MARGINAL COMMENTS
By LAWRENCE ATHILL
BEARDS serve many ends. They act as comforters and add to the sea-doggishness of Admirals. They cloak the inexperience of young explorers and amuse small boys. In Eastern countries they arc deemed the fount and udder of compassion, so that human kindness must indeed be dry in him from whom a suppliant milking of the beard can wring no drop ; and I myself once grew a honey-coloured one to arm my chin against the pluckings of the African tax-payer whom, at the time, it was my duty to oppi.ess. Now I have unearthed an even subtler function of the beard.
I had been reading Mr. Nevinson's Dear Land of Ghosts, and had had recourse to Lempriere's Classical Dictionary to bridge the chasms of my ignorance. Wandering through that enchanted rabbit-warren of mythology in search of Jason, I missed a page and found myself face to face with Janus.
Like all readers of The Spectator I knew and admired the modern writings of the sage. I do not know if he and Lempriere's Janus are one and the same, but since the latter is immortal there is no reason why they should not be, and the community of name at least implies a similarity of attri- butes. I was of course already aware that both enjoyed a double-facedness which bared to them the secrets of the future and the past ; but as I delved for deeper infor- mation I came upon a startling and significant disclosure. Janus, says Lempriere, sometimes sports a beard and some- times not.
Now up to then I had imaged Janus of the Notebook a: spruce in chin and body as in mind, but here he seemed to be displayed a sloven ; at best a weekly shaver with the corollary of a weekly bath. So I was shocked and sad till I remembered Sergeant Carabine of the Infanterie Coloniale de la Marine. Sergeant Carabine was a weekly shaver and my daily opponent on a Madagascan tenths court rightly described by him as accidente, where we strove with balls from which the bounce of youth had long departed. On St n lay, fresh from his bath and barefaced as the moon, Carabine was a lobber whose every lob, directed with unrivalled knowledge of the court, fell in some deadly hazard. But, as the week advanced and his beard grew, his play, in keeping with his face, assumed a more ferocious aspect until, on Saturday, his drives impinged upon my racket or my person like flaccid cannon-balls. In fact there was not one Carabine but seven, ranging in temper from urbanity to manslaughter as his beard waxed and waned.
So, by a purposeful use or disuse of his razor, Janus is not one but seven. On Monday he is smooth and pens his little jokes. On Tuesday, conscious of a slight roughness, he calls a spade a spade. By Wednesday a definite prickliness has descended to his pen. Thursday finds him slashing at shibboleths with all the vigour of the great unshaven and unwashed. On Friday and Saturday caution or his Editor drives him to some secret fastness in the hills where, dout tless, he becomes unprintable. Then, with the Sabbath and a few deft razor-strokes, Janus tnfrons is Janus imberbis once again. Thus sameness is exorcised and catholicity of outlook guaranteed. A splendid notion.
Encouraged by this I wandered further in search of Sejanus who, I remembered, had shouldered the burden of the Notebook on one of those rare occasions when Janus closed his temple door. Lempriere, I regret to say, knew little that was good about Sejanus but does attribute to him one singular, or rather plural, feat. Once, no doubt to fill his notebook, he sought to win the confidences of the Senate, and with this end in view achieved what must be a record in journalistic enter- prise. " It is even said," writes Lempriere, "that Sejanus gained to his view all the wives of the Senators by a private and most secret promise of marriage to each of them." Bearded or beardless, Sejanus had at least what Carabine calls " toupet."
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