Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/211

 for a score of guests, yet Luke feasted alone. This was his compensation for the misery he had endured during that period of his life when, already accustomed to luxury, he had been subjected to indignity and want. While everybody else feasted he had starved. Tit for tat. He now invited himself to a gorgeous banquet, from which everybody else was excluded. Luke was a very bad fellow, but there was something in his nature that harmonised with my own. I felt more glad than I ought to have been when he was regaling himself in his selfish fashion; less glad than I ought to have been when his brother returned to life, and retributive justice hurled him from his lofty eminence.

My feelings, when I brought home the puppet and laid it on the parlour table before me, must have been extremely similar to those of Luke when he first sat down to his feast. I had had my period of privation. I had not indeed suffered poverty, but I had lost the capability of being amused, which alone makes life tolerable. The people standing round the show from which Punch squeaked forth his paltry ribaldry had roared with laughter, while I was altogether unmoved. Now the tables were about to be turned. Punch should squeak for me alone; and that very fact might be sufficient to season his wretched jokes even for my dull palate.

One of my readers, looking extremely sagacious, wonders that I could be such a fool as to lay Punch on the table and expect him to get up of his own accord; and is willing to explain how the hand of the human performer, craftily inserted into the puppet, is the sole cause of its brief vitality. If, having purchased Punch, I had managed him after the approved fashion, moving his arms with two of my fingers and his head with a third, there would at least have been a method in my madness.

Exactly, I ought to have been amused by witnessing the twiddle of my own fingers. In that case a handkerchief knotted into that infantile semblance of a confessional, wherewith nurses vainly try to amuse squalling children, would have answered my purpose. The verb "amuse" rose before me in the purely passive form. I did not want to amuse myself, but to be amused—that is, by somebody or something that was not myself, and the sight of Punch in the street suggested to me that the puppet was the destined source of amusement.

So far so good; but, as the sagacious reader has perceived, I have not yet accounted for my extreme folly in believing that Punch was capable of spontaneous motion. The wish that the inanimate figure might squeak and jump about was ridiculous enough, but it was not without precedent. The German poet Heine once wished that every paving-stone might have an oyster in its shell, and that the earth might be visited by heavy showers of champagne; and a town where the window-panes are made of barley-sugar, and ready-roasted pigs, with knives and forks stuck into their bodies, run about squeaking, "Come, eat me"— such a town has for years been the coveted Utopia of many an infant epicure. But why, in my case, did the floating desire condense itself into a firm belief? Why did such a trivial wish become father to such a very audacious thought?

If the sagacious reader persists in this question he has never known what it is to be really in love. For if he has experienced the sort of love, out of which such works as Romeo and Juliet can be fashioned, he must be perfectly aware that there is a state of mind in which wish and belief are entirely commensurate with each other. Tell a lover, fired with the sort of passion, which I now have in view, that his idol is quick-tempered, greedy, vain, selfish—give her, in short, any attribute that militates against perfection, and support your assertions with any amount of evidence, and you will find that the false faultless image, which is set up in his own mind, is not to be overthrown by living witness or by lively argument. No; he worships a mental ideal, and the earthly figure which he has chosen as its corresponding actuality must exactly resemble it, in spite of every obstacle. When the idol, so strenuously bolstered up, falls down, it comes with a crash, as in the case of Othello.

Well, the desire of seeing a spontaneously jumping Punch, had with me reached the intensity of belief, and as the figure lay on the table before me, I honestly expected it to get up and execute some of its wonted feats. It was exactly eight o'clock when I commenced my experiment, and when the timepiece had struck the half-hour I was still, with fixed eyes, staring at a motionless Punch. When I heard the indication that an hour was completed, I was in despair.

For about ten minutes, as I learned by the timepiece, my mind was a perfect blank; but I was roused by a sharp ring at the bell. Impelled by I know not what instinct, I strode to the street door, and tearing it open, saw an uncouth person with unkempt hair, holding in his hand a vessel, apparently of tarnished silver, which he proffered for a moment and then withdrew. Following the motion of his arm, I snatched it from him, and closing the door with a bang, rushed back into the dining-room, an inner voice telling me that I now held an elixir of life which would animate the puppet. I sprinkled a few drops on the rigid face, and inclined my own head towards it with feverish expectation. A smart stroke on be left ear, causing me considerable pain, startled me from my contemplation. I raised myself to an erect posture, and to my infinite delight, saw Punch sitting upright, and brandishing his cudgel with more than wonted vigour. (By the way, I should have said before that I put this weapon in its proper place, with the arms of the figure folded across it, when I first laid my purchase on the table.)

Punch not only moved, and rattled his tiny legs, but his eyes seemed to flash with a vivid intelligence which I had never perceived in the show, and he appeared to meditate some decisive action. He did not meditate long, but aimed a