The Man and the Match

Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot — that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you — was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated P in a drawing of the man].* A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane. Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interested experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room. The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me) who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now,’ and returned to his periodical — But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?

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“Letter to Warren Lewis, 20 March 1932,” in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 57-8.

*Lewis’s insertion.