Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (442 page)

Motherhood is the law of the Universe. The whole duty of man is to be a mother. We labour: to what end? the children — the woman in the home, the man in the community. The nation takes thought for its future: why? In a few years its statesmen, its soldiers, its merchants, its toilers, will be gathered unto their fathers. Why trouble we ourselves about the future? The country pours its blood and treasure into the earth that the children may reap. Foolish Jacques Bonhomie, his addled brain full of dreams, rushes with bloody hands to give his blood for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He will not live to see, except in vision, the new world he gives his bones to build — even his spinning word-whipped head knows that. But the children! they shall live sweeter lives. The peasant leaves his fireside to die upon the battle-field. What is it to him, a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new lands? the heritage his fathers left him shall be greater for his sons. Patriotism! what is it but the mother instinct of a people?

Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be no more generations, with this life the world shall die. Think you we should move another hand? The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain would rot in the ground. Should we paint pictures, write books, make music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence. Think you with what eyes husband and wife would look on one another. Think you of the wooing — the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.

How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life. Herein, if nowhere else, lies our eternity. This Ego shall never die — unless the human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments. These features of mine — we will not discuss their aesthetic value — shall never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time. This temperament of mine — this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age, spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating. I go into my children and my children’s children, I am eternal. I am they, they are I. The tree withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings. The tree dies not, it changes.

These men and women that pass me in the street, this one hurrying to his office, this one to his club, another to his love, they are the mothers of the world to come.

This greedy trickster in stocks and shares, he cheats, he lies, he wrongs all men — for what? Follow him to his luxurious home in the suburbs: what do you find? A man with children on his knee, telling them stories, promising them toys. His anxious, sordid life, for what object is it lived? That these children may possess the things that he thinks good for them. Our very vices, side by side with our virtues, spring from this one root, Motherhood. It is the one seed of the Universe. The planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron. What is the Great Centre of us all, life animate and inanimate — if any life be inanimate? Is the eternal universe one dim figure, Motherhood, filling all space?

This scheming Mother of Mayfair, angling for a rich son-in-law! Not a pleasing portrait to look upon, from one point of view. Let us look at it, for a moment, from another. How weary she must be! This is her third “function” to-night; the paint is running off her poor face. She has been snubbed a dozen times by her social superiors, openly insulted by a Duchess; yet she bears it with a patient smile. It is a pitiful ambition, hers: it is that her child shall marry money, shall have carriages and many servants, live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her name in the Society Papers. At whatever cost to herself, her daughter shall, if possible, enjoy these things. She could so much more comfortably go to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do commercial traveller. Justice, Reader, even for such. Her sordid scheming is but the deformed child of Motherhood.

Motherhood! it is the gamut of God’s orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.

The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she defending hers with her life. The spider sucks the fly to feed its myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children’s sake. Perhaps when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we shall learn it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its place around the central theme, Motherhood.

ON THE INADVISABILITY OF FOLLOWING ADVICE

I was pacing the Euston platform late one winter’s night, waiting for the last train to Watford, when I noticed a man cursing an automatic machine. Twice he shook his fist at it. I expected every moment to see him strike it. Naturally curious, I drew near softly. I wanted to catch what he was saying. However, he heard my approaching footsteps, and turned on me. “Are you the man,” said he, “who was here just now?”

“Just where?” I replied. I had been pacing up and down the platform for about five minutes.

“Why here, where we are standing,” he snapped out. “Where do you think ‘here’ is — over there?” He seemed irritable.

“I may have passed this spot in the course of my peregrinations, if that is what you mean,” I replied. I spoke with studied politeness; my idea was to rebuke his rudeness.

“I mean,” he answered, “are you the man that spoke to me, just a minute ago?”

“I am not that man,” I said; “good-night.”

“Are you sure?” he persisted.

“One is not likely to forget talking to you,” I retorted.

His tone had been most offensive. “I beg your pardon,” he replied grudgingly. “I thought you looked like the man who spoke to me a minute or so ago.”

I felt mollified; he was the only other man on the platform, and I had a quarter of an hour to wait. “No, it certainly wasn’t me,” I returned genially, but ungrammatically. “Why, did you want him?”

“Yes, I did,” he answered. “I put a penny in the slot here,” he continued, feeling apparently the need of unburdening himself: “wanted a box of matches. I couldn’t get anything put, and I was shaking the machine, and swearing at it, as one does, when there came along a man, about your size, and — you’re SURE it wasn’t you?”

“Positive,” I again ungrammatically replied; “I would tell you if it had been. What did he do?”

“Well, he saw what had happened, or guessed it. He said, ‘They are troublesome things, those machines; they want understanding.’ I said, ‘They want taking up and flinging into the sea, that’s what they want!’ I was feeling mad because I hadn’t a match about me, and I use a lot. He said, ‘They stick sometimes; the thing to do is to put another penny in; the weight of the first penny is not always sufficient. The second penny loosens the drawer and tumbles out itself; so that you get your purchase together with your first penny back again. I have often succeeded that way.’ Well, it seemed a silly explanation, but he talked as if he had been weaned by an automatic machine, and I was sawney enough to listen to him. I dropped in what I thought was another penny. I have just discovered it was a two-shilling piece. The fool was right to a certain extent; I have got something out. I have got this.”

He held it towards me; I looked at it. It was a packet of Everton toffee.

“Two and a penny,” he remarked, bitterly. “I’ll sell it for a third of what it cost me.”

“You have put your money into the wrong machine,” I suggested.

“Well, I know that!” he answered, a little crossly, as it seemed to me — he was not a nice man: had there been any one else to talk to I should have left him. “It isn’t losing the money I mind so much; it’s getting this damn thing, that annoys me. If I could find that idiot Id ram it down his throat.”

We walked to the end of the platform, side by side, in silence.

“There are people like that,” he broke out, as we turned, “people who will go about, giving advice. I’ll be getting six months over one of them, I’m always afraid. I remember a pony I had once.” (I judged the man to be a small farmer; he talked in a wurzelly tone. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but an atmosphere of wurzels was the thing that somehow he suggested.) “It was a thoroughbred Welsh pony, as sound a little beast as ever stepped. I’d had him out to grass all the winter, and one day in the early spring I thought I’d take him for a run. I had to go to Amersham on business. I put him into the cart, and drove him across; it is just ten miles from my place. He was a bit uppish, and had lathered himself pretty freely by the time we reached the town.

“A man was at the door of the hotel. He says, ‘That’s a good pony of yours.’

“‘Pretty middling,’ I says.

“‘It doesn’t do to over-drive ‘em, when they’re young,’ he says.

“I says, ‘He’s done ten miles, and I’ve done most of the pulling. I reckon I’m a jolly sight more exhausted than he is.

“I went inside and did my business, and when I came out the man was still there. ‘Going back up the hill?’ he says to me.

“Somehow, I didn’t cotton to him from the beginning. ‘Well, I’ve got to get the other side of it,’ I says, ‘and unless you know any patent way of getting over a hill without going up it, I reckon I am.’

“He says, ‘You take my advice: give him a pint of old ale before you start.’

“‘Old ale,’ I says; ‘why he’s a teetotaler.’

“‘Never you mind that,’ he answers; ‘you give him a pint of old ale. I know these ponies; he’s a good ‘un, but he ain’t set. A pint of old ale, and he’ll take you up that hill like a cable tramway, and not hurt himself.’

“I don’t know what it is about this class of man. One asks oneself afterwards why one didn’t knock his hat over his eyes and run his head into the nearest horse-trough. But at the time one listens to them. I got a pint of old ale in a hand-bowl, and brought it out. About half-a-dozen chaps were standing round, and of course there was a good deal of chaff.

“‘You’re starting him on the downward course, Jim,’ says one of them. ‘He’ll take to gambling, rob a bank, and murder his mother. That’s always the result of a glass of ale, ‘cording to the tracts.’

“‘He won’t drink it like that,’ says another; ‘it’s as flat as ditch water. Put a head on it for him.’

“‘Ain’t you got a cigar for him?’ says a third.

“‘A cup of coffee and a round of buttered toast would do him a sight more good, a cold day like this,’ says a fourth.

“I’d half a mind then to throw the stuff away, or drink it myself; it seemed a piece of bally nonsense, giving good ale to a four-year-old pony; but the moment the beggar smelt the bowl he reached out his head, and lapped it up as though he’d been a Christian; and I jumped into the cart and started off, amid cheers. We got up the hill pretty steady. Then the liquor began to work into his head. I’ve taken home a drunken man more than once and there’s pleasanter jobs than that. I’ve seen a drunken woman, and they’re worse. But a drunken Welsh pony I never want to have anything more to do with so long as I live. Having four legs he managed to hold himself up; but as to guiding himself, he couldn’t; and as for letting me do it, he wouldn’t. First we were one side of the road, and then we were the other. When we were not either side, we were crossways in the middle. I heard a bicycle bell behind me, but I dared not turn my head. All I could do was to shout to the fellow to keep where he was.

“‘I want to pass you,’ he sang out, so soon as he was near enough.

“‘Well, you can’t do it,’ I called back.

“‘Why can’t I?’ he answered. ‘How much of the road do YOU want?’

“‘All of it and a bit over,’ I answered him, ‘for this job, and nothing in the way.’

“He followed me for half-a-mile, abusing me; and every time he thought he saw a chance he tried to pass me. But the pony was always a bit too smart for him. You might have thought the brute was doing it on purpose.

“‘You’re not fit to be driving,’ he shouted. He was quite right; I wasn’t. I was feeling just about dead beat.

“‘What do you think you are?’ he continued, ‘the charge of the Light Brigade?’ (He was a common sort of fellow.) ‘Who sent YOU home with the washing?’

“Well, he was making me wild by this time. ‘What’s the good of talking to me?’ I shouted back. ‘Come and blackguard the pony if you want to blackguard anybody. I’ve got all I can do without the help of that alarm clock of yours. Go away, you’re only making him worse.’

“‘What’s the matter with the pony?’ he called out.

“‘Can’t you see?’ I answered. ‘He’s drunk.’

“Well, of course it sounded foolish; the truth often does.

“‘One of you’s drunk,’ he retorted; ‘for two pins I’d come and haul you out of the cart.’

“I wish to goodness he had; I’d have given something to be out of that cart. But he didn’t have the chance. At that moment the pony gave a sudden swerve; and I take it he must have been a bit too close. I heard a yell and a curse, and at the same instant I was splashed from head to foot with ditch water. Then the brute bolted. A man was coming along, asleep on the top of a cart-load of windsor chairs. It’s disgraceful the way those wagoners go to sleep; I wonder there are not more accidents. I don’t think he ever knew what had happened to him. I couldn’t look round to see what became of him; I only saw him start. Half-way down the hill a policeman holla’d to me to stop. I heard him shouting out something about furious driving. Half-a-mile this side of Chesham we came upon a girls’ school walking two and two — a ‘crocodile’ they call it, I think. I bet you those girls are still talking about it. It must have taken the old woman a good hour to collect them together again.

“It was market-day in Chesham; and I guess there has not been a busier market-day in Chesham before or since. We went through the town at about thirty miles an hour. I’ve never seen Chesham so lively — it’s a sleepy hole as a rule. A mile outside the town I sighted the High Wycombe coach. I didn’t feel I minded much; I had got to that pass when it didn’t seem to matter to me what happened; I only felt curious. A dozen yards off the coach the pony stopped dead; that jerked me off the seat to the bottom of the cart. I couldn’t get up, because the seat was on top of me. I could see nothing but the sky, and occasionally the head of the pony, when he stood upon his hind legs. But I could hear what the driver of the coach said, and I judged he was having trouble also.