I have—­now I come to think of it—­another objection to the modern Christmas.  It would be affectation to pretend not to know that there are many Jews living in England, and in London especially.  I have always had a deep respect for that race, their distinction in intellect and in character.  Being not one of them, I may in their behalf put a point which themselves would be the last to suggest.  I hope they will acquit me of impertinence in doing this.  You, in your turn, must acquit me of sentimentalism.  The Jews are a minority, and as such must take their chances.  But may not a majority refrain from pressing its rights to the utmost?  It is well that we should celebrate Christmas heartily, and all that.  But we could do so without an emphasis that seems to me, in the circumstances, ’tother side good taste.  “Good taste” is a hateful phrase.  But it escaped me in the heat of the moment.  Alas!

THE FEAST

By

J*S*PH C*NR*D

The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the forest and the river.  Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars.  Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at the hut’s mouth.  In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.

The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel.  Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint.  Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage went through the farce of growth—­that farce old and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.

Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so.  Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so as not to excite him from sleep.  Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another in thousands.  The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back into their camps.

The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely.  With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around.  The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night.  So far so good.  The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own interests.  He regarded himself, passing his hands over his skin.