The Strand Magazine/Volume 3/Issue 16/TQS
The Queer Side of Things.
INCE poor Moozeby tried those experiments in precipitating trains and things, he has kept up his studies in Theosophy; but the results have not been at all encouraging.
We were all at Mrs. Moozeby's reception, and we all knew one another more or less, with the exception of one man who was a stranger to all of us. We could not help noticing him; for, besides being new to us all, his appearance and manner were rather remarkable.
"Who's that old boy?" said Pinniger to Thripling. "I never saw such a queer fish in my life. He seems to move about so awkwardly, as if he hadn't the proper use of his limbs."
"I fancy it's acute rheumatism, or St. Vitus's dance, or something of that sort," said Thripling. "I've noticed it myself. He's a genial sort of old boy though, apparently; patted me on the back just now, and said he hoped I was enjoying myself! I take it he must be one of Mrs. M.'s brothers—fancy she did tell me once, now I come to think of it, that she had a matter of a brother or two in Australia. He must be some relation, or he would hardly make himself quite so much at home, would he?"
"Tell you what," said Pinniger presently, "that old fellow is a regular study. The way he gets about is really lovely—like a crab on crutches. And his voice is so queer; every now and then it breaks and becomes a squeak, and at other times he seems to be trying to imitate Moozeby: in fact, now I come to think of it, his accent is very much like Moozeby's. I have it—he's a relation of Moozeby's, not Mrs. M.'s; there is a sort of family likeness all round. Never heard that Moozeby had a brother, but he may be a first cousin or something."
At this moment Mrs. Moozeby came up and whispered to Pinniger, "Do you know who that gentleman is? I thought he must be a friend of Mrs. Wimbledon's; but she says she never saw him before in her life. Who has brought him? And I wonder why they didn't introduce him to me, or anything?"
Pinniger and Thripling shook their heads hopelessly.
"I don't at all like his manners!" continued Mrs. Moozeby. "He goes about as if my house belonged to him, and offers people wine and things! Just now, I do believe, he went down into the cellar and fetched up more champagne; and he addresses me as 'My dear' and 'My love'! I do wish my husband would come home! Look! look! He has actually had the impertinence to go up and fetch baby out of bed! I won't have it! It's too much! I don't care who brought him, I shall go and ask him what he means by it all!"
"Kitchee! Kitchee!"
"It's all right, my love," said the stranger, tossing the baby up. "I'm sure baby's had a good sleep, and he wants to see the company. Don't you, Toddlums?"
"Actually knows baby's pet name!" exclaimed Mrs. Moozeby. "I have not the pleasure of knowing who you are, sir; but I consider that you are taking very great liberties in my house, and I must ask you to behave yourself if you remain here. Pray, who brought you here?"
The stranger stared a little at this speech, and then broke into a laugh of great enjoyment, though still with something of puzzledom in it.
"Kitchee! kitchee!" he said between his chuckles. "Mummy's funny, isn't she, Toddlums? Funny, wunny, wee! Fun-ny, wun-ny, widdle-de, wee!"
The infant seemed to enjoy the joke intensely, and laid a slobbery finger on the stranger's nose; but Mrs. Moozeby indignantly snatched it away, and hurried with it upstairs, exclaiming at every step, "Of all the impertinence!" "To think of it!" "Well!"
"In a safe position."
"Very extraordinary!" exclaimed the stranger. "What in the name of heaven can have put her out? Never saw her in such a tantrum." And he rushed upstairs after her; then there came a scream from above, and we hurried up, to find Mrs. M. at bay in a corner, with the baby in a safe position behind her, stamping her foot at the stranger and pouring forth volumes of wild indignation.
The stranger stood in the middle of the room scratching his head in a perplexed way, and occasionally exclaiming "My love!" and "Tut, tut!"
"Gad!" said Pinniger, "mad! Better send for a policeman."
"I do believe she is mad," said the stranger. "But I don't think a policeman would know what to do. Aren't burnt feathers, or smelling salts, or arnica, or something like that, good for this sort of thing?"
"Oh, why doesn't Mr. Moozeby come home?" cried Mrs. M., beating an angry tattoo with her shoe.
The stranger gazed at us and shook his head. "Mad!" he murmured; then he said, "My love, don't you know me?"
"No," cried Mrs. Moozeby, "I do not; and what is more, whoever had the impertinence to bring you here shall never enter this house again!"
"I do hope she won't take to tearing baby limb from limb," said the stranger nervously; "I think I had better try to get it away. If she doesn't know me—her husband—she'll be fancying baby is a rat, or a blackbeetle, or something! Kitchee, kitchee. Hang it—you fellows don't seem to know me! What's come to me? I do believe there's a something about me that—which—that isn't—"
"Clutching at his hair."
He rushed to the cheval glass, gazed at himself a moment, then sank on the floor with his hands clutching at his hair.
"I've muddled it somehow!" he whispered to himself.
"It's all right." said Pinniger, soothingly, advancing with a Japanese fan he had hastily snatched up, and waving it gently before the stranger, to amuse and quiet him. "There's a nice cab coming to fetch you, and a man with nice, bright buttons all down his coat. So nice! Be here in a minute, if you sit nice and still."
"Pinniger, my dear fellow, don't!" said the stranger. "Can't you see I'm—no, I suppose you can't; but I am—Moozeby. I've been precipitating myself, and somehow muddled it. You see, I was anxious to get home here quickly from the City so as to receive the people; but I missed my train, so I found a nice quiet spot in the Temple Gardens and elementalised myself, so that I might re-precipitate myself here at once; but somehow (I fancy I was thinking of a business acquaintance whom I had just left at the bottom of Ludgate-hill) I muddled it, and mixed myself up somehow, and I seem to have come out something like him here and there. You see—yes—he has a little bit of hair right in the middle of his forehead, and here it is; and this is his heavy moustache; and his legs are much longer than mine, and I seem to have one of his and one of my own, and two different kinds of boots, too. Dear, dear! But look here, this mole at the back of my neck, that is mine. Look, my love, see? Mole! It's all right. I must really be chiefly myself, speaking in a general way and on broad lines, while I have that mole. Where that mole is I am; because they always used to distinguish me, as a baby, from other babies of the same size, by means of that mole. Yes, here it is; the large one, with the little tiny one by the side of it, for luck."
"Her harrowed feelings found relief."
Mrs. Moozeby at length persuaded herself to approach him, and examine the mole; then her harrowed feelings found relief in sobs.
"I wish you had never seen those hateful Mahatma books, 'Hysteric Buddhism,' and the rest of them!" she said. "As if you had not quite enough irritating habits before, Robert! And now there's always this precipitating business going on; and I always told you it was bad for your health, especially your digestion, which was always delicate, besides being wicked and flying in the face of Providence! And now just see what you've done—mixed yourself up like this so that nobody can recognise you; and a nice job for Doctor Coddles to get you right again! And then that hateful moustache—very nice to be set against one's meals by festoons of soup and mayonnaise hanging to it! You'll have the kindness, at least, to shave that off at once."
"'Where is my leg? Has anybody seen my nose?'"
"I—really, my dear, I hardly like to. The fact is, I don't feel as if it were altogether my own property. You see, if I returned the other parts to Mownde—that's that business acquaintance, my dear—without the moustache, he mightn't altogether like—but, then, after all, I suppose this one is only a duplicate of his, and he's all right and complete as it is, and knows nothing about it. Oh, dear, it is puzzling; I don't quite understand all the bearings of the thing yet—"
"No," said Mrs. Moozeby. "And it will come to having to keep an inventory of yourself, and go through it every morning to see if you are all there; a nice waste of time, and pretty late it will make you for town! Besides, the untidiness of leaving pieces of yourself all about in different places! I'm sure George and Mary have quite enough work as it is, folding up your clothes that you throw all over the place; and then what a nice example for baby to grow up with before its eyes! How can you expect the servants to be tidy, and put things away, with you for ever asking where your legs are, or whether anyone has seen your nose? I'm sure if these hateful Mahatmas had to manage a house themselves, they would have thought twice before inventing this detestable nonsense!"
Altogether that reception of Mrs. Moozeby's was a failure, and we all left early; for we could not feel that Moozeby, in his existing state, was a proper substitute for himself; and it was difficult to regard him as our host. It is true that the poor fellow did his very best to pull himself together and try to make us at home; he came down and tried to get up some extempore tableaux vivants, but we could perceive that he was tired and out of sorts—in fact, he experienced a great deal of pain in the leg which was not one of his own, and came to the conclusion that that business acquaintance of his must suffer badly from gout or rheumatism, and we thought it would be a relief to him if we all went away.
Next day, being rather anxious about poor Moozeby, I called for Pinniger, and we went together to see how he was getting on. We found him at home as we had expected; for, as he said, it would not be of much use to go to town, as neither the clerks nor anyone else would recognise him; besides which, he had a morbid sensitiveness about venturing out and showing himself, being jerky and spasmodic in his movements in consequence of a difficulty in working the parts which were not his own, and which required practice to get used to.
He was very miserable, poor fellow; among other things, he had developed a violent cold in his nose—or rather, in his business acquaintance's nose. He recollected having noticed Mownde standing in a violent draught in town, and warning him against taking cold; and evidently he had taken cold. Then there was another thing—Moozeby's right hand, which was Mownde's, would keep taking out his watch and holding it up to be looked at, which convinced Moozeby that Mownde had some important engagement that morning; and Moozeby's misery was increased by the uncertainty whether Mownde was really complete in himself, or whether he was waiting for the missing parts before he could keep his appointment.
Poor Moozeby was fearfully perplexed how to act for the best. Several times he was tempted to elementalise himself, with a view to precipitating himself at Mownde's residence: but he was so upset by the muddle he had already made, that all sorts of vague apprehensions held him back, one of them being that he might lose Mownde's pieces irrecoverably on the way, thus doing irreparable harm.
"Moozeby and his fox-terrier."
The worst of it was, Moozeby's fox-terrier would spend his whole time in walking round and round Moozeby on the tips of his paws, and with his legs rigid like those of an automaton, and growling; and the possibility of his deciding on a bite was increased by Mownde's intense aversion to dogs, which caused Moozeby's right hand (in the intervals of taking out the watch) to seize all sorts of objects with the purpose of flinging them at the dog. As this would be absolutely certain to precipitate the threatened attack, Moozeby was forced to keep incessantly on the watch for the vagaries of that hand, which would occasionally (being very quick) seize a lump of coal or something while Moozeby's eye was turned away, and all but succeed in hurling it. Then that hand of Mownde's had a nasty twitch in it—some sort of paralysis—and would, every now and then, pinch Moozeby's ear, or pull his whiskers, causing him to grunt with pain. At length he settled matters for the time by sitting on that hand; and presently the dog went to sleep.
Several weeks passed before poor Moozeby could pluck up courage to attempt to set things right by a further experiment in elementalising himself; but, what with the pressure put upon him by Mrs. Moozeby, who declared her determination to go and live with her mother if he intended to continue going about that guy, and the general unsatisfactory state of the case, he at length braced up his nerves to the attempt. That dog resented the operations from the commencement, and Pinniger had to hold him back; and Mrs. Moozeby had insisted on having Dr. Coddles present in case of accidents.
The poor fellow could not concentrate his mind on the operation, a most essential condition of success. His thoughts would wander to the objects he saw; and at the first try he re-precipitated himself fairly all right, with the exception of the right leg, which was the leg of a table—a facsimile of those supporting the dining table in front of him. Then, while he was trying to concentrate his thoughts on that leg, the rest of him grew nebulous, and faded right away; and we feared the worst. But his voice, apparently from the centre of the earth, murmured: "All right, you fellows, I'm all here in the form of air; only I wish you would put a newspaper or something in front of the fire to prevent some of me being drawn up the chimney by the draught."
We waited breathlessly for a quarter of an hour, then we heard Moozeby's voice saying: "I say, just get down that book, 'Every Man his own Mahatma.' I think it's in that little bookcase by the window. That's it. Now, just turn to page 392, where it tells you how to unravel your elements when you've got 'em in a tangle. Thanks."
"The leg of a table."
More suspense, and then a condensing nebula; and finally the form of Moozeby sitting on the mantelpiece. It was Moozeby this time, but with one strange—very strange—peculiarity; he had one black-and-tan ear like the terrier!
Mrs. Moozeby was dreadfully upset by that ear; and poor M., with a sigh of despair, offered to try again, but his wife put her foot down this once and for all, and absolutely forbade any more of the nonsense.
"We shall have you turning out next," she said angrily, speaking of him as if he were a blancmange, "with the door-knob for a nose, or something of that sort, which would show more! No, you must brush your hair down over that ear and make the best of it, and it serves you right!"
"A very despondent state."
And we left poor Moozeby in a very despondent state, with his black-and-tan ear drooping, ruefully watching Mrs. M., who was employed in burning his collection of Theosophical pamphlets on the fire, while the terrier, who had already detected that ear, sat with one bright eye threateningly fixed upon it, making up his mind.
HAWK KILLED BY TRAIN.
O railway officials it is a well-known fact that the engines of high speed expresses kill small and large heavy flying birds, such as partridges and grouse, in great quantities, sometimes carrying their bodies long distances. A few months ago the writer was shown by a locomotive superintendent of one of the principal northern lines, a dead bird which, strange to say, though a very rapid flyer, had met its doom through the agency of the iron horse. This bird was a sparrow-hawk, and it is now stuffed and may be seen un the Carlton-road Board School Museum, Kentish Town. The driver of the train relates that he was travelling between sixty and seventy miles an hour near Melton, when, just on the point of entering a long tunnel, he observed, fluttering in front of the engine, some object which he at first mistook for a rag, but when, on leaving the tunnel, he went forward, he discovered, to his astonishment, that it was a sparrow-hawk which had become entangled between the hand-rail and smoke-box of the engine, and was held there firmly by the pressure of the wind. It was not quite dead when taken out of this curious death trap, though one eye had been destroyed. There is no doubt that it met its death accidentally, as a hawk can fly quicker than the fastest trains travel—so the drivers say, who often observe them flying low down in the hedgerow and keeping up with the train till some unwary small bird, frightened by the noise, flies out of the fence, when the hawk pounces on it and devours it. This instance of a hawk being killed by a train on the above-mentioned line is unique, and will most probably be new and interesting to our readers.
FIND THEIR RESPECTIVE LORDS.
How I lost palette and patron.
A long farewell.
Visitor: "Why what in the world are you doing with that umbrella?"
Host: "I am going to lend it to you, and I should like to have something to remember it by."
By inadvertence.
Thoughtless Visitor: "Yes, you know, Mrs. Graymaire, the Theosophists hold that the soul, in its migrations, inhabits alternately a male and a female body. Now, for instance, you yourself, in your last existence, were a member of the gentler sex—ah—er—that is, I mean to say Mr. Graymaire was."