the latter in order to come up to London for the season, whilst others are resorting to various economical artifices to meet the crisis. Plus four golf knickers, let down, make admirable wedding trousers for a short man, and many are the old college blazers dyed black and doing duty as natty pea-jackets.
In the City, of course, fustian and corduroys are almost the only wear, and there is much divergence of opinion on the Stock Exchange as to the best knot for spotted red neckerchiefs and the proper way of tying the difficult little bow beneath the knees.
Even in the Welsh collieries it is becoming the habit to go down the pits in rough home-spun, and reserving the top hat, morning coat and check trousers for striking in.
"DENIKIN TIRED.
LOOKING FOR A LITTLE HOUSE IN ENGLAND."
The gallant General is not the only one who is worn out with this hopeless task.
Was this the last hope of restoring calm to the "troubled waters"?
"He has represented Lowestoft at St. Stephen's--one of the most important fishing centres in the country--for many years past."
The House of Commons seems to have been confused with Izaak Walton Heath.
"LADIES' GOLF AT RANELAGH.
But it is hoped that this method of thinning out the competitors will not be generally resorted to.
"MURAL TEACHING.
Speaking at Manchester last night Lord Haldane advocated a great and new national reform by enabling the Universities to train the best teachers of their own level to go out and do extra Mural teaching on a huge scale."
We gather that in our contemporary's opinion it is high time that our Universities recognised "the writing on the wall."
A VANISHED SPECIES.
THE great auk is but a memory; the bittern booms more rarely in our eastern marshes; and now they tell me Brigadiers are extinct. Handsomest and liveliest of our indigenous fauna, the bright beady eye, the flirt of the trench coat-tail through the undergrowth, the glint of red betwixt the boughs, the sudden piercing pipe--how well I knew them, how often I have lain hidden in thickets and behind hedgerows to study them more closely. How inquisitive the creature was, yet how seldom would it feed from the hand. And now, it seems, they are gone.
Vainly I rack my brains to envisage the manner of their passing. Is there to be nothing left but silence and a shadow or a specimen in a dusty case of glass preserved in creosol and stuffed with lime? Or did not the Brigadiers rather, when they felt their last hour was upon them, retire like the elephants of the jungle to some distant spot and shuffle off the mortal coil in the midst of Salisbury Plain or the vast solitude of Slough?
Or it may be that they underwent some classic metamorphosis, translated to a rainless paradise, where they dreamed of battalions for ever inspected and the general salute eternally blown.
"And there, they say, two bright and ag?d snakes Who once were brigadiers of infantry Bask in the sun."
How different from this sort was the type that could always be placated by a glittering bayonet charge or a thoroughly smart salute! I remember one of this kind who came charging across the landscape, his Staff Captain at his heels, to a point where he saw a friend of mine apparently lost in meditation and sloth. Unfortunately the great man's horse betrayed him as he tried to jump a low hedge, and, when he had clambered up again and arrived in a rather tumbled condition to ask indignantly what had happened to the scouts, "They have established a number of hidden observation posts," my friend replied, keeping his presence of mind, "and are making an exact report of everything that transpires on the enemy's front," and he waved his arm towards the scene of the catastrophe. It was not thought necessary to examine their notes.
The first was apt to exhibit its contempt for danger by strolling about in perilous places for five minutes and leaving them to be shelled in consequence for a week.
"All hell has broken loose in front of us. The earth shivers as if a volcano is beneath our feet. The pock-marked ridges in the distance are covered with the advancing waves of field-grey forms. Our boys are going up happily shouting and singing to the battle. Sorry, I didn't quite catch what you said about being in touch on the right. The brazen roar of the cannon is mingled with the intermittent rattle of innumerable machine guns. Eh, what? What?"
"And now no sacred staff shall break to blossom, No choral salutation lure to light,"
as SWINBURNE put it; or
"All the birds of the air fell a-sighin' and a-sobbin' When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin,"
as No. 1 platoon of A Company used to sing. Ah, well.
EVOE.
A COUNTRY NIGHT PIECE.
Where the high-road dips down to the dingle, A coppice in arabesque gleams Whose traceries melt and commingle, Like ghost trees in moon-fretted streams, As the tremulous glamour sweeps o'er it And skirts the inscrutable sky; Then, Fairyland flitting before it, The car flashes by.
Sport in Ireland.
"In a collision between his vehicle and a tramcar yesterday a passenger was injured and removed to hospital.
For other Sporting News see Page 6."
A popular establishment, we feel confident.
THE TAKING OF TIMOTHY.
TEA was over, a clearing was made of the articles of more fragile virtue, and Timothy, entering in state, was off-loaded from his nurse's arms into his mother's.
"Isn't he looking sweet to-day?" said Suzanne. "It's really time we had him photographed."
"Why?" I asked.
"Well, why do people as a rule get photographed?"
"That," I said, "is a question I have often asked myself, but without finding a satisfactory answer. What do you propose to do with the copies?"
"Aunt Caroline one day took me into her confidence and showed me what she called her scrap-heap. It was a big box full of photographs that had been presented to her from time to time, and she calculated that if she had had them all framed, as their donors had doubtless expected, it would have cost her some hundreds of pounds. While her back was turned I looked through the collection. Your photograph was there--and mine, Suzanne."
"Anyhow, we shall want one to keep ourselves. Think what a pleasure it will be to him when he grows up to see what he looked like as a tiny baby."
I called to mind an ancestral album belonging to my own family that I had carefully kept guarded from Suzanne precisely for the reason that it contained various presentments of myself at early ages in mirth-compelling garments and attitudes; but of course I could not now urge that chamber of horrors in opposition to her demand.
"Besides," she went on, "we needn't buy any copies at all if we don't like them. Snapper and Klick are continually worrying me to have Baby taken. Once a week regularly, ever since the announcement of his birth appeared, they've rung me up to ask when he will give them a sitting. Sometimes it's Snapper and sometimes it's Klick; I don't know which is which, but one of them has adenoids. We can't do any harm by taking him there, because they say in their circulars they present two copies free and there's no obligation to purchase any."
"I wonder how they make that pay?"
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