Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (69 page)

“Beastly mean way of getting ‘em,” retorted Dan. And no argument that came to me, neither then nor at any future time, brought him to right thinking on this point.

He would judge all matters for himself. In his opinion Achilles was a coward, not a hero.

“He ought to have told the Trojans that they couldn’t hurt any part of him except his heel, and let them have a shot at that,” he argued; “King Arthur and all the rest of them with their magic swords, it wasn’t playing the game. There’s no pluck in fighting if you know you’re bound to win. Beastly cads, I call them all.”

I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He liked to see things coming right, he explained.

My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me himself.

“It’s very curious, Paul,” he said, “you seem to know a good deal.”

“They asked me all the things I didn’t know. They seemed to do it on purpose,” I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed the room and sat down beside me.

“Spud!” he said — it was a long time since he had called me by that childish nickname—”perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the unlucky ones.”

“Are you unlucky?” I asked.

“Invariably,” answered my father, rumpling his hair. “I don’t know why. I try hard — I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always does.”

“But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune,” I said, looking up in surprise. “We’re getting on, aren’t we?”

“I have thought so before, so often,” said my father, “and it has always ended in a — in a collapse.”

I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.

“You see, when I married your mother,” he went on, “I was a rich man. She had everything she wanted.”

“But you will get it all back,” I cried.

“I try to think so,” he answered. “I do think so — generally speaking. But there are times — you would not understand — they come to you.”

“But she is happy,” I persisted; “we are all happy.”

He shook his head.

“I watch her,” he said. “Women suffer more than we do. They live more in the present. I see my hopes, but she — she sees only me, and I have always been a failure. She has lost faith in me.”

I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.

“That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul,” he continued after a silence. “You can’t think what a help education is to a man. I don’t mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it rather hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man with a well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a cup of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should not trouble.”

And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh hope, planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A worse actor never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional attempts at a cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our all three crying in one another’s arms. No; it was only when things were going well that experience came to his injury. Child of misfortune, he ever rose, Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from contact with his mother.

Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself said, he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new house in Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while at the same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently central for office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey’s Inn and Bedford Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the Law’s sad courtiers.

“Poplar,” said my father, “has disappointed me. It seemed a good idea — a rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors. It ought to have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn’t.”

“There have been a few come,” my mother reminded him.

“Of a sort,” admitted my father; “a criminal lawyer might gather something of a practice here, I have no doubt. But for general work, of course, you must be in a central position. Now, in Guilford Street people will come to me.”

“It should certainly be a pleasanter neighbourhood to live in,” agreed my mother.

“Later on,” said my father, “in case I want the whole house for offices, we could live ourselves in Regent’s Park. It is quite near to the Park.”

“Of course you have consulted Mr. Hasluck?” asked my mother, who of the two was by far the more practical.

“For Hasluck,” replied my father, “it will be much more convenient. He grumbles every time at the distance.”

“I have never been quite able to understand,” said my mother, “why Mr. Hasluck should have come so far out of his way. There must surely be plenty of solicitors in the City.”

“He had heard of me,” explained my father. “A curiou[s] old fellow — likes his own way of doing things. It’s not everyone who would care for him as a client. But I seem able to manage him.”

Often we would go together, my father and I, to Guilford Street. It was a large corner house that had taken his fancy, half creeper covered, with a balcony, and pleasantly situated, overlooking the gardens of the Foundling Hospital. The wizened old caretaker knew us well, and having opened the door, would leave us to wander through the empty, echoing rooms at our own will. We furnished them handsomely in later Queen Anne style, of which my father was a connoisseur, sparing no necessary expense; for, as my father observed, good furniture is always worth its price, while to buy cheap is pure waste of money.

“This,” said my father, on the second floor, stepping from the bedroom into the smaller room adjoining, “I shall make your mother’s boudoir. We will have the walls in lavender and maple green — she is fond of soft tones — and the window looks out upon the gardens. There we will put her writing-table.”

My own bedroom was on the third floor, a sunny little room.

“You will be quiet here,” said my father, “and we can shut out the bed and the washstand with a screen.”

Later, I came to occupy it; though its rent — eight and sixpence a week, including attendance — was somewhat more than at the time I ought to have afforded. Nevertheless, I adventured it, taking the opportunity of being an inmate of the house to refurnish it, unknown to my stout landlady, in later Queen Anne style, putting a neat brass plate with my father’s name upon the door. “Luke Kelver, Solicitor. Office hours, 10 till 4.” A medical student thought he occupied my mother’s boudoir. He was a dull dog, full of tiresome talk. But I made acquaintanceship with him; and often of an evening would smoke my pipe there in silence while pretending to be listening to his monotonous brag.

The poor thing! he had no idea that he was only a foolish ghost; that his walls, seemingly covered with coarse-coloured prints of wooden-looking horses, simpering ballet girls and petrified prize-fighters, were in reality a delicate tone of lavender and maple green; that at her writing-table in the sunlit window sat my mother, her soft curls curtaining her quiet face.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF THE LOVE-LIT EYES.

“There’s nothing missing,” said my mother, “so far as I can find out. Depend upon it, that’s the explanation: she has got frightened and has run away.

“But what was there to frighten her?” said my father, pausing with a decanter in one hand and the bottle in the other.

“It was the idea of the thing,” replied my mother. “She has never been used to waiting at table. She was actually crying about it only last night.”

“But what’s to be done?” said my father. “They will be here in less than an hour.”

“There will be no dinner for them,” said my mother, “unless I put on an apron and bring it up myself.”

“Where does she live?” asked my father.

“At Ilford,” answered my mother.

“We must make a joke of it,” said my father.

My mother, sitting down, began to cry. It had been a trying week for my mother. A party to dinner — to a real dinner, beginning with anchovies and ending with ices from the confectioner’s; if only they would remain ices and not, giving way to unaccustomed influences, present themselves as cold custard — was an extraordinary departure from the even tenor of our narrow domestic way; indeed, I recollect none previous. First there had been the house to clean and rearrange almost from top to bottom; endless small purchases to be made of articles that Need never misses, but which Ostentation, if ever you let her sneering nose inside the door, at once demands. Then the kitchen range — it goes without saying: one might imagine them all members of a stove union, controlled by some agitating old boiler out of work — had taken the opportunity to strike, refusing to bake another dish except under permanently improved conditions, necessitating weary days with plumbers. Fat cookery books, long neglected on their shelf, had been consulted, argued with and abused; experiments made, failures sighed over, successes noted; cost calculated anxiously; means and ways adjusted, hope finally achieved, shadowed by fear.

And now with victory practically won, to have the reward thus dashed from her hand at the last moment! Downstairs in the kitchen would be the dinner, waiting for the guests; upstairs round the glittering table would be the assembled guests, waiting for their dinner. But between the two yawned an impassable gulf. The bridge, without a word of warning, had bolted — was probably by this time well on its way to Ilford. There was excuse for my mother’s tears.

“Isn’t it possible to get somebody else?” asked my father.

“Impossible, in the time,” said my mother. “I had been training her for the whole week. We had rehearsed it perfectly.”

“Have it in the kitchen,” suggested my aunt, who was folding napkins to look like ships, which they didn’t in the least, “and call it a picnic.” Really it seemed the only practical solution.

There came a light knock at the front door.

“It can’t be anybody yet, surely,” exclaimed my father in alarm, making for his coat.

“It’s Barbara, I expect,” explained my mother. “She promised to come round and help me dress. But now, of course, I shan’t want her.” My mother’s nature was pessimistic.

But with the words Barbara ran into the room, for I had taken it upon myself to admit her, knowing that shadows slipped out through the window when Barbara came in at the door — in those days, I mean.

She kissed them all three, though it seemed but one movement, she was so quick. And at once they saw the humour of the thing.

“There’s going to be no dinner,” laughed my father. “We are going to look surprised and pretend that it was yesterday. It will be fun to see their faces.”

“There will be a very nice dinner,” smiled my mother, “but it will be in the kitchen, and there’s no way of getting it upstairs.” And they explained to her the situation.

She stood for an instant, her sweet face the gravest in the group. Then a light broke upon it.

“I’ll get you someone,” she said.

“My dear, you don’t even know the neighbourhood,” began my mother. But Barbara had snatched the latchkey from its nail and was gone.

With her disappearance, shadow fell again upon us. “If there were only an hotel in this beastly neighbourhood,” said my father.

“You must entertain them by yourself, Luke,” said my mother; “and I must wait — that’s all.”

“Don’t be absurd, Maggie,” cried my father, getting angry. “Can’t cook bring it in?”

“No one can cook a dinner and serve it, too,” answered my mother, impatiently. “Besides, she’s not presentable.”

“What about Fan?” whispered my father.

My mother merely looked. It was sufficient.

“Paul?” suggested my father.

“Thank you,” retorted my mother. “I don’t choose to have my son turned into a footman, if you do.”

“Well, hadn’t you better go and dress?” was my father’s next remark.

“It won’t take me long to put on an apron,” was my mother’s reply.

“I was looking forward to seeing you in that new frock,” said my father. In the case of another, one might have attributed such a speech to tact; in the case of my father, one felt it was a happy accident.

My mother confessed — speaking with a certain indulgence, as one does of one’s own follies when past — that she herself also had looked forward to seeing herself therein. Threatening discord melted into mutual sympathy.

“I so wanted everything to be all right, for your sake, Luke,” said my mother; “I know you were hoping it would help on the business.”

“I was only thinking of you, Maggie, dear,” answered my father. “You are my business.”

“I know, dear,” said my mother. “It is hard.”

The key turned in the lock, and we all stood quiet to listen.

“She’s come back alone,” said my mother. “I knew it was hopeless.”

The door opened.

“Please, ma’am,” said the new parlour-maid, “will I do?”

She stood there, framed by the lintel, in the daintiest of aprons, the daintiest of caps upon her golden hair; and every objection she swept aside with the wind of her merry wilfulness. No one ever had their way with her, nor wanted it.

“You shall be footman,” she ordered, turning to me — but this time my mother only laughed. “Wait here till I come down again.” Then to my mother: “Now, ma’am, are you ready?”

It was the first time I had seen my mother, or, indeed, any other flesh and blood woman, in evening dress, and to tell the truth I was a little shocked. Nay, more than a little, and showed it, I suppose; for my mother flushed and drew her shawl over the gleaming whiteness of her shoulders, pleading coldness. But Barbara cried out against this, saying it was a sin such beauty should be hid; and my father, filching a shawl with a quick hand, so dextrously indeed as to suggest some previous practice in the feat, dropped on one knee — as though the world were some sweet picture book — and raised my mother’s hand with grave reverence to his lips; and Barbara, standing behind my mother’s chair, insisted on my following suit, saying the Queen was receiving. So I knelt also, glancing up shyly as towards the gracious face of some fair lady hitherto unknown, thus Catching my first glimpse of the philosophy of clothes.