(December 23 to January 20)
CAPRICORN IS the sign of the Goat, but this is not as bad as it sounds. There always has to be a goat, and if the obvious goat plays his cards skilfully, popularity, promotion and success await him. The secret of being the goat lies in these words: Never deny and never protest. Anticipate blame. When something goes wrong and everyone else is trying to show that they could not possibly have been responsible for it, say coolly and frankly: “It’s my fault; I wasn’t here when it happened, but I should have foreseen it, and if anybody has to take the responsibility, let it be me.” This will work like magic, and those who have been trying to escape blame will experience an indefinable sense that you have out-generaled them. Follow this course always, and with special firmness when you are obviously not to blame. Little by little an impression will spread that you are unaffected, fearless, ruthlessly honest and devoted to your job rather than to personal advancement. For female Capricorns this is the secret of happiness in marriage. A wife who is always to blame is prized above rubies, as Wizard Solomon said.
Bad luck for you in the matter of lucky colours; your only good one is purple, and the others are grey, green, black and brown; you will need a lot of imagination to present a festive appearance in those. Your lucky flowers are the poppy, flax and holly. Your lucky gems are the onyx, the garnet, the sapphire and the amethyst, but the best of them all is the lodestone. Unfortunately this is simply magnetic oxide of iron, and it is not easy to make it into a pleasing adornment; even the genius of Fabergé was stumped by it. When once the late Czar Nicholas commissioned the celebrated jeweller to create a suitable gift for an Imperial favourite who was a Capricornian, Fabergé was unable to produce anything handsomer than an ordinary magnet with a golden handle, for a lodestone is simply a magnet. However, there is luck in everything; you can do your shopping at the hardware store instead of at the jeweller’s, and a corsage of holly, held in place with a small magnet, will set you up for a big night of romance.
You have no special point of weakness, and are supposedly gifted with an iron constitution. Remember, your astrological sign is that of the goat, and goats are not given to fits of the vapours (not in the Victorian acceptance of the word, that is to say) and have never been pernickety about their food. But there must be reason in everything. You must not push your goatishness too far. Even a goat can ruin its constitution, though I cannot tell you how this is done. Nobody has ever seen a nauseated goat, or a drunk goat, and three veterinarians of long experience have assured me on their solemn oath that they have never seen a dead goat. However, as goats are mortal, they must be the inheritors of some of the ills of flesh, and my personal belief is that these are so dreadful that goats cannot bring themselves to speak of them. There is a look in the eye of certain elderly goats which tells a vague but hideous story. It looks like Disillusion, but is probably thirty-third degree ulcers.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
(Written on a card bearing the message ‘A Merry Christmas and Good Wishes for 1949’: the date has been altered in pencil to the current year.)
Dear Nephew:
Thank you for your thoughtful present. I opened it, as you suggested, as soon as it arrived, and a prettier parcel of soap I have never seen. I shall distribute new cakes on Christmas morning to the whole household. Your notion of a cake of soap fashioned in the likeness of an Aberdeen terrier for your Uncle Gomeril will flatter his Scottish susceptibilities.
I already have quite a number of gifts to be returned and exchanged as soon as the shops open after Christmas. Someone has thoughtlessly sent your Uncle a dressing-gown in the tartan of a clan from which the Marchbanks have been estranged for over three hundred years. He very sensibly asks what need he has of even an acceptable dressing-gown? He never wears one, and goes to his bath lightly wrapped in an old copy of the Toronto Globe, the Scotsman’s friend.
Your affct. aunt,
Bathsheba Marchbanks.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
(Written on an expensive but aesthetically reprehensible card which reveals a robin sitting on a bare branch, with a twig of holly in its beak; the bird’s eye is a black bead, and the holly berries are red beads, cleverly glued to the paper. Spelled out in twigs of holly and mistletoe is the message: ‘Just the Old, Old Wish.’)
Dear Mr. Marchbanks:
I had hoped that this seasonable greeting might come from Mrs. Wittol as well as myself, but she has been absent from home for several days. I have not heard from her, but last night a man’s voice on the phone made some very insulting remarks to me, and I thought I recognized her hiccup among the background noises.
Yours regretfully,
Waghorn Wittol.
*
(Written upon a card which bears a portrait of Santa Claus, wearing an expression possible only to one drunk, or mad; realism has been added to the picture by a feather, glued on to represent the Saint’s beard.)
At this gladsome tide I and Lambie-Pie hasten to freely offer yet once again the right hand of fellowship which you have so often spurned. As the angel’s message of Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men rings round the sad old world I beseech you to drop your legal action against me for hiding a skunk in your car, and as Ye Goode Shippe NEW YEAR sets forth into uncharted seas of Time let the olive branch, symbol of neighbourly amity, wave freely from the poop.
Your repentant neighbour,
Dick Dandiprat.
*
To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
(On a Greetings Telegram)
HAVE BEGUN FESTIVITIES EARLIER THAN EXPECTED STOP HASTEN WITH STOMACH PUMP STOP THINK SELF POISONED THREE DINNERS STILL TO GO STOP MERRY CHRISTMAS STOP
MARCHBANKS
*
To Genghis Marchbanks, ESQ.
My Dear Cousin:
I really think your terms are ungenerous, considering the season of the year. If, as you suggest, I bring all the unwanted Christmas presents I receive to your pawnshop, I shall expect more than a mere one-third of their ordinary retail price. I hate to say it, Genghis, but I do not consider that you are showing the Christmas Spirit. You can skin the public, if you like, but you ought to draw the line at skinning a relative.
Yours reproachfully,
S. M.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
My very dear Mr. Marchbanks:
It has never been the custom of Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat to send out greeting cards at the Festive Season; to a firm as old as ours such conduct would seem flashy. We do, however, send letters bearing good wishes to our more valued clients, of whom you, my dear sir, are not the least.
All of the firm are, I am happy to say, well. The life of our senior partner, Mr. Jabez Mouseman, has been considerably brightened since he began—through what scientific accident we know not—to receive television programs on his hearing-aid. When reception is particularly strong phantoms of charming young women in low-cut evening gowns may be seen to move gracefully across his shirt-bosom; at first Mr. Jabez thought himself beset by evil spirits, but now he spends many hours each day happily regarding himself in the mirror.
Mr. Cicero Forcemeat is, as always, in rude health and his powerful voice—that boon of the successful advocate—is, if anything, stronger than before. His peroration in a divorce case last week cracked a chandelier in the court-room.
I am as always in good health and beg to subscribe myself, dear Mr. Marchbanks, with no legal qualification whatever, your servant and sincere well-wisher,
Mordecai Mouseman
(for Mouseman, Mouseman and Forcemeat).
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
Dear Sir:
This department finds that in computing your Income Tax for 1963 you neglected to mention that when you addressed the Ladies Arts and Letters Club of Pelvis, Sask., in that year you were treated by the committee to a dinner which cost $1.25. This constitutes hidden income, and you must pay tax amounting to 67 cents, plus extra tax for late payment, amounting to 9 cents, making 76 cents in all, within ten days or we shall pursue you with the full rigour of the law.
This Department has received a card from you bearing Christmas Greetings. We are returning the card which is the wrong size for our files, and enclose herewith proper forms for the expression of this wish, to be completed in triplicate, and returned at once.
Yours, but not as much as you are ours,
Haubergeon Hydra.
*
To Samuel Marchbanks, ESQ.
(A greeting card, obviously home made, to which has been glued a snapshot of a stringy female of cheerful aspect, nursing what looks like a very old floor mop.)
Yuletide Greetings from self and dearest Fido.
Minerva Hawser.
*
(An exceedingly dirty and crumpled picture of an ample lady of brilliant complexion, showing a lot of leg, and smoking a cigar.)
How, Marchbanks:
Find this picture in top of cigar box. Make nice card for you. All us fellows in jail send you happy wishes. Warden promise good Christmas in jail. Chicken and mince pie. No women, he say. We need women. You got any women?
Osceola Thunderbelly
(Chief of the Crokinoles).
*
NO ROAST OX, THANKS / New Year’s Day, and I hail the onset of another year by eating more than I should but not quite so much as I want. I yearn for the spacious days of the Middle Ages, when cooking was cooking. Those were the days when the lord of the manor was faced, at dinner, with a whole ox into which was stuffed a whole boar, into which was stuffed a lamb, into which was stuffed a hare, into which was stuffed a pheasant. When he had settled this difficult problem in carving, the lord ate the pheasant, and threw the wrappings to the scurvy knaves and lubberly churls who composed his household, and set to work on a venison pie and five or six pounds of mincemeat encased in marchpane. Only, if I had lived in the Middle Ages, I would undoubtedly have been a lubberly churl—or at best Pynne-Heade, the household jester—and would have had to eat over-cooked ox, swilled down with the water in which the mead-horns had been washed. I have no illusions about the glory of my ancestry. So I dismissed my dream of mediaeval gluttony, and picked at a few pounds of turkey and ham, and washed it all down with liquids so innocent that even the Government puts its stamp upon them.
A VULGAR ERROR / There is a widespread belief that all tobacco chewers are good spitters. I heard a friend talking today in a manner which showed that he subscribed to this superstition. But I know it to be false. In my childhood I used to spend much of my spare time around a blacksmith shop, and although some good spitting could be seen, most of it was poor. I have seen men—tobacco chewers of a quarter century’s standing—who could not hit anything, and sometimes failed to clear their own chins.I have seen chewers at that blacksmith’s shop spit at a crack for an hour, without hitting it once. De Quincey writes that the London hackney-coachmen of his day were so accomplished that they could spit around a corner, but I do not believe it. De Quincey was a dope fiend, and nothing that he says can be accepted as evidence. Show me one of these virtuoso spitters, and I may change my mind. But not until then.
THE INIQUITY OF FREE BOOKS / There is a great rejoicing in some parts of Ontario because the provincial government has decided to give free school-books to children, but I am not among the merry-makers. I am a writer of books myself, and any move which inculcates in children the idea that books are things which you get for nothing excites my implacable enmity. There are too many free books already, in public libraries and other institutions primarily designed to rob authors of their livelihood. A pox on the memory of Andrew Carnegie and his misplaced benevolence! There are in Canada, by actual count, 528 people who buy books for their own use; an author may count on these people buying a copy of any book he writes. There are 6,417,333 people who are on friendly terms with the 528, and they all borrow their copies of new books, read them, and then write to the author, pointing out typographical errors, plagiarisms from Holy Writ, faulty economics, and other blemishes. If the Ontario Government is going to teach children that books drop from Heaven, or are supplied from the public purse, like wheat subsidies, the profession of letters in Canada will drop below that of the nightsoil removers.
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
I was at a Twelfth Night party last night—a wonderful affair. I haven’t much use for people who confine their merrymakings to Christmas Day; I insist on the full Twelve Days of Christmas from The Day itself to Epiphany. There was a man at the party who had some snuff, and as we all took tentative, apprehensive pinches he told us that he had acquired the habit while fighting in the East with Ghurka troops. A Scotch officer, he said, had asked for a large tin of snuff to be sent to him from home and in due course it was dropped from a plane in a package with other supplies. But he never got it. The kitchen troops got it, and not understanding its use and assuming that it was some rare condiment they curried their meat with it. The result was such fires in the tripes as were never known before in the Chindits.
During the course of the evening several Scots reels were performed with more spirit than science on the part of most of the dancers. As I watched it struck me that the Canadians present might well have done a folk-dance of their own; folk dances can be easily faked. A little nimble bobbing about, a little clapping of the hands, a little playful running at the ladies and then retreating from them in fright, and a final prance round the room in which everybody bashes into everybody else—and there’s your folkdance. I am working on one now, to be called “Marchbanks’ Brawl.”
Yours Januwearily,
Sam.
*
To the Rev. Simon Goaste, B.D.
Dear Rector:
Can you tell me why it is that so many brides insist on having the Bridal Chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin played as they stumble up the aisle at their weddings? It seems to me to be a singularly ill-chosen piece of music for such an occasion.
Consider the story of the opera: Elsa, a silly girl, has got herself into a mess; a young man comes along and very competently gets her out of it; he marries her, on the understanding that she will never ask his name or whence he comes; but Elsa and her relatives nag him insufferably until he can bear it no more, and leaves her. The lesson of the whole opera is that nosiness is a first-class way to break up a marriage, and Wagner, who was married to one of the great snoops of his time, knew what he was talking about. Why is it that girls want this prelude to a strikingly unfortunate marriage played at their weddings?
I have often wondered what happened to Elsa after Lohengrin ran away. My guess is that she set up in business as a Wronged Wife, forgot completely her part in breaking up her marriage, and passed her time very pleasantly at tea parties, warning younger women that Men Are Not To Be Trusted. What are your views?
Faithfully,
S. Marchbanks.
*
To Raymond Cataplasm, M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dear Dr. Cataplasm:
I was at a party recently where a lady was explaining a new medical theory to me, in which she said that her husband (who is a physician) is keenly interested. The nubbin of the theory is that placid and careful living is just as aging as rowdy living if you make a habit of it, and that the human metabolism needs frequent shocks, just to keep it on its toes, so to speak. For this reason everybody should take care to overeat grossly every now and then, or get drunk, or run a mile, or chop a cord of wood. Anything will do, so long as it is something to which the body is unaccustomed.
I have been testing this notion myself. You know that I will do anything to further the ends of science. I overate as much as possible all during the Christmas season, and washed the food down with strong waters. Result: except for a slight feeling of other-worldliness before breakfast I felt fine, and my metabolism chugged away like a Coin Wash. But during the past week I have run to and from my office, carrying a heavily-weighted briefcase, four times each day. Result: my metabolism has seized up, my circulation is at a stand-still, and I see everything upside down unless I keep a firm hold on the top of my head.
Undoubtedly there is a great lesson for science in this. Perhaps you will explain to me what it is. Meanwhile I am going to lie down.
Your perennial patient,
*
To Miss Minerva Hawser.
Dear Miss Hawser:
Thank you for your letter; if you really want my old Christmas cards, you can have them; your idea for cutting them up into bits and distributing them for use as confetti at the weddings of the Underprivileged seems to me to be an excellent one, and an accurate reflection of your kindly and ingenious nature. My cards may be a disappointment to you. They were classifiable under the following heads:
Ghastly Good Taste: plain white cards made of hard stuff like the icing of a Christmas cake, with an engraved greeting on them; indistinguishable from old-fashioned death notices.
Art Drearies: designed by people who are determined to get away from conventional Christmas colours and designs; they are usually executed in shades suggesting cheese mould. Some are religious, in a strictly ‘God-is-dead’ sense.
Stark Realism: cards to which snapshots of the senders have been pasted, showing them at their worst, and often in company with dead fish, half-dead dogs, and the like.
Canadian Art: showing the same French-Canadian farmer, driving the same sleigh through the same bluish snow, but in slightly different stages of his progress toward a village consisting of a Church and three huts.
Phoney Mediaeval: showing people eating and drinking and playing oversize guitars, and looking cleaner and healthier than was likely in the Middle Ages.
Unspeakables: on which a reindeer with a red nose is depicted.
I sent cards in all these forms myself, for there was nothing else to be had. But I really long for a decent old-fashioned Christmas card, with the Virgin and Child on it, and Santa Claus and his reindeer, and a robin with a twig of holly in its beak, and some mica clinging to it to simulate snow, and a really compendious and warm-hearted greeting in the manner of G. K. Chesterton:
Here’s for a bursting Yuletide
To my friends wherever they be!
With boozing and stuffing
And praying and puffing
All under the Evergreen Tree!
Yours sincerely,
Samuel Marchbanks.
*
To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
Last night I was at the movies, and as usual it was necessary to sit through a good deal of rather depressing stuff before we were allowed to see the film which had really brought us to the theatre. Among these shorts (why do you suppose they call them shorts? Surely shortness is a comparative thing? Judged by the anguish of spirit they induced, these affairs were immeasurably long)—but as I was saying, among these shorts was one in which the audience was asked to join in the singing of popular gems of modern minstrelsy. But the audience refrained from doing so, and sat in a glum and resentful silence until the short had dragged out its weary length.
This is a hopeful sign. Human beings are refusing to be cajoled into doing silly things by machines, and by celluloid shadows. For a group of people to sing because a movie machine asks them to do so is just nonsense, and they know it.
Mark my words, the revolution of Man against Machine is close at hand, and when it comes we shall see the end of that era which historians are already referring to in learned works as The Age of Boloney.
Adieu,
Sam.
*
A BORE IN TRAINING / Talking to a young man I realized, with a shock, that in fifteen years he would be a bore. The young are never bores, though they are often boring, particularly when they talk about themselves. But it does not lie in the power of youth to be a self-sustaining, day-in-and-day-out bore; a man must be at least thirty-five before he can manage that. Youth has a buoyance, a resiliency, which makes it impossible for the young to keep to that dead-level which is the very heart and essence of the bore’s craft. The spirits of youth keep bobbing up and down; a bore must be steady as a rock. The eye of youth sometimes lightens; the eye of the bore is glazed with the film of stupidity. There are gloomy bores, and agreeable bores, and eager bores and stuffy bores, but once they have set their course and determined their character, they do not change.… This young man, however, was in strict training to become an agreeable bore, and as he seemed naturally gifted in that respect he may achieve his aim before thirty-five, and become one of the youngest bores in Canadian history. And if he does he will be a lesson in what may be achieved by persistent effort.
JEOFFRY / Dined with some friends and admired their seven-toed cat; upon each of its forepaws it has an extra toe. Did this, I pondered, make him a better clamberer than ordinary cats? I was reminded forcibly of the cat Jeoffry, who belonged to the poet Christopher Smart, and about whom Smart wrote what I consider to be one of the most remarkable poems in the English language, praising Jeoffry’s excellence as a clamberer as an evidence of the glory of God—
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
My friends’ cat was named Sydney, but like every good cat he bore a resemblance to Smart’s Jeoffry.
LILLIPUT / Some children I know were showing me a doll’s house which they had been given at Christmas. It was a spacious and pleasant dwelling which, on the human scale, could not be built for less than $80,000 at present costs. I should judge that some doll of the junior executive class lived in it. Like so many doll’s houses, it lacked a staircase; dolls are used to being heaved from one floor to another. It was fully, though conventionally, furnished, and over the mantel in the drawing-room was that picture “The Boyhood of Raleigh” which suggested to me that the dolls were rather old-fashioned and romantic in their tastes, in spite of the modernity of some of their furniture. I envied the father-doll the neatness of his garage; mine, which doubles as toolshed, is a sorry thing beside it. The dolls had a remarkably nice bathroom, too, quite unlike the cornery afterthought at Marchbanks Towers. I enquired whether the dolls owned or rented, and was told that they were owners; roughly I computed their land-tax, school-tax and improvements tax, and decided that these dolls were not the sort of people I would be asked to dine with, if some sudden shrinkage should whisk me into their world.
CANADIAN CAUTION / It is wrong to say that Canadians have no distinctive national characteristics; what about our national custom of Keeping Down With the Joneses? In other countries people keep up with the Joneses; they vie with one another in the acquirement of showy and prestige-giving possessions. But the crafty Canadian always wants his neighbours to think that he has less money than he really has. He underdresses, for the possession of more than two suits might suggest affluence and a desire to seem glorious in the eyes of men. His wife probably has a fur coat, but she wears it to do the shopping, and to sweep off the stoop, so that it is really just a hard-wearing overall, and not a token of wealth. He eats good food, but he likes it to be disguised, so that even the tooth-test sometimes fails to reveal how good it is. It is only when he goes on a holiday to the USA that he splurges, takes suites in hotels, gives huge tips to hirelings, and drinks pearls dissolved in wine. At home he likes the neighbours to think that he is just keeping out of jail. Surely this is a striking and unusual national attitude?
*
To Big Chief Marchbanks.
How, Marchbanks:
Us fellows in jail fix New Year Dance. Ball and Chain Ball, we call it. We got no women, so no dance. We got no booze, so no drink. We got no money, so no gamble. But we got peace and plenty dirty story. You want ticket? Fight cop. He give you ticket.
Osceola Thunderbelly
(Chief of the Crokinoles).
*
Do not be discouraged by lack of immediate success. Bernard Shaw flowered at 17, but nobody smelled him until he was 40.