gift of treading on everybody’s tenderest place. They talk in
America of a man’s ‘Platform.’ I should describe the Platform of
the Long-lost as a Platform composed of other people’s corns, on
which he had stumped his way, with all his might and main, to his
present position. It is needless to add that Flipfield’s great
birthday went by the board, and that he was a wreck when I
pretended at parting to wish him many happy returns of it.
There is another class of birthdays at which I have so frequently
assisted, that I may assume such birthdays to be pretty well known
to the human race. My friend Mayday’s birthday is an example. The
guests have no knowledge of one another except on that one day in
the year, and are annually terrified for a week by the prospect of
meeting one another again. There is a fiction among us that we
have uncommon reasons for being particularly lively and spirited on
the occasion, whereas deep despondency is no phrase for the
expression of our feelings. But the wonderful feature of the case
is, that we are in tacit accordance to avoid the subject – to keep
it as far off as possible, as long as possible – and to talk about
anything else, rather than the joyful event. I may even go so far
as to assert that there is a dumb compact among us that we will
pretend that it is NOT Mayday’s birthday. A mysterious and gloomy
Being, who is said to have gone to school with Mayday, and who is
so lank and lean that he seriously impugns the Dietary of the
establishment at which they were jointly educated, always leads us,
as I may say, to the block, by laying his grisly hand on a decanter
and begging us to fill our glasses. The devices and pretences that
I have seen put in practice to defer the fatal moment, and to
interpose between this man and his purpose, are innumerable. I
have known desperate guests, when they saw the grisly hand
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
approaching the decanter, wildly to begin, without any antecedent
whatsoever, ‘That reminds me – ‘ and to plunge into long stories.
When at last the hand and the decanter come together, a shudder, a
palpable perceptible shudder, goes round the table. We receive the
reminder that it is Mayday’s birthday, as if it were the
anniversary of some profound disgrace he had undergone, and we
sought to comfort him. And when we have drunk Mayday’s health, and
wished him many happy returns, we are seized for some moments with
a ghastly blitheness, an unnatural levity, as if we were in the
first flushed reaction of having undergone a surgical operation.
Birthdays of this species have a public as well as a private phase.
My ‘boyhood’s home,’ Dullborough, presents a case in point. An
Immortal Somebody was wanted in Dullborough, to dimple for a day
the stagnant face of the waters; he was rather wanted by
Dullborough generally, and much wanted by the principal hotelkeeper.
The County history was looked up for a locally Immortal
Somebody, but the registered Dullborough worthies were all
Nobodies. In this state of things, it is hardly necessary to
record that Dullborough did what every man does when he wants to
write a book or deliver a lecture, and is provided with all the
materials except a subject. It fell back upon Shakespeare.
No sooner was it resolved to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday in
Dullborough, than the popularity of the immortal bard became
surprising. You might have supposed the first edition of his works
to have been published last week, and enthusiastic Dullborough to
have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, whether it had
ever done half that, but that is a private opinion.) A young
gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two years had
enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the sonnet into
the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits of Shakespeare
broke out in the bookshop windows, and our principal artist painted
a large original portrait in oils for the decoration of the diningroom.