Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  Somewhere in the third hour, stunned into near-insensibility by the strenuous regard of strangers, Sir John found himself wishing he had something to draw with. That whiteness of tablecloth, between the dessert-plate and the port, looked so inviting. If he just had pen and ink, he could insert a porthole, or a trapdoor, and vanish through it like a hare.

  Instead, he sat motionless, a slumped and wizened figure, cured and hardened by cigar-smoke, not quite dead but visibly eroding beneath the punishing waves of oratory, as platoons of grim-faced volunteers marched to the dais to pay their respects to the man of the hour. Who knew the room, the city, England to hold so many after-dinner speakers? Surely even the footmen would be persuaded to say a few words.

  Sir John roused himself a bit when the grey-haired, grey-faced, grey-mannered man beside him rose to speak. As the highest-ranking person in attendance, surely the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour, MP, DL, Leader of the House of Commons, signalled that the end was near. But Sir John’s attention wandered when Balfour displayed a downright parliamentary inability to get to the point. The Leader’s route to the subject of Sir John Tenniel was serpentine, led over boulders into thickets of nettles. He expressed himself on multiple topics, including Parliament’s raising Edward VII’s salary to 470,000 pounds per annum, which the Leader called “a small enough acknowledgement of the large debt owed His Majesty by grateful subjects the whole world round.” This occasioned much cheering, and drinking of toasts, and further delays, as Sir John stared grimly at the few sheets of dispensed-with manuscript face down to the Leader’s left, and the much thicker stack of yet-to-be-heard-from pages to the Leader’s right. He wished he could draw a cricket-bat and smash Balfour’s head with it.

  When Balfour finally began talking about Sir John, the subject of his remarks nearly missed it, having become distracted by a stain. Sir John found himself strangely fixated on the single blemish on the Leader’s immaculate shirtfront, too irregular and ill placed to be a button or a stud.

  “For the past fifty years,” intoned the Leader, “no political issue, no world crisis, no chapter in the history of our empire has escaped the witty and knowing attention of Sir John Tenniel, who in the pages of Punch has made himself an icon of an era second only to our late Queen, who bestowed upon him the first knighthood ever granted a popular cartoonist. Like many of you, I know the experience of being immortalized by his pen, and no subject of his ever laughed the louder at seeing himself made foolish on the page.”

  Coals to Newcastle, Sir John thought, to the extent he could think of anything but the Leader’s shirt-stain. What was he looking at, precisely?

  Had this been a black-tie breakfast, Sir John would have assumed a spot of marmalade. Given the hour, it was more likely a dab of mustard, or a smear of butter from a tumbling roll. Gravity was the foe of etiquette. The stain was yellowish-orange, at any rate. It was also—Sir John blinked and rubbed his good eye to confirm this—moving. The whatsit was notably nearer the great man’s lapel. It seemed to expand—no. It was a live thing, shaking itself and unfurling its wings.

  The Leader droned on, oblivious. Sir John fought the urge to reach over and brush aside the wasp (for surely it was a wasp), or to pop his napkin at it, like a schoolboy at target-practice during prayers. Surely this was simply not done; or, if ’twere done, surely the Leader had aides, trained public servants, to do it.

  But no trained public servants appeared, and the Leader seemed untroubled. No one else seemed to notice them, either—not the first wasp, the vanguard, the one now inscribing arabesques on the Leader’s shirtfront, not the demolition-wasp rubbing its forelegs together with satisfaction in the ruins of a pudding, not the Alpine wasp scaling the champagne flute, not the Magellan wasp pacing the circumference of the Leader’s great bald head, not the explorer wasp tickling a route through the hairs on the back of Sir John’s drawing hand.

  Stifling a cry, Sir John flapped his hand. The evicted wasp rose lazily, like a balloon ascending, and hovered at eye level but beyond a napkin’s reach. The wasp regarded Sir John, and Sir John regarded the wasp.

  Twoscore wasps darted and circled and crawled everywhere Sir John looked, over and amid and upon the seated, smiling guests, who might have been waxworks for all they cared. A waiter emerged from the kitchen bearing a round tray that held a swarming pile of wasps in the rough shape of a coffee-urn. These began to peel off from the mass, disperse all over the room, and Sir John was bracing himself to stand and scream in revulsion and outrage when he felt his shoulder seized in the too-firm, too-familiar clamp of the Leader’s hand.

  “Zir John Tenniel,” said the Leader, “I hope you will not take it amizz, old friend, if we all zzzing the zzzzong that befitzzzzz you zzzzzzo well.”

  The hand on Sir John’s shoulder was no longer a hand, but a single bristled, insectoid claw, its grip chitinous and sharp, and the Leader was no longer the Leader, but a monstrous man-sized wasp in evening wear. Sir John saw his open-mouthed horror reflected a hundredfold in the faceted serving-platters of the creature’s compound eyes. The Leader-wasp wore as best it could—at an indifferent angle between its antennae—a yellowing wig, the sort worn by old men when Sir John was a boy.

  Pinned and unable to move, Sir John registered the rumbling, rushing sound of the floor falling away, but it was only two hundred dignitaries pulling back their chairs and standing as one, to roar out lustily as the Leader-wasp led the chorus.

  “For he’zzz a jolly good fellow,

  For he’zzz a jolly good fellow—”

  Each table held at least one man-wasp, and an especially drunken table in the back held eight Fleet-Street wasps, swaying perilously as they sang, “And zzzo zzzay all of uzzzz!”

  The din was frightful, half human bellowing, half a buzzing like a plague of Egypt. The Leader’s voice was gone entirely over to buzz, as it frantically jerked its free claw in wild mismatch to anything resembling a tempo. The back of its dinner-jacket surged as its constrained wings struggled to break free.

  In the front row of banquet-tables, a man-wasp shed its dinner jacket, its cummerbund collapsing around its impossibly narrow waist. It rose, wings a blur, trousers too short for its dangling, multijointed legs as it ascended headfirst into the chandelier and hung there, nestled and half-hidden as if feeding, its legs kicking in lazy joy.

  “For he’s a jolly good zzzzzz,

  Zzzz nobody zzz zzzz!”

  * * *

  “Dropping the Pilot.”

  The once-great Bismarck, builder of modern Germany, descends the gangplank for the last time, noble in humiliation. The fingertips of his left hand brush the hull as he passes. The hand does not bear his weight, just reminds the old man of the rough timbers he planed and polished, the wheel that will be steered by others forevermore. Behind and above Bismarck, amid a cross-hatch of pen-and-ink shadow, lurks the Kaiser, who leans on his elbows and watches the pilot go, his own waxed moustache looking pasted-on, part of a child’s costume at a summer fete, a faint echo of Bismarck’s walruslike bristles. Behind the Kaiser’s mummer-moustache, beneath his bejewelled crown, is the face of a wasp—an elderly, querulous, wholly un-drawable wasp. Beneath its crown oozes a yellowing wig, like butter-icing that melts during a long mayoral speech and slides off a plum-cake in the sun.

  * * *

  “But, Father,” said young John, “can’t we stop for today? I’m tired.”

  He knew instantly that he had said the wrong thing. In speaking so rashly, he also had proven his fatigue, beyond all doubt; but this was no comfort.

  After a pause, Father smiled. A stranger would have thought it a kindly, forgiving smile—but John, at age twenty, was no stranger.

  As he raised his epee once more, Father seemed to stand even straighter, if that were possible. His moustache was splendid, his carriage impeccable, his muscles taut beneath his Arctic-white shirt. He was every inch the Huguenot dancing-master of Kensington. If he ever sweated, his eldest son had yet to cause it.

 
“Another hit, I think,” said Father, and waited.

  John’s bottom was against the courtyard wall as he leaned forward, hands on knees, sucking in air, almost spent. Seeing Father’s resolve, he tried to breathe normally, and mostly succeeded. He gathered his thoughts, then stood, picked up his epee, which seemed heavier than before.

  “If you need quick energy,” Father said, “I suggest a sugar cube.”

  John tried to ignore this. A sugar cube! As if he were a skittish horse. Above him, in the eaves, wasps came and went from what must be a hidden nest a-borning. John envied the wasps their purpose, their freedom.

  He walked in a circle, flexing his sore arms, cleaving the air with his blade. He felt uncertain, awkward: a right-hand foot in a left-hand shoe.

  This was, in theory, only a practice round, impromptu, because Father was home early—from some country earl’s London house—and was bored, and so both father and son were in shirtsleeves and street pants, and barefaced. A trunk in the stable held the padding, the jacket, the breeches, the masks.

  “Come on, come on,” said Father. He underscored his impatience by whipping his blade up and down. Neither man noticed the faint ping of something tiny hitting the corner of the yard: the button off the tip of Father’s sword.

  “En garde!” cried John, and made the first lunge. Father parried easily. Then, a painful but familiar routine of thrust and parry, riposte and attack, disengage and circle parry and counterattack.

  To John’s astonishment, he was backing Father into the far wall. John pressed his advantage, pleased to see Father losing his poise. But Father also was losing his temper.

  Lunge by Father, riposte by John—but Father wasn’t where John expected him to be, and Father’s blade—

  John’s right eye bloomed in agony. He stumbled, dropped his blade with a clatter, clutched his face. Pain drove all thought from his head, but somewhere below thought, he was sure his eyeball had been sliced in two.

  “Son! What’s wrong? My God, what have I done?”

  “No, Father! It’s quite all right!” John blinked back tears, managed—after several tries—to hold his eyes open. The world looked flooded and melting. “It’s only … it’s only a sting.”

  “Let me see,” Father said.

  Feeling Father’s hands on his shoulders, Father’s hot breath on his face, John wrenched away, and lied without thought.

  “It wasn’t you,” he said. “It must have been a wasp. Yes, I’m sure of it. It was a wasp.”

  He tried to turn away, but his Father’s face, ever before him, looked monstrous, was flowing into a worse shape yet. John knew that his life was over, that he would never be an artist now.

  “Those damned wasps!” he cried.

  * * *

  “The Reform Bill, 1866. Frantic Excitement!!!”

  A parlour scene. John Bull and his missus, his great gut straining his waistcoat buttons, her ample bosom straining the front of her dress, sit dozing over their evening papers full of the transcribed debate in Commons, rendered inert by Mr. Gladstone’s latest riposte to Mr. Locke, or was it Mr. Locke’s latest sally against Mr. Lowe? Untouched tea cools on the table between them. His hand is limp, the newspaper it barely grasps puddling on the hearth-rug. Her newspapers are spread nicely across her knees, as one squares and straightens in one’s lap something that one has resolved never to read, only to admire in all its stately grey splendour. She hunches forward, intent on her inner eyelids. Will she concentrate so hard that she jerks herself awake? Their deep, gentle breaths, not yet coarsened into snores, are evident from the darkening ink that pools around the snoozing couple. The ink seeks purchase, demands entrance. At their feet, lying on a newspaper all his own—the Illustrated Police News, perhaps; or, worse yet, Punch—is the bull-pup, himself dozing, his multifaceted eyes staring in all directions, his pincers folded beneath his chinless lower face. His wig sits awkwardly atop his head, as if pasted there late in the production process, and his own snore is a buzz.

  * * *

  “How you go on!” the Wasp said in a peevish tone. “Worrity, worrity! There never was such a child!”

  Worrity, indeed, thought Tenniel, who’d had quite enough of this chapter.

  “Your jaws are too short,” the Wasp went on: “but the top of your head is nice and round.” He took off his own wig as he spoke, and stretched out one claw towards Alice, as if he wished to do the same for her, but she kept out of reach, and would not take the hint.

  Tenniel snorted. Without lifting his eyes from the manuscript, he groped one-handed for the teacup, or more precisely for its handle. Finding it, he lifted the tea and took a sip: ice-cold. He blew on its surface and sipped again, and found it better, if only for the disturbance.

  “Then your eyes—they’re too much in front, no doubt. One would have done as well as two, if you must have them so close—”

  “Nonsense,” Tenniel said aloud, smacking the manuscript decisively onto the desk as if hoping to kill something small. Inviting children to go one-eyed! The idea!

  Tenniel would give much to have two functioning eyes again. He had kept from his father the extent of the fencing injury, which eventually had claimed the sight in his right eye. Why had he done that? Why had he protected the old man?

  Tenniel shook his head like a horse, to drive away the bites and darts of memory. Having learned precisely nothing helpful from re-reading, he picked up his pen, dunked it, tink-tink-tinked it against the side of the ink-pot, and resumed his attempt to draw the impossible.

  Before him, splayed beneath velvet-covered bookweights, were open copies of Spencer’s Introduction and the relevant volume of The Entomologist’s Annual, the bottom margin of which was spattered by Tenniel’s growing indignation. The pages on display featured labelled anatomical sketches of order Hymenoptera, suborder Apocrita, family Vespidae. Everywhere Tenniel started was clearly the wrong place to start. The head was wrong, especially the mandibles; the wings were wrong; the abdomen and thorax were wrong; the obscenely tiny join between them was wrong. Tenniel’s habit was not to crumple his failures, but to sail the flat sheets off the desk, so all around him were straggling lines and gaping crosshatches. They did not add up to a wasp.

  As he sketched his fourth outstretched leg of the afternoon, his housekeeper bustled in.

  “Goodness, Mr. Tenniel, ain’t you closed your window yet? I warned you, all the little beasties are swarming to-day.”

  “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Cabot, you may leave it anywhere,” murmured Tenniel, who while drawing attended to nothing else.

  “Shoo!” said Mrs. Cabot, swatting flies from the cream-pitcher as she leaned across the tea-table to bring down the sash with an emphatic bang. As she straightened, she brushed her palms together and squinted at the drapes. She disliked these busy William Morris patterns, as all manner of vermin could hide against them. “Aha!” she murmured: A largish wasp was crawling up one of the drapes. Had he paid the slightest attention, Tenniel would have been astonished by her quick production from an apron-pocket of a horsehair fly-swatter with a foot-long braided leather handle. Mrs. Cabot liked to play the crone of a workday, in part to fend off employers more attentive than Mr. Tenniel, but she was barely thirty and full of life, and at home she and Mr. Cabot had many tools at hand. As she edged nearer the winged intruder, she spoke calmly and slowly, as if to soothe the creature.

  “I never did hold with opening one’s house to the elements,” cooed the creeping Mrs. Cabot. “Before you know it, the outside has come inside, and then where are we, I ask you?” With a lunge, she brought the swat down on the precise spot formerly occupied by the wasp, which now sailed toward her face. “Go on!” she cried, slashing the wasp’s vicinity with the horsehair. “Get away!”

  “About six o’clock, I believe, Mrs. Cabot,” replied Tenniel, without looking up, “and in the parlour. No need to bother with the dining-room.” Tongue slightly protruding from the corner of his mouth, he was placing a human face on the wasp, as he had
done years before with the Caterpillar—but the result was looking too much like Mrs. Cabot to suit him.

  The housekeeper stopped flailing. She glanced about, eyes wide. From behind her right ear, tendrils of reddish-blonde hair plumed from her bonnet, as if electrified. With a rustle, another castoff sheet from Tenniel’s desk sailed to the floor, landing near Mrs. Cabot’s toe. The zigzag line Tenniel had drawn meant nothing to her, but she looked in the direction it seemed to point. There lay the stunned wasp, upon a plain woven coconut-mat blessedly free of Mr. Morris’s curlicues. It was on its back, one wing crumpled, kicking its last.

  “Hah!” Mrs. Cabot said, and smashed the tiny creature beneath her sensible heel. “That’s for you, Mr. Gillie Wetfoot,” she added, grinding its remains into the weave with force and satisfaction.

  Sadism, thought Tenniel, inscribing an arc that never would be abdominal, was an unseemly charge to levy against a fellow Englishman, yet the malign hurdles Dodgson had set him suggested at least a borderline case.

  “I’ll return this mat directly, Mr. Tenniel,” said Mrs. Cabot, bustling from the room. “I’ll just give it a bit of a wipe-down.”

  “Why, thank you, Mrs. Cabot,” murmured Tenniel. “I’m rather proud of it myself.” He savagely scratched out another failed wasp-face, his nib tearing the paper.

  To be sure, being a professional, Tenniel somehow had parried all Dodgson’s challenges. He had managed to avoid, without Dodgson’s noticing, having Humpty Dumpty’s “legs crossed like a Turk.” While drawing legs on an egg was no great leap, to draw those legs crossed, in Turkish fashion or any other, was an anatomical impossibility.

  At Dodgson’s insistence, Tenniel had redrawn the King’s Messenger in prison—but why should the man not have been staring at his hat, Tenniel still would like to know? What else had he to stare at?

  Tenniel had managed to draw the Rocking-horse-fly, the Snap-dragon-fly, and the Bread-and-butterfly. He had drawn the toves, which were “something like badgers, something like lizards, and something like corkscrews”—a fine description, that! At his lowest ebb, Tenniel had even drawn a leg of mutton taking a bow.