Marginal Comments A CHANGE OF FOCUS
By JAN SMUTTIER
THE best cure for optical strain is a complete change of focus. When the eye is exhausted from watching the inexplicable antics of human beings, clap it to a telescope or a microscope : the behaviour of stars and beetles, though scarcely less baffling, will come as a relief. It was all very well to tell myself this, last night, in a mood of sickened weariness at the almost unbroken gloom of the world's news. But a south-west gale was raging outside and rain streamed relentlessly down the windows ; both astronomy and entomology were out of the question. So I was compelled, as one too often is, to fall back upon half-measures ; if a drastic change of focus was im- possible, then a slight one would have to do. I put aside the London 'papers and took up the local one instead ; there would be solace, I felt, in its small babbling chronicle of flower-shows and whist-drives, amateur theatricals and harvest-homes. Not, as I well know, that peace is the key-note, or even the dominant one, of country life : every village is a microcosm, and flouncing out of council-rooms in a huff is apao g parochial, red l, raeswinell tooth andinternational, sport ; nature, n and claw, can still deal some pretty telling blows ; and there are always tithes. But on the whole it seemed likely that. I. should be soothed rather than disquieted by the local news. • It was with a double sense of shock, therefore, that I read the first item which caught my eye, namely, that lep loaei Alfred Nettipole, itinerant vendor b or eeTin charged dbY with the Arktiko Ice-Cream Company, embezzlement ; embezzlement, to be exact, of " ice- cream or its equivalent in money to the value of £7 4s. 2d." tphroeasummerch i ng along ; n g o w Pr ioeadd, I knew the man well. The ingratiating Wilde of his tricycle-bell had been heard ap twice or three times a day all Pied- Piperish skill he conjured children out of the houses and pennies out of their parents' pockets ; and his wares were as appetising to the palate as their names—Fooling Kups, Ice-oh-Bars and the like—were repellent to the sensitive mind. But it was not only because I knew the man that I felt disturbed, though one is always sorry to see one's friends in the Police Court. What really worried me was the idea of any ice-cream man going to the bad. I had always instinctively thought of them as being a race whose integrity was above suspicion. If it is trite, as we were taught at school, that you cannot touch pitch without being defiled, then t to make you as handling a holgofs ice- cream, day in, day out, ottih 'driven snow. Sewermen and street-scavengers, now-- there would be some excuse for them leading corrupt lives ; fishmongers could be forgiven for becoming slippery customers, and butchers for being bloody- minded ; the moral sense of horse-ropers and secondhand- car-dealers is notoriously but pardonably warped by the influence of the cranky difficult creatures which they buy and sell ; but to think of an ice-cream man—that Kum- rade of the Kiddies, that white-clad purveyor of mass- produced and immaculate delight—straying from the frigid path of honour, is aesthetically, as well as ethically, shocking. My only hope is that the charge may yet turn out to be a complete fabrication on the part of some malicious galaktokrystallophobe.
Evidently my change of focus had not been a big enough one after all. I laid down the local paper with a sigh, picked up Bowater's Knots and Splices, and .spent the rest of the evening trying to make .a dottb!e failing beetles, there is a wall-and-crown . Failing stars, wealth of comfort in the passionless intricacies of rope.
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