The Citizen

WILD OUTBURST OF JOY.

Mafeking Night, When London Flung Aside All Dignity.

'Mafeking night' gave a verb to the English language. 'To maffik,' defined in a phrase, means to turn everything upside down in a wild outburst of joy. Certainly we did turn everything upside down that night—Friday, May 18, 1900—in London, and we had joy and to spare to justify us. It was not merely that Mafeking was relieved—the town in which Baden-Powell and his men, edging close to starvation, had sat tight so long and so pluckily; it was the far greater relief that came to all England at the end of that dark winter through which all England, silently, doggedly, had taken its nasty punishment, with the winning at last of a substantial victory. The tense strain was relaxed suddenly, and London, with good cause for it, mafficked exultingly through all that glad night long.

Tiddlers are peacock tail feathers. Tiddling is tickling other people's noses with them. With my own happy eyes that night I saw two Whitechapel girls, with proper Whitechapel curls twirled on their temples, tiddle the nose of a Pall Mall policeman! And that policeman—imagine, if you please, all possible impossibilities fused into one single ultra violet ray of incredibility—fairly thrust forward his law-embodying nose to be tiddled by those worse than regicides—he was a Pall Mall policeman, remember—and benignly rewarded them with the sneeze of their desire!

On the same lines I may cite another example from that same evening. I saw on Piccadilly an intensely respectable looking Englishman—middle aged, stout, gray whiskered, dressed in seemly black and wearing a seemly top hat—who most obviously was a member of the conservative middle class, a well to do city man, I should say, with a tidy villa at Shepherd's Bush or Hackney, who on Sundays very likely handed the plate. And this by rights typically phlegmatic Briton was seated, with his chubby legs very wide outspread before him, on the roof of a four wheeler, and he had the union jack in one hand and the standard in the other, and he was coming along the middle of one of the great streets of London in the thick of the roaring crowd filling it waving those national banners with an incomparable fervor and hurrahing just as loud as he possibly could hurrah!

But I saw no mote in the eye of my phlegmatic English brother—we were about of an age—flag waving and hurrahing up there on the roof of his growler, possibly because at the moment I had something of a beam in my own. Strictly speaking, the relief of Mafeking was not my affair at all. But, God bless me, there I was, too, with my standard and my union jack (they cost me sixpence apiece, mounted on little bamboo poles, and as long as I live I shall cherish them), and I went about London that night waving those flags just as crazily as anybody and roared away with the national anthem and 'Soldiers of the Queen' and the 'Absentminded Beggar' just as loudly as anybody. — Thomas A. Janvier in Harper's.