Filling the Census Paper. . .

Free Lance, Volume I, Issue 43, 27 April 1901, Page 19

Filling the Census Paper. . .

IT was Sunday evening, the teathings, had been removed, and the family was assembled in the cosy dining-room. Mr. Phmby sat at the head of the table, with three or four great virgin sheets of blotting-paper spread betorc him. The ink-bottle had been newly replenished, and was brimful. Mr. Phmby was armed with a new pen, and a kindly but resolute expression. Upon the virgin blotter lay the clean pink census papers, and Mr. Amos Phmby was about to do his duty as a citizen, a householder, and father, not to mention a husband, and the proprietor of a horse, a cow, fourteen ducks, ten hens, a pet kangaroo, a bicycle, and other live stock. Mr. Phmby took up his pen resolutely, struck an attitude, spread himself over his papers, and said "Now!" with the air of a man who meant business. The family had an awed expression, and were preternaturally quiet. They ■were a very large and very young family, and would take a lot of filling in." Mrs. Plimby looked anxious, and signalled to the children nervously. The unaccustomed literary task had unnerved the whole house. Mr. Plimby took a dip and spread lus elbows wider, looking at the paper like a reluctant diver about to plunge into a cold and unknown sea. Then he dropped his head on one side, and wrote very deliberately — "Amos Henry Plimby." . Mr. Phmby surveyed his work with great satisfaction "There, my dear," he said, 'the Government won't have much difficulty in reading that, I think. If everybody fill*, in his census paper as intelligently and legibly as I'll fill this one, there'll be ]oy in the Census Office next week.' "Very nice, indeed," said Mrs. Plimby, "but are you sure it's m the right column ?" "The right column? Do you think you have married a born idiot?" "Well, I don't know, Amos, of course, but isn't that the place tor broken legs and things' 3 Sec, it says, 'Sickness and Infirmity' on top." Mr. Pkmby looked, and flushed to the roots of his hair, and assumed the expression of a deeply injured man. He had placed the paper down folded, and had entered himself as a "Sickness and Infirmity." He cast a look of withering reproach at his wife, but said nothing. He was a man who could suffer and be still. "I — I hope you won't get into trouble over it," said Mrs. Plimby, anxiously. "They can't send you to gaol, can they ? I saw something about wilful and corrupt perjury, or is it bigotry or something?" Phmby sneered elaborately, and straightened out his paper. Then he wrote again, "Amos Henry Plimby," in the right place this time, but he dropped a blot as big as an elephant's tear right in the middle of "Henry." This made him savage, and he plunged into the ink, and dashed off the details opposite his name in a reckless way. Then he sat back panting, with a blot on his white shirt, a smudge on his nose, and his thumb and index finger black to the first knuckle. Mrs. Plimby leaned over and scrutinised. "This does not seem quite right. You seem to say here that you were born in Wesleyan Methodist, and that your religion is brick outside and lath and plastered." Amos snatched the paper away. "Please don't interfere," he said hotly, "I don't think I require any assistance from you." Mrs Phmby looked insulted, and sat back in her chair, bouncing the baby clow n upon her knee to express her indignation, and Phmby went on with his list. 'What's -your second name?" he a&ked presently "As if you didn't know," snapped Mrs. Phmby. "Madame, your second name?" said Mr. Plimby, glaring horribly over his spectacles, after the manner of an indignant official. "Hannah," replied the lady, awed by the remembrance of the hinted pains and penalties. Mr. Plimbv wrote laboriously, and the ink oozed out between his fingers, and stole up to his cuffs. "Male or female ? " he asked. "Don't be ridiculous'" said Mrs. P. Plimby started up wildly. "Male or female 9" he yelled. Then, recollecting himself, he grunted, and entered an F. in the column liondod ' Age Last Birthday." \£C last birthday 9" he blurted "Let me see." she murmured. "I was thirty-eight years two months old exactly when baby was born, and that was a year and three weeks and two days ago, or a year and two weeks and three days, I don't quite know which What does that make me 9 " "What does that make you s " said Plimby, with dangerous restraint. "Do you want my candid opinion ?" "To be sure I do." "Well, it makes you a simpering idiot!" yelled Plimby. "How in thundor am I to say how old you are with

a bally riddle like that to guess from I For Heaven's sake go to the Bible and hunt up jour age ! Find out when you were born — if you've been born at all." Mrs. Pkmby, awed by the possibility of having to serve twelve months for conspiracy or arson if her age was incorrectly stated, set the baby on the table, and went to search the Scriptures, and, meanwhile, Plimb- who began to look like a coloured-labour cartoon himself, and who had covered the census paper with many blots and smudges, set to work filling in the children and other items at a great rate. The baby, being a child of a literary turn, seized the opportunity to drink the ink, and Tommy, the eldest, m a gallant effort to effect a rescue, upset the whole of the Stephens' blue-black over the baby, the table-cloth. Mr. Phmby, and the census paper. Mr. Phmby said nothing for the space of a minute. He was too full for utterance, and sat back in his chair like an exhausted tar-sprinkler, gazing at his black piccaninny and his beautiful paper , and then he exploded, and raved in shameful week-day language for five minutes by the clock, whilst Mrs. Plimby stood over him, deadly pale, staring, too, at the paper and the baby, feeling like a convicted criminal. "Per-pup-pup-perhaps it can be cleaned," she falterecj, taking up the document. "Oh, yes, it can be cleaned," said Amos, relapsing into bitter irony, "it can be cleaned. Take it away and wash it ; us© hot water and plenty of soap, and scrub it well on the board. Clean it, my dear — clean it!" Mrs. Plimby was looking at the paper attentively. Presently she ventured, meekly . "After all it does not matter much, Amos, dear. You see the words can be read quite distinctly." Amos snatched it out of her hands. "For goodness sake, woman, let me do my work," he gasped. "I've read about those great writers — Dickens and Carlyle, and Byron and Shelley — not being able to get on well with their wives, and, by heavens, I can understand it now ! The man who tries to do literary work with a woman poking at his elbow is an ass, a drivelling maniac 1 " He dashed at the paper again, and worked feverishly for two minutes, and the ink stole up his face into his hair. His light trousers were ruined, and his face was like that of a rain-washed Christy minstrel. "There," he said, throwing the paper away from him, "it's done at last, and if I had to do such another job once a month I'd want a divorce before the year was out." His wife took the paper reverently, and looked over the items with the air of a harmless imbecile trying to solve a problem in Euclid. "It seems very strange, dear," she said, diffidently. "I'm sure you've entered baby as a 'milch cow,' and should a bicycle go under the head of 'other stock' ?" "Oh, rubbish'" cried Phmby; "nothing of the sort." "It's here," said Mrs. P., with a little more spirit , "and you've put me down as one of the unemployed, and entered Tommy as a female suffering from Wesleyan. That's all wrong." "Women," said Plimby, loftily, "have no literary judgment." "Perhaps not, Plimby, but I've got too much commonsense to enter up Daisy the cow as my own son, aged 13, a student, of the Wesleyan religion, and built of weatherboard, with an iron roof. Whoever heard of a Wesleyan cow with an iron roof?" "Nobody , it required a maniacal imagination like yours, my love to discover such an idiotic thing. Give me the paper again. I neglected to mention your feeble intellect." "I shall do nothing of the sort. You have stated that Mary is aged 16, and that we have been married 14 years , you say that she is working for a blacksmith, and that she is suffering from the Wesleyan religion, and was born in influenza. That is about enough, I think, but you must go and enter my poor bed-ridden father as a horse, and include the dog-cart in the place set apart for turkeys. If this paper — " But Plimby had snatched the document from her hand. He tore it into a thousand fragments, hurled them down, and danced on them, and Mrs. Plimby, looking like a woman witnessing the perpetration of a massacre, gazed in awe at the scraps. "Good heavens'" she said, trembling on the verge of tears, and suddenly concerned about the safety of her husband, "what shall we tell the census man in the morning?" "Tell him the paper was eaten by the goat," snarled Amos. •'But — but you know we have not got a goat, dear." "Then," yelled Plimby, "you'd better go out and borrow one. I'm going to bed!" And Plimby had a hot bath, find retired in high dudgeon. — By Owen Deed, in Melbourne "Punch."