The Collected Works | Page 7

the eve of the Fancy Ball;

So a kiss or two was nothing to you
Or any one else at all.
Jenny would go in a domino--
Pretty and pink but warm;
While I
attended, clad in a splendid
Austrian uniform.
Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged
Early that afternoon,

At Number Four to waltz no more,
But to sit in the dusk and
spoon.
I wish you to see that Jenny and Me
Had barely exchanged our troth;

So a kiss or two was strictly due
By, from, and between us both.
When Three was over, an eager lover,
I fled to the gloom outside;

And a Domino came out also
Whom I took for my future bride.
That is to say, in a casual way,
I slipped my arm around her;
With a
kiss or two (which is nothing to you),
And ready to kiss I found her.
She turned her head and the name she said
Was certainly not my own;

But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek
She fled and left me
alone.
Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame
She'd doffed her domino;

And I had embraced an alien waist--
But I did not tell her so.

Next morn I knew that there were two
Dominoes pink, and one
Had
cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian House,
Our big Political gun.
Sir J. was old, and her hair was gold,
And her eye was a blue cerulean;

And the name she said when she turned her head
Was not in the
least like "Julian."
THE MAN WHO COULD WRITE
Shun--shun the Bowl! That fatal, facile drink
Has ruined many geese
who dipped their quills in 't;
Bribe, murder, marry, but steer clear of
Ink
Save when you write receipts for paid-up bills in 't.
There may be silver in the "blue-black"--all
I know of is the iron and
the gall.
Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen,
Is a dismal failure--is a
Might-have-been.
In a luckless moment he discovered men
Rise to
high position through a ready pen.
Boanerges Blitzen argued
therefore--"I,
With the selfsame weapon, can attain as high."
Only
he did not possess when he made the trial,
Wicked wit of C-lv-n,
irony of L--l.
[Men who spar with Government need, to back their blows,

Something more than ordinary journalistic prose.]
Never young Civilian's prospects were so bright,
Till an Indian paper
found that he could write:
Never young Civilian's prospects were so
dark,
When the wretched Blitzen wrote to make his mark.
Certainly
he scored it, bold, and black, and firm,
In that Indian paper--made his
seniors squirm,
Quoted office scandals, wrote the tactless truth--

Was there ever known a more misguided youth?
When the Rag he
wrote for praised his plucky game,
Boanerges Blitzen felt that this
was Fame;
When the men he wrote of shook their heads and swore,

Boanerges Blitzen only wrote the more:

Posed as Young Ithuriel, resolute and grim,
Till he found promotion
didn't come to him;
Till he found that reprimands weekly were his lot,

And his many Districts curiously hot.
Till he found his furlough strangely hard to win,
Boanerges Blitzen
didn't care to pin:
Then it seemed to dawn on him something wasn't
right--
Boanerges Blitzen put it down to "spite";
Languished in a District desolate and dry;
Watched the Local
Government yearly pass him by;
Wondered where the hitch was;
called it most unfair.

That was seven years ago--and he still is there!
MUNICIPAL
"Why is my District death-rate low?"
Said Binks of Hezabad.
"Well,
drains, and sewage-outfalls are
"My own peculiar fad.
"I learnt a lesson once, It ran
"Thus," quoth that most veracious
man:--
It was an August evening and, in snowy garments clad,
I paid a round
of visits in the lines of Hezabad;
When, presently, my Waler saw, and
did not like at all,
A Commissariat elephant careering down the Mall.
I couldn't see the driver, and across my mind it rushed
That that
Commissariat elephant had suddenly gone musth.
I didn't care to meet him, and I couldn't well get down,
So I let the
Waler have it, and we headed for the town.
The buggy was a new one and, praise Dykes, it stood the strain, Till the
Waler jumped a bullock just above the City Drain;
And the next that I
remember was a hurricane of squeals,
And the creature making

toothpicks of my five-foot patent wheels.
He seemed to want the owner, so I fled, distraught with fear, To the
Main Drain sewage-outfall while he snorted in my ear-- Reached the
four-foot drain-head safely and, in darkness and despair, Felt the brute's
proboscis fingering my terror-stiffened hair.
Heard it trumpet on my shoulder--tried to crawl a little higher-- Found
the Main Drain sewage outfall blocked, some eight feet up, with mire;
And, for twenty reeking minutes, Sir, my very marrow froze, While the
trunk was feeling blindly for a purchase on my toes!
It missed me by a fraction, but my hair was turning grey
Before they
called the drivers up and dragged the brute away.
Then I sought the City Elders, and my words were very plain. They
flushed that four-foot drain-head and--it never choked