Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (255 page)

“Go on to Birmingham,” I says, “and try and find it. You can catch the quarter to six and be back here before eight.”

“Come with me,” he says; “you’re a good man, come with me. I ain’t fit to go by myself.”

He was right; he’d have got run over outside the door, the state he was in then.

“Well,” I says, “if the guv’nor don’t object—”

“Oh! he won’t, he can’t,” cries the young fellow, wringing his hands. “Tell him it’s a matter of a life’s happiness. Tell him—”

“I’ll tell him it’s a matter of half sovereign extra on to the bill,” I says. “That’ll more likely do the trick.”

And so it did, with the result that in another twenty minutes me and young Milberry and the bull-pup in its hamper were in a third-class carriage on our way to Birmingham. Then the difficulties of the chase began to occur to me. Suppose by luck I was right; suppose the pup was booked for the Birmingham Dog Show; and suppose by a bit more luck a gent with a hamper answering description had been noticed getting out of the 5.13 train; then where were we? We might have to interview every cabman in the town. As likely as not, by the time we did find the kid, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of unpacking. Still, it wasn’t my cue to blab my thoughts. The father, poor fellow, was feeling, I take it, just about as bad as he wanted to feel. My business was to put hope into him; so when he asked me for about the twentieth time if I thought as he would ever see his child alive again, I snapped him up shortish.

“Don’t you fret yourself about that,” I says. “You’ll see a good deal of that child before you’ve done with it. Babies ain’t the sort of things as gets lost easily. It’s only on the stage that folks ever have any particular use for other people’s children. I’ve known some bad characters in my time, but I’d have trusted the worst of ’em with a wagon-load of other people’s kids. Don’t you flatter yourself you’re going to lose it! Whoever’s got it, you take it from me, his idea is to do the honest thing, and never rest till he’s succeeded in returning it to the rightful owner.”

Well, my talking like that cheered him, and when we reached Birmingham he was easier. We tackled the station-master, and he tackled all the porters who could have been about the platform when the 5.13 came in. All of ’em agreed that no gent got out of that train carrying a hamper. The station-master was a family man himself, and when we explained the case to him he sympathised and telegraphed to Banbury. The booking-clerk at Banbury remembered only three gents booking by that particular train. One had been Mr. Jessop, the corn-chandler; the second was a stranger, who had booked to Wolverhampton; and the third had been young Milberry himself. The business began to look hopeless, when one of Smith’s newsboys, who was hanging around, struck in:

“I see an old lady,” says he, “hovering about outside the station, and a-hailing cabs, and she had a hamper with her as was as like that one there as two peas.”

I thought young Milberry would have fallen upon the boy’s neck and kissed him. With the boy to help us, we started among the cabmen. Old ladies with dog-baskets ain’t so difficult to trace. She had gone to a small second-rate hotel in the Aston Road. I heard all particulars from the chambermaid, and the old girl seems to have had as bad a time in her way as my gent had in his. They couldn’t get the hamper into the cab, it had to go on the top. The old lady was very worried, as it was raining at the time, and she made the cabman cover it with his apron. Getting it off the cab they dropped the whole thing in the road; that woke the child up, and it began to cry.

“Good Lord, Ma’am! what is it?” asks the chambermaid, “a baby?”

“Yes, my dear, it’s my baby,” answers the old lady, who seems to have been a cheerful sort of old soul — leastways, she was cheerful up to then. “Poor dear, I hope they haven’t hurt him.”

The old lady had ordered a room with a fire in it. The Boots took the hamper up, and laid it on the hearthrug. The old lady said she and the chambermaid would see to it, and turned him out. By this time, according to the girl’s account, it was roaring like a steam-siren.

“Pretty dear!” says the old lady, fumbling with the cord, “don’t cry; mother’s opening it as fast as she can.” Then she turns to the chambermaid—”If you open my bag,” says she, “you will find a bottle of milk and some dog-biscuits.”

“Dog-biscuits!” says the chambermaid.

“Yes,” says the old lady, laughing, “my baby loves dog-biscuits.”

The girl opened the bag, and there, sure enough, was a bottle of milk and half a dozen Spratt’s biscuits. She had her back to the old lady, when she heard a sort of a groan and a thud as made her turn round. The old lady was lying stretched dead on the hearthrug — so the chambermaid thought. The kid was sitting up in the hamper yelling the roof off. In her excitement, not knowing what she was doing, she handed it a biscuit, which it snatched at greedily and began sucking.

Then she set to work to slap the old lady back to life again. In about a minute the poor old soul opened her eyes and looked round. The baby was quiet now, gnawing the dog-biscuit. The old lady looked at the child, then turned and hid her face against the chambermaid’s bosom.

“What is it?” she says, speaking in an awed voice. “The thing in the hamper?”

“It’s a baby, Ma’am,” says the maid.

“You’re sure it ain’t a dog?” says the old lady. “Look again.”

The girl began to feel nervous, and to wish that she wasn’t alone with the old lady.

“I ain’t likely to mistake a dog for a baby, Ma’am,” says the girl. “It’s a child — a human infant.”

The old lady began to cry softly. “It’s a judgment on me,” she says. “I used to talk to that dog as if it had been a Christian, and now this thing has happened as a punishment.”

“What’s happened?” says the chambermaid, who was naturally enough growing more and more curious.

“I don’t know,” says the old lady, sitting up on the floor. “If this isn’t a dream, and if I ain’t mad, I started from my home at Farthinghoe, two hours ago, with a one-year-old bulldog packed in that hamper. You saw me open it; you see what’s inside it now.”

“But bulldogs,” says the chambermaid, “ain’t changed into babies by magic.”

“I don’t know how it’s done,” says the old lady, “and I don’t see that it matters. I know I started with a bulldog, and somehow or other it’s got turned into that.”

“Somebody’s put it there,” says the chambermaid; “somebody as wanted to get rid of a child. They’ve took your dog out and put that in its place.”

“They must have been precious smart,” says the old lady; “the hamper hasn’t been out of my sight for more than five minutes, when I went into the refreshment-room at Banbury for a cup of tea.”

“That’s when they did it,” says the chambermaid, “and a clever trick it was.”

The old lady suddenly grasped her position, and jumped up from the floor. “And a nice thing for me,” she says. “An unmarried woman in a scandal-mongering village! This is awful!”

“It’s a fine-looking child,” says the chambermaid.

“Would you like it?” says the old lady.

The chambermaid said she wouldn’t. The old lady sat down and tried to think, and the more she thought the worse she felt. The chambermaid was positive that if we hadn’t come when we did the poor creature would have gone mad. When the Boots appeared at the door to say there was a gent and a bulldog downstairs enquiring after a baby, she flung her arms round the man’s neck and hugged him.

We just caught the train to Warwick, and by luck got back to the hotel ten minutes before the mother turned up. Young Milberry carried the child in his arms all the way. He said I could have the hamper for myself, and gave me half-a-sovereign extra on the understanding that I kept my mouth shut, which I did.

I don’t think he ever told the child’s mother what had happened — leastways, if he wasn’t a fool right through, he didn’t.

THE PROBATION OF JAMES WRENCH.

“There are two sorts of men as gets hen-pecked,” remarked Henry — I forgot how the subject had originated, but we had been discussing the merits of Henry VIII., considered as a father and a husband,—”the sort as likes it and the sort as don’t, and I wouldn’t be too cocksure that the sort as does isn’t on the whole in the majority.

“You see,” continued Henry argumentatively, “it gives, as it were, a kind of interest to life which nowadays, with everything going smoothly, and no chance of a row anywhere except in your own house, is apt to become a bit monotonous. There was a chap I got to know pretty well one winter when I was working in Dresden at the Europäischer Hof: a quiet, meek little man he was, a journeyman butcher by trade; and his wife was a dressmaker, a Schneiderin, as they call them over there, and ran a fairly big business in the Praguer Strasse. I’ve always been told that German husbands are the worst going, treating their wives like slaves, or, at the best, as mere upper servants. But my experience is that human nature don’t alter so much according to distance from London as we fancy it does, and that husbands have their troubles same as wives all the world over. Anyhow, I’ve come across a German husband or two as didn’t carry about with him any sign of the slave driver such as you might notice, at all events not in his own house; and I know for a fact that Meister Anton, which was the name of the chap I’m telling you about, couldn’t have been much worse off, not even if he’d been an Englishman born and bred. There were no children to occupy her mind, so she just devoted herself to him and the work-girls, and made things hum, as they say in America, for all of them. As for the girls, they got away at six in the evening, and not many of them stopped more than the first month. But the old man, not being able to give notice, had to put up with an average of eighteen hours a day of it. And even when, as was sometimes the case, he managed to get away for an hour or two in the evening for a quiet talk with a few of us over a glass of beer, he could never be quite happy, thinking of what was accumulating for him at home. Of course everybody as knew him knew of his troubles — for a scolding wife ain’t the sort of thing as can be hid under a bushel, — and was sorry for him, he being as amiable and good-tempered a fellow as ever lived, and most of us spent our time with him advising him for his good. Some of the more ardent would give him recipes for managing her, but they, being generally speaking bachelors, their suggestions lacked practicability, as you might say. One man bored his life out persuading him to try a bucket of cold water. He was one of those cold-water enthusiasts, this fellow; took it himself for everything, and always went to a hydropathic establishment for his holidays. Rumour had it that Meister Anton really did try this experiment on one unfortunate occasion — worried into it, I suppose, by the other chap’s persistency. Anyhow, we didn’t see him again for a week, he being confined to his bed with a chill on the liver. And the next suggestion made to him he rejected quite huffily, explaining that he had no intention of putting any fresh ideas into his wife’s head.

“She wasn’t a bad woman, mind you — merely given to fits of temper. At times she could be quite pleasant: but when she wasn’t life with her must have been exciting. He had stood it for about seven years; and then one day, without a word of warning to anyone, he went away and left her. As she was quite able to keep herself, this seemed to be the best arrangement possible, and everybody wondered why he had never thought of it before, I did not see him again for nine months, until I ran against him by pure chance on the Köln platform, where I was waiting for a train to Paris. He told me they had made up all their differences by correspondence, and that he was then on his way back to her. He seemed quite cheerful and expectant.

“‘Do you think she’s really reformed?’ I says. ‘Do you think nine months is long enough to have taught her a lesson?’ I didn’t want to damp him, but personally I have never known but one case of a woman being cured of nagging, and that being brought about by a fall from a third-story window, resulting in what the doctors called permanent paralysis of the vocal organs, can hardly be taken as a precedent.

“‘No,’ he answers, ‘nor nine years. But it’s been long enough to teach me a lesson.’

“‘You know me,’ he goes on. ‘I ain’t a quarrelsome sort of chap. If nobody says a word to me, I never says a word to anybody; and it’s been like that ever since I left her, day in and day out, all just the same. Up in the morning, do your bit of work, drink your glass of beer, and to bed in the evening; nothing to excite you, nothing to rouse you. Why, it’s a mere animal existence.’

“He was a rum sort of chap, always thought things out from his own point of view as it were.”

“Yes, a curious case,” I remarked to Henry; “not the sort of story to put about, however. It might give women the idea that nagging is attractive, and encourage them to try it upon husbands who do not care for that kind of excitement.”

“Not much fear of that,” replied Henry. “The nagging woman is born, as they say, not made; and she’ll nag like the roses bloom, not because she wants to, but because she can’t help it. And a woman to whom it don’t come natural will never be any real good at it, try as she may. And as for the men, why we’ll just go on selecting wives according to the old rule, so that you never know what you’ve got till it’s too late for you to do anything but make the best or the worst of it, according as your fancy takes you.

“There was a fellow,” continued Henry, “as used to work with me a good many years ago now at a small hotel in the City. He was a waiter, like myself — not a bad sort of chap, though a bit of a toff in his off-hours. He’d been engaged for some two or three years to one of the chambermaids. A pretty, gentle-looking little thing she was, with big childish eyes, and a voice like the pouring out of water. They are strange things, women; one can never tell what they are made of from the taste of them. And while I was there, it having been a good season for both of them, they thought they’d risk it and get married. They did the sensible thing, he coming back to his work after the week’s holiday, and she to hers; the only difference being that they took a couple of rooms of their own in Middleton Row, from where in summer-time you can catch the glimpse of a green tree or two, and slept out.