A Santa Claus Tragedy.

Otago Witness, Issue 2667, 26 April 1905, Page 74

A Santa Claus Tragedy.

A bashful young man, in a moment of "weakness, once consented to play the part of Santa Claus at the closing exercises of a country school, , , How he overcame his customary pamtul land painfully evident meekness long enough to give himself so entirely into the hands of the enemy, that bashful young man has never yet been able to explain. Nor if he lives to be as old as the Santa Glaus legend does he expect, he says, to be able to do so. . . i ,i • But h© did, and that is the principal thing to be considered, as it is the prelude of the Berio-comio tragedy here set down. Imprimis, let it be stated that the locality of the school was strange to the young man. This may seem unimportant. It isn't. For it is an eternal verity that the fellow who makes a fool of himself where he is known escapes muob. more lightly than he who "butts in" with his folly in a stranger's country. It's natural. Local pride is touched <upon. Imported donkeys, like imported anything else, are looked upon with suspicion, and, if opportunity offers, are fit objects for special attention by the deriding class. When he arrived in the village the young man's reception was not reassuring. It was like this.

"Who's that guy?" he heard a hobbledehoy of ferocious aspect query of another equally hobbledehoyish and ferocious. "Damfino," was the reply. "He's a stranger here." "Hurl a rock at him," was the unfrienclly and alarming advice given instanter by the questioner. And the rock was hurled, missing its mark by a small margin, and throwing the target into almost as <rreat consternation as though it had been thrown true. Then the bashful young man made his first blunder. Instead of walking along in assumed dignity and disregard of the missiles of his "friends," lie deemed it fitting that he should remonstrate. Fatal error. Argument with a. strange hobbledehoy, at a safe distance, is as futile as chasing the wind, and much more exasperating. The only tangible result was tihe substitution of less deadly but more disfiguring mud for the uncompromising rocks, and the speedy bespattering of the newly-arrived with a heterogeneous homogeneity of dirt, in which condition he made a hasty and undignified retreat in the direction of the sohoolhouse, fortunately near enough fco be a harbour of refuge.

Arriving there, in that condition, it was to be expected that his natural bashfulness should ba increased. It was. The scholars, too, were in evidence. Not with rocks ready to be/ hurled, but with inquiring glances and unwelcome attentions which suggested that supreme contempt boys and girls seem naturally to assume in the presence of stranger elders. He arrived at the door in a profuse perspiration, and with a stutter both in his utterance and his locomotion.

Nothing, however, could have been kinder than his reception by the teacher, young, pretty, and roguish. If there had heen none there but she all might have been ■well. But, alas! there was the usual gathering of fond and dotin" parents, most of them bearing in their arms chubby babies too young for school, but thus obtaining- early introduction into the scholastic path. Made, in a moment, the battery of a score of pairs of eyes, deafened by the bedlam of (it seemed) a hundred fretful babies, plunged into an atmosphere of, ax^par entry, 220deg Fahrenheit, with the mercury still ascending, already at his wit's ends, the bashful young man, as may easily be imagined, experienced confusion •worse confounded and looked around for chance of escape.

But anyone who has ever promised to act the fool will bear witness to the fact that there is never a way of escaping from the performance. He found none.

He -was shown to a seat, after having made all kinds of blunders in the course of his introduction to the assembled company. For instance, to a comely mother whose baby was but just through partaking of refreshment at Nature's fount, as Micawber has it, but was 'nevertheless giving vent to doleful complaints, he had suggested that "Perhaps it's toothache."

He ha-d trodden upon the tails oi, ifc seemed, a score of dogs stretched lazily around the stove, and thereby raised a very babel of yelpings. He had clumsily pulled down three mottoes, Peace on Earth," "Christmas Greetings," and "Welcome" in a vain attettnpt to hang his hat on a nail which had precarious hold in the plaster, and in making his way past a bevy of bigger echoed girls ho had rubbed, with his shoulder, a particularly excellent blackboard sketch of a holly bunch with green leaves and red berries, which was thus reduced to a hopeless smudge. It is one of the fallacies of life that a bashful, awkward man is unaware of the blunders ho commits. On the contrary, the gawk is not only- fully cognisant thereof, but a superheated imagination magnifies all his blunders and multiolies them, so that when this unfortunate reached his seat it seemed to him a miracle that the schoolhouse still stood. That it didn't rock on its foundations, after all his awkwardness, seemed little short of a miracle.

The exercises might have given him a respite had it not been that in hurriedly sitting down he had mistaken a woman's hat for a cushion and discovered, as such things are discovered, the penetrating qualities of a hat-pin. And to add to his confusion, his neighbour, a stout woman, ■who found the heat oppressive and her youngest hopeful a, burden, took it as a matter of course that he would like to hold the baby while she rested a few minutes.

But when th« exercises were concluded lio was beckoned by the presiding genius of the affair to repair to the mysterious 2'egions of the ante-Tooni to assume the regulation fSa-nta Claus regalia. How he struggled into the- turkey red tuuic with its trimmings of fluffy white stuff, the pantaIcons and the high boots, two sizes too small, anay b& left to the imagination. Those difficulties war© nothing" compared with the horrible haunting dread that he would make a fool of himself when he had dres.sed, iiotwithstanding that they were added to Iby an accident. In balancing himself on one foot, while he thrust the other into the uncompromising top of a high boot, ho swayed fearfully, and, in imminent danger of falling, grabbed the insecure support of a large bottle of ink, in the window till, uncorked and fuii to ih& tog. iWitji

frantic mopping of his handkerchief he removed the outward evidence on his best clothes of tho largest possible quantity cf ink, and, more than ever coiifused, completed his attire. The mask effectually blinded him, and the best he was capable of was an imperfect vision of the small radius of the floor to be seen through the lower apertures. And thus handicapped he hammered, according to instructions, upon the door, and was admitted.

The roar which his appearance created, appreciative though it may have been, tended only to his greater confusion. Laughter, always painful because of the dread that it wn directed at him ; an indistinguishable, and, therefore, horrible, babel of ejaculations, momentarily deafened him. But someone took him by the hand, someone piloted him to the place of authority, where the tree, in all the finery of Christmas decoration, was an object of wide-eyed admiration, and someone — it must have been that same presiding genius — whispered in his ear, "Now, say something nice to the children." »

"Say something nice to the- children !" To say anything seemed the last possible thing. Something nice was beyond everything. If he had been given the privilege to say something not at all nice, perhaps his bashfulness might l~ave allowed of it, but otherwise, not in the- realms of possibility. And so he stood there, feeling ten thousand times more- awkward than, be looked, and looking ten thousand times more awkward than any deeeat Santa Claris, direct from the Polar latitudes and frozen stiff, could possibly have looked.

Words would not come. An inarticulate gurgle broke the tense silence with ghostly sound suggestive of strangulation. Trembling hands fluttering nervously before and behind him betrayed sometning of what was going on inside. Ifc was truly "suspense no longer tp be borne," and again the presiding genius came to the rescue. "Now," said she, "Santa Claus will distribute the presents."

The inarticulate jrurgle of semi-strangula-tion gave way to the spasmodic ejaculation of assent, and the sympathy-deserving martyr of the occasion turned with evident relief to the tree.

Now, anyone with a modicum of sense will know that the fleecy attire of the regulation Sbnta Claus is in dangerous proximity when it approaches near to a Christmas tree lighted with candk-s. But whatever modicum of sense this young man had was long gone glimmering, and as, willing — nay, feverishly anxious, — to do something — anything I—to1 — to relieve the situation, he turned frantically toward where there seemed something to be' done, his tunic, with its cottony trimming, impinged upon the bla#2, and before he could be told he was an illuminated Santa Claus without intending it.

Someone^— it seemed to him a hundred — grabbed him or struck .him all the kinds of bLows of which he had read in tbe anrals of the prize ring. He was upper, cue on the jaw, left-hooked on the ribs, had open-handed slaps all over him, one! in a brace of craoksT the Santa Claus disguise was ripped bodily from him, and ho stood there .

Well, in donning the fancy rig he found ifc -necessary to remove more clothing than it is customary- for a- man _o throw off in a mixed audience, and when the costume was thus rudely torn away he presented the appoaraace of a much-heated pose plastique. To hide his confusion he grabbed his pocket handkerchief, which in a moment ■of' aberratio.i he lad inserted in the top of his long-boot, and mopped Lis perspiring face. The looks of concern and the exclamations of anxiety gave place in a moment to laughter, and realising that nothing but the piofcare of an ink-bedaubed, scantily-clad, unheroio Santo. Claus could have occasioned such an immediate change, he made one bound in the direction of the door, found ifc by the greatest chanoe, tnd disappeared amid the rousing cheers of ihe admiring throng. How he ma-iagec^ to replace sufficient apparel to make- his appearance on the street not a misdemeanour, how he found his way home, what people thought about him — all these are as groat mysteries to him now, years after, as is the question. "When will I ever forget the time I plavcd Santa Claus?"