“I think I would rather not hear it just now,” said Alice politely.
“It is expressly intended for publication,” said Humpty Dumpty; “I don’t suppose there’ll be a paper to-morrow that won’t be talking about it.”
“In that case I suppose I may as well hear it,” said Alice, with resignation.
“The scene,” said Humpty Dumpty, “is Before Ladysmith, and the time—well, the time is After Colenso:
To tell him—if you must, you might.
(The weather was extremely hot).
How would you do it, if you did?
And then I wondered if I ought.”
“It’s dreadfully hard to understand,” said Alice.
“It gets easier as it goes on,” said Humpty Dumpty, and resumed—
They put dead horses in the stream;
At least I never held my peace.
I could not hit upon the door.
It would be well to persevere.
They said it very loud and plain.
“Why, what a hurry they are in!”
Observe, I got there just the same.
Well, show him to me, if you can.
“Thank you very much,” said Alice; “it’s very interesting, but I’m afraid it won’t help to cool the atmosphere much.”
“I could tell you lots more like that,” Humpty Dumpty began, but Alice hastily interrupted him.
“I hear a lot of fighting going on in the wood; don’t you think I had better hear the rest some other time?”
ALICE IN A FOG
“The Duke and Duchess!” said the White Rabbit nervously, as it went scurrying past; “they may be here at any moment, and I haven’t got it yet.”
“Hasn’t got what?” wondered Alice.
“A rhyme for Cornwall,” said the Rabbit, as if in answer to her thought; “borne well, yawn well”—and he pattered away into the distance, dropping in his hurry a folded paper that he had been carrying.
“What have you got there?” asked the Cheshire Cat as Alice picked up the paper and opened it.
“It seems to be a kind of poetry,” said Alice doubtfully; “at least,” she added, “some of the words rhyme and none of them appear to have any particular meaning.”
“What is it about?” asked the Cat.
“Well, some one seems to be coming somewhere from everywhere else, and to get a mixed reception:
“I’ve heard something like that before,” said the Cat; “it went on, if I remember, ‘Your aunt has the pen of the gardener.’”
“There’s nothing about that here,” said Alice; “supposing she didn’t weep when the time came?”
“She would if she had to read all that stuff,” said the Cat.
“And then it goes on—
“That doesn’t help us unless we know how the swallow came,” observed the Cat. “If he went as the swallow usually travels he would have won the Deutsch Prize.”
Now it hath winged its way to winters green.”
“There seems to have been some urgent reason for avoiding the swallow,” continued Alice. “Then all sorts of things happened to the Almanac:
“You see there were two dawns to every noon and evening—it must have been dreadfully confusing.”
“It would be at first, of course,” agreed the Cat.
“I think it must have been that extra dawn that
or else it was the Flag.”
“What flag?”
“Well, the flag that some one found,
“Would you mind explaining,” said the Cat, “which was doing the scouring and furrowing?”
“The flag,” said Alice, “or the some one. It isn’t exactly clear, and it doesn’t make sense either way. Anyhow, wherever the flag was it floated o’er the Free.”
“Come, that tells us something. Whoever it was must have avoided Dartmoor and St. Helena.”
Young Commonwealths you found.”
“There’s a great deal of wandering in the poem,” observed the Cat.
“You sailed from us to them, from them to us,” continued Alice.
“That isn’t new, either. It should go on: ‘You all returned from him to them, though they were mine before.’”
“It doesn’t go on quite like that,” said Alice; “it ends up with a lot of words that I suppose were left over and couldn’t be fitted in anywhere else:
Imperial Power.”
“That,” said the Cat, “is the cleverest thing in the whole poem. People see that at the end, and then they read it through to see what on earth it’s about.”
“I’d give sixpence to any one who can explain it,” said Alice.
ALICE HAS TEA AT THE HOTEL CECIL
The March Hare and the Dormouse and the Hatter were seated at a very neglected-looking tea-table; they were evidently in agonised consideration of something—even the Dormouse, which was asleep, had a note of interrogation in its tail.
“No room!” they shouted, as soon as they caught sight of Alice.
“There’s lots of room for improvement,” said Alice, as she sat down.
“You’ve got no business to be here,” said the March Hare.
“And if you had any business you wouldn’t be here, you know,” said the Hatter; “I hope you don’t suppose this is a business gathering. What will you have to eat?” he continued.
Alice looked at a long list of dishes with promising names, but nearly all of them seemed to be crossed off.
“That list was made nearly seven years ago, you know,” said the March Hare, in explanation.
“But you can always have patience,” said the Hatter. “You begin with patience and we do the rest.” And he leaned back and seemed prepared to do a lot of rest.
“Your manners want mending,” said the March Hare suddenly to Alice.
“They don’t,” she replied indignantly.
“It’s very rude to contradict,” said the Hatter; “you would like to hear me sing something.”
Alice felt that it would be unwise to contradict again, so she said nothing, and the Hatter began:
How I wonder more and more,
As about the veldt you hop
When you really mean to stop.
“Talking about stopping,” interrupted the March Hare anxiously, “I wonder how my timepiece is behaving.”
He took out of his pocket a large chronometer of complicated workmanship, and mournfully regarded it.
“It’s dreadfully behind the times,” he said, giving it an experimental shake. “I would take it to pieces at once if I was at all sure of getting the bits back in their right places.”
“What is the matter with it?” asked Alice.
“The wheels seem to get stuck,” said the March Hare. “There is too much Irish butter in the works.”
“Ruins the thing from a dramatic point of view,” said the Hatter; “too many scenes, too few acts.”
“The result is we never have time to get through the day’s work. It’s never even time for a free breakfast-table; we do what we can for education at odd moments, but we shall all die of old age before we have a moment to spare for social duties.”
“You might lose a lot if you run your business in that way,” said Alice.
“Not in this country,” said the March Hare. “You see, we have a Commission on everything that we don’t do.”
“The Dormouse must tell us a story,” said the Hatter, giving it a sharp pinch.
The Dormouse awoke with a start, and began as though it had been awake all the time: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe——”
“I know,” said Alice, “she had so many children that she didn’t know what to do.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said the Dormouse, “you lack the gift of imagination. She put most of them into Treasuries and Foreign Offices and Boards of Trade, and all sorts of unlikely places where they could learn things.”
“What did they learn?” asked Alice.
“Painting in glowing colours, and attrition, and terminology (that’s the science of knowing when things are over), and iteration (that’s the same thing over again), and drawing——”
“What did they draw?”
“Salaries. And then there were classes for foreign languages. And such language!” (Here the March Hare and the Hatter shut their eyes and took a big gulp from their tea-cups.) “However, I don’t think anybody attended to them.”
The Dormouse broke off into a chuckle which ended in a snore, and as no one seemed inclined to wake it up again Alice thought she might as well be going.
When she looked back the Hatter and the March Hare were trying to stiffen the Dormouse out into the attitude of a lion guardant. “But it will never pass for anything but a Dormouse if it will snore so,” she remarked to herself.
ALICE GOES TO CHESTERFIELD
Alice noticed a good deal of excitement going on among the Looking-Glass creatures: some of them were hurrying off expectantly in one direction, as fast as their legs would carry them, while others were trying to look as if nothing in particular was about to happen.
“Those mimsy-looking birds,” she said, catching sight of a group that did not look in the best of spirits, “those must be Borogoves. I’ve read about them somewhere; in some parts of the country they have to be protected. And, I declare, there is the White King coming through the Wood.”
Alice went to meet the King, who was struggling with a very unwieldy pencil to write something in a notebook. “It’s a memorandum of my feelings, in case I forget them,” he explained. “Only,” he added, “I’m not quite sure that I meant to put it that way.”
Alice peeped over his shoulder and read: “The High Commissioner may tumble off his post; he balances very badly.”
“Could you tell me,” she asked, “what all the excitement is about just now?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said the White King, “unless it’s the awakening.”
“The what?” said Alice.
“The Red King, you know; he’s been asleep for ever so long, and he’s going to wake up to-day. Not that it makes any difference that I can see—he talks just as loud when he’s asleep.”
Alice remembered having seen the Red King, in rose-coloured armour that had got a little rusty, sleeping uneasily in the thickest part of the wood.
“The fact is,” the White King went on, “some of them think we’re only a part of his dream, and that we shall all go ‘piff’ when he wakes up. That is what makes them so jumpy just now. Oh,” he cried, giving a little jump himself, “there go some more!”
“What are they?” asked Alice, as several strange creatures hurtled past, like puff-balls in a gale.
“They’re the Slithy Toves,” said the King, “Libimps and Jubjubs and Bandersnatches. They’re always gyring and gimbling wherever they can find a wabe.”
“Where are they all going in such a hurry?” Alice asked.
“They’re going to the meeting to hear the Red King,” the White King said, in rather a dismal tone. “They’ve all got latchkeys,” he went on, “but they’d better not stay out too late.”
Here the White King gave another jump. “What’s the matter?” asked Alice.
“Why, I’ve just remembered that I’ve got a latchkey too, my very own! I must go and find it.” And away went the White King into the wood.
“How these kings do run about!” thought Alice. “It seems to be one of the Rules of the Game that when one moves the other moves also.”
The next moment there was a deafening outburst of drums, and Alice saw the Red King rushing through the wood with a big roll of paper.
“Dear me!” she heard him say to himself as he passed, “I hope I sha’n’t be late for the meeting, and I wonder how they’ll take my speech.”
Alice noticed that the Borogoves made no attempt to follow, but tried to look as if they didn’t care a bit. And away in the distance she heard a sort of derisive booing, with a brogue in it. “That must be the Mome Raths outgribing,” she thought.
THE AGED MAN
To prick the Bishops’ calves,
I search for Royal Commissions, too,
To use as safety valves.”
[See the Debate on Temperance Legislation in the House of Lords, May 14, 1901.]
SPADES IN WONDERLAND
The Red King: Harcourt, Grey, and Lloyd-George are all putting their own colours on, I think I’d better paint it myself.]
The Gresham Press,
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
WOKING AND LONDON.