Джером К. Джером
Malvina of Brittany
"Who's that?" says Mr. Parable. "I am not at home to anyone."
"I'll see," I says. And on my way I slipped into the kitchen.
"Coffee for one, cook," I says, and she understood. Her cap and apron were hanging behind the door. I flung them across to her, and she caught them; and then I opened the front door.
They pushed past me without speaking, and went straight into the parlour. And they didn't waste many words on him either.
"Where is she?" asked Miss Bulstrode.
"Where's who?" says Mr. Parable.
"Don't lie about it," said Miss Bulstrode, making no effort to control herself. "The hussy you've been dining with?"
"Do you mean Mrs. Meadows?" says Mr. Parable.
I thought she was going to shake him.
"Where have you hidden her?" she says.
It was at that moment cook entered with the coffee.
If they had taken the trouble to look at her they might have had an idea. The tray was trembling in her hands, and in her haste and excitement she had put on her cap the wrong way round. But she kept control of her voice, and asked if she should bring some more coffee.
"Ah, yes! You'd all like some coffee, wouldn't you?" says Mr. Parable. Miss Bulstrode did not reply, but Mr. Quincey said he was cold and would like it. It was a nasty night, with a thin rain.
"Thank you, sir," says cook, and we went out together.
Cottages are only cottages, and if people in the parlour persist in talking loudly, people in the kitchen can't very well help overhearing.
There was a good deal of talk about "fourteen days," which Mr. Parable said he was going to do himself, and which Miss Dorton said he mustn't, because, if he did, it would be a victory for the enemies of humanity. Mr. Parable said something about "humanity," which I didn't rightly hear, but, whatever it was, it started Miss Dorton crying; and Miss Bulstrode called Mr. Parable a "blind Samson," who had had his hair cut by a designing minx who had been hired to do it.
It was all French to me, but cook was drinking in every word, and when she returned from taking them in their coffee she made no bones about it, but took up her place at the door with her ear to the keyhole.
It was Mr. Quincey who got them all quiet, and then he began to explain things. It seemed that if they could only find a certain gentleman and persuade him to come forward and acknowledge that he began a row, that then all would be well. Mr. Quincey would be fined forty shillings, and Mr. Parable's name would never appear. Failing that, Mr. Parable, according to Mr. Quincey, could do his fourteen days himself.
"I've told you once," says Mr. Parable, "and I tell you again, that I don't know the man's name, and can't give it you."
"We are not asking you to," says Mr. Quincey. "You give us the name of your tango partner, and we'll do the rest."
I could see cook's face; I had got a bit interested myself, and we were both close to the door. She hardly seemed to be breathing.
"I am sorry," says Mr. Parable, speaking very deliberate-like, "but I am not going to have her name dragged into this business."
"It wouldn't be," says Mr. Quincey. "All we want to get out of her is the name and address of the gentleman who was so anxious to see her home."
"Who was he?" says Miss Bulstrode. "Her husband?"
"No," says Mr. Parable; "he wasn't."
"Then who was he?" says Miss Bulstrode. "He must have been something to her – fiance?"
"I am going to do the fourteen days myself," says Mr. Parable. "I shall come out all the fresher after a fortnight's complete rest and change."
Cook leaves the door with a smile on her face that made her look quite beautiful, and, taking some paper from the dresser drawer, began to write a letter.
They went on talking in the other room for another ten minutes, and then Mr. Parable lets them out himself, and goes a little way with them. When he came back we could hear him walking up and down the other room.
She had written and stamped the envelope; it was lying on the table.
"'Joseph Onions, Esq.,'" I says, reading the address. "'Auctioneer and House Agent, Broadway, Hammersmith.' Is that the young man?"
"That is the young man," she says, folding her letter and putting it in the envelope.
"And was he your fiance?" I asked.
"No," she says. "But he will be if he does what I'm telling him to do."
"And what about Mr. Parable?" I says.
"A little joke that will amuse him later on," she says, slipping a cloak on her shoulders. "How once he nearly married his cook."
"I shan't be a minute," she says. And, with the letter in her hand, she slips out.
Mrs. Meadows, we understand, has expressed indignation at our publication of this interview, she being under the impression that she was simply having a friendly gossip with a neighbour. Our representative, however, is sure he explained to Mrs. Meadows that his visit was official; and, in any case, our duty to the public must be held to exonerate us from all blame in the matter.
Mr. Joseph Onions, of the Broadway, Hammersmith, auctioneer and house agent, expressed himself to our representative as most surprised at the turn that events had subsequently taken. The letter that Mr. Onions received from Miss Comfort Price was explicit and definite. It was to the effect that if he would call upon a certain Mr. Quincey, of Harcourt Buildings, Temple, and acknowledge that it was he who began the row at the Earl's Court Exhibition on the evening of the twenty-seventh, that then the engagement between himself and Miss Price, hitherto unacknowledged by the lady, might be regarded as a fact.
Mr. Onions, who describes himself as essentially a business man, decided before complying with Miss Price's request to take a few preliminary steps. As the result of judiciously conducted inquiries, first at the Vine Street Police Station, and secondly at Twickenham, Mr. Onions arrived later in the day at Mr. Quincey's chambers, with, to use his own expression, all the cards in his hand. It was Mr. Quincey who, professing himself unable to comply with Mr. Onion's suggestion, arranged the interview with Miss Bulstrode. And it was Miss Bulstrode herself who, on condition that Mr. Onions added to the undertaking the further condition that he would marry Miss Price before the end of the month, offered to make it two hundred. It was in their joint interest – Mr. Onions regarding himself and Miss Price as now one – that Mr. Onions suggested her making it three, using such arguments as, under the circumstances, naturally occurred to him – as, for example, the damage caused to the lady's reputation by the whole proceedings, culminating in a night spent by the lady, according to her own account, on Ham Common. That the price demanded was reasonable Mr. Onions considers as proved by Miss Bulstrode's eventual acceptance of his terms. That, having got out of him all that he wanted, Mr. Quincey should have "considered it his duty" to communicate the entire details of the transaction to Miss Price, through the medium of Mr. Andrews, thinking it "as well she should know the character of the man she proposed to marry," Mr. Onions considers a gross breach of etiquette as between gentlemen; and having regard to Miss Price's after behaviour, Mr. Onions can only say that she is not the girl he took her for.
Mr. Aaron Andrews, on whom our representative called, was desirous at first of not being drawn into the matter; but on our representative explaining to him that our only desire was to contradict false rumours likely to be harmful to Mr. Parable's reputation, Mr. Andrews saw the necessity of putting our representative in possession of the truth.
She came back on Tuesday afternoon, explained Mr. Andrews, and I had a talk with her.
"It is all right, Mr. Andrews," she told me; "they've been in communication with my young man, and Miss Bulstrode has seen the magistrate privately. The case will be dismissed with a fine of forty shillings, and Mr. Quincey has arranged to keep it out of the papers."
"Well, all's well that ends well," I answered; "but it might have been better, my girl, if you had mentioned that young man of yours a bit earlier."
"I did not know it was of any importance," she explained. "Mr. Parable told me nothing. If it hadn't been for chance, I should never have known what was happening."
I had always liked the young woman. Mr. Quincey had suggested my waiting till after Wednesday. But there seemed to me no particular object in delay.
"Are you fond of him?" I asked her.
"Yes," she answered. "I am fonder than – " And then she stopped herself suddenly and flared scarlet. "Who are you talking about?" she demanded.
"This young man of yours," I said. "Mr. – What's his name – Onions?"
"Oh, that?" she answered. "Oh, yes; he's all right."
"And if he wasn't?" I said, and she looked at me hard.
"I told him," she said, "that if he would do what I asked him to do, I'd marry him. And he seems to have done it."
"There are ways of doing everything," I said; and, seeing it wasn't going to break her heart, I told her just the plain facts. She listened without a word, and when I had finished she put her arms round my neck and kissed me. I am old enough to be her grandfather, but twenty years ago it might have upset me.
"I think I shall be able to save Miss Bulstrode that three hundred pounds," she laughed, and ran upstairs and changed her things. When later I looked into the kitchen she was humming.
Mr. John came up by the car, and I could see he was in one of his moods.
"Pack me some things for a walking tour," he said. "Don't forget the knapsack. I am going to Scotland by the eight-thirty."
"Will you be away long?" I asked him.
"It depends upon how long it takes me," he answered. "When I come back I am going to be married."
"Who is the lady?" I asked, though, of course, I knew.
"Miss Bulstrode," he said.
"Well," I said, "she – "
"That will do," he said; "I have had all that from the three of them for the last two days. She is a Socialist, and a Suffragist, and all the rest of it, and my ideal helpmate. She is well off, and that will enable me to devote all my time to putting the world to rights without bothering about anything else. Our home will be the nursery of advanced ideas. We shall share together the joys and delights of the public platform. What more can any man want?"
"You will want your dinner early," I said, "if you are going by the eight-thirty. I had better tell cook – "
He interrupted me again.
"You can tell cook to go to the devil," he said.
I naturally stared at him.
"She is going to marry a beastly little rotter of a rent collector that she doesn't care a damn for," he went on.
I could not understand why he seemed so mad about it.
"I don't see, in any case, what it's got to do with you," I said, "but, as a matter of fact, she isn't."
"Isn't what?" he said, stopping short and turning on me.
"Isn't going to marry him," I answered.
"Why not?" he demanded.
"Better ask her," I suggested.
I didn't know at the time that it was a silly thing to say, and I am not sure that I should not have said it if I had. When he is in one of his moods I always seem to get into one of mine. I have looked after Mr. John ever since he was a baby, so that we do not either of us treat the other quite as perhaps we ought to.
"Tell cook I want her," he said.
"She is just in the middle – " I began.
"I don't care where she is," he said. He seemed determined never to let me finish a sentence. "Send her up here."
She was in the kitchen by herself.
"He wants to see you at once," I said.
"Who does?" she asked.
"Mr. John," I said.
"What's he want to see me for?" she asked.
"How do I know?" I answered.
"But you do," she said. She always had an obstinate twist in her, and, feeling it would save time, I told her what had happened.
"Well," I said, "aren't you going?"
She was standing stock still staring at the pastry she was making. She turned to me, and there was a curious smile about her lips.
"Do you know what you ought to be wearing?" she said. "Wings, and a little bow and arrow."
She didn't even think to wipe her hands, but went straight upstairs. It was about half an hour later when the bell rang. Mr. John was standing by the window.
"Is that bag ready?" he said.
"It will be," I said.
I went out into the hall and returned with the clothes brush.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"Perhaps you don't know it," I said, "but you are all over flour."
"Cook's going with me to Scotland," he said.
I have looked after Mr. John ever since he was a boy. He was forty-two last birthday, but when I shook hands with him through the cab window I could have sworn he was twenty-five again.
THE LESSON
The first time I met him, to my knowledge, was on an evil-smelling, one-funnelled steam boat that in those days plied between London Bridge and Antwerp. He was walking the deck arm-in-arm with a showily dressed but decidedly attractive young woman; both of them talking and laughing loudly. It struck me as odd, finding him a fellow-traveller by such a route. The passage occupied eighteen hours, and the first-class return fare was one pound twelve and six, including three meals each way; drinks, as the contract was careful to explain, being extra. I was earning thirty shillings a week at the time as clerk with a firm of agents in Fenchurch Street. Our business was the purchasing of articles on commission for customers in India, and I had learned to be a judge of values. The beaver lined coat he was wearing – for the evening, although it was late summer, was chilly – must have cost him a couple of hundred pounds, while his carelessly displayed jewellery he could easily have pawned for a thousand or more.
I could not help staring at him, and once, as they passed, he returned my look.
After dinner, as I was leaning with my back against the gunwale on the starboard side, he came out of the only private cabin that the vessel boasted, and taking up a position opposite to me, with his legs well apart and a big cigar between his thick lips, stood coolly regarding me, as if appraising me.
"Treating yourself to a little holiday on the Continent?" he inquired.
I had not been quite sure before he spoke, but his lisp, though slight, betrayed the Jew. His features were coarse, almost brutal; but the restless eyes were so brilliant, the whole face so suggestive of power and character, that, taking him as a whole, the feeling he inspired was admiration, tempered by fear. His tone was one of kindly contempt – the tone of a man accustomed to find most people his inferiors, and too used to the discovery to be conceited about it.
Behind it was a note of authority that it did not occur to me to dispute.
"Yes," I answered, adding the information that I had never been abroad before, and had heard that Antwerp was an interesting town.
"How long have you got?" he asked.
"A fortnight," I told him.
"Like to see a bit more than Antwerp, if you could afford it, wouldn't you?" he suggested. "Fascinating little country Holland. Just long enough – a fortnight – to do the whole of it. I'm a Dutchman, a Dutch Jew."
"You speak English just like an Englishman," I told him. It was somehow in my mind to please him. I could hardly have explained why.
"And half a dozen other languages equally well," he answered, laughing. "I left Amsterdam when I was eighteen as steerage passenger in an emigrant ship. I haven't seen it since."
He closed the cabin door behind him, and, crossing over, laid a strong hand on my shoulder.
"I will make a proposal to you," he said. "My business is not of the kind that can be put out of mind, even for a few days, and there are reasons" – he glanced over his shoulder towards the cabin door, and gave vent to a short laugh – "why I did not want to bring any of my own staff with me. If you care for a short tour, all expenses paid at slap-up hotels and a ten-pound note in your pocket at the end, you can have it for two hours' work a day."
I suppose my face expressed my acceptance, for he did not wait for me to speak.
"Only one thing I stipulate for," he added, "that you mind your own business and keep your mouth shut. You're by yourself, aren't you?"
"Yes," I told him.
He wrote on a sheet of his notebook, and, tearing it out, handed it to me.
"That's your hotel at Antwerp," he said. "You are Mr. Horatio Jones's secretary." He chuckled to himself as he repeated the name, which certainly did not fit him. "Knock at my sitting-room door at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. Good night!"
He ended the conversation as abruptly as he had begun it, and returned to his cabin.
I got a glimpse of him next morning, coming out of the hotel bureau. He was speaking to the manager in French, and had evidently given instructions concerning me, for I found myself preceded by an obsequious waiter to quite a charming bedroom on the second floor, while the "English breakfast" placed before me later in the coffee-room was of a size and character that in those days I did not often enjoy. About the work, also, he was as good as his word. I was rarely occupied for more than two hours each morning. The duties consisted chiefly of writing letters and sending off telegrams. The letters he signed and had posted himself, so that I never learnt his real name – not during that fortnight – but I gathered enough to be aware that he was a man whose business interests must have been colossal and world-wide.
He never introduced me to "Mrs. Horatio Jones," and after a few days he seemed to be bored with her, so that often I would take her place as his companion in afternoon excursions.
I could not help liking the man. Strength always compels the adoration of youth; and there was something big and heroic about him. His daring, his swift decisions, his utter unscrupulousness, his occasional cruelty when necessity seemed to demand it. One could imagine him in earlier days a born leader of savage hordes, a lover of fighting for its own sake, meeting all obstacles with fierce welcome, forcing his way onward, indifferent to the misery and destruction caused by his progress, his eyes never swerving from their goal; yet not without a sense of rough justice, not altogether without kindliness when it could be indulged in without danger.
One afternoon he took me with him into the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and threading his way without hesitation through its maze of unsavoury slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house overlooking a stagnant backwater.
"The room I was born in," he explained. "Window with the broken pane on the second floor. It has never been mended."
I stole a glance at him. His face betrayed no suggestion of sentiment, but rather of amusement. He offered me a cigar, which I was glad of, for the stench from the offal-laden water behind us was distracting, and for a while we both smoked in silence: he with his eyes half-closed; it was a trick of his when working out a business problem.
"Curious, my making such a choice," he remarked. "A butcher's assistant for my father and a consumptive buttonhole-maker for my mother. I suppose I knew what I was about. Quite the right thing for me to have done, as it turned out."
I stared at him, wondering whether he was speaking seriously or in grim jest. He was given at times to making odd remarks. There was a vein of the fantastic in him that was continually cropping out and astonishing me.
"It was a bit risky," I suggested. "Better choose something a little safer next time."
He looked round at me sharply, and, not quite sure of his mood, I kept a grave face.
"Perhaps you are right," he agreed, with a laugh. "We must have a talk about it one day."
After that visit to the Goortgasse he was less reserved with me, and would often talk to me on subjects that I should never have guessed would have interested him. I found him a curious mixture. Behind the shrewd, cynical man of business I caught continual glimpses of the visionary.
I parted from him at The Hague. He paid my fare back to London, and gave me an extra pound for travelling expenses, together with the ten-pound note he had promised me. He had packed off "Mrs. Horatio Jones" some days before, to the relief, I imagine, of both of them, and he himself continued his journey to Berlin. I never expected to see him again, although for the next few months I often thought of him, and even tried to discover him by inquiries in the City. I had, however, very little to go upon, and after I had left Fenchurch Street behind me, and drifted into literature, I forgot him.
Until one day I received a letter addressed to the care of my publishers. It bore the Swiss postmark, and opening it and turning to the signature I sat wondering for the moment where I had met "Horatio Jones." And then I remembered.
He was lying bruised and broken in a woodcutter's hut on the slopes of the Jungfrau. Had been playing a fool's trick, so he described it, thinking he could climb mountains at his age. They would carry him down to Lauterbrunnen as soon as he could be moved farther with safety, but for the present he had no one to talk to but the nurse and a Swiss doctor who climbed up to see him every third day. He begged me, if I could spare the time, to come over and spend a week with him. He enclosed a hundred-pound cheque for my expenses, making no apology for doing so. He was complimentary about my first book, which he had been reading, and asked me to telegraph him my reply, giving me his real name, which, as I had guessed it would, proved to be one of the best known in the financial world. My time was my own now, and I wired him that I would be with him the following Monday.
He was lying in the sun outside the hut when I arrived late in the afternoon, after a three-hours' climb followed by a porter carrying my small amount of luggage. He could not raise his hand, but his strangely brilliant eyes spoke their welcome.
"I am glad you were able to come," he said. "I have no near relations, and my friends – if that is the right term – are business men who would be bored to tears. Besides, they are not the people I feel I want to talk to, now."
He was entirely reconciled to the coming of death. Indeed, there were moments when he gave me the idea that he was looking forward to it with an awed curiosity. With the conventional notion of cheering him, I talked of staying till he was able to return with me to civilisation, but he only laughed.
"I am not going back," he said. "Not that way. What they may do afterwards with these broken bones does not much concern either you or me.
"It's a good place to die in," he continued. "A man can think up here."
It was difficult to feel sorry for him, his own fate appearing to make so little difference to himself. The world was still full of interest to him – not his own particular corner of it: that, he gave me to understand, he had tidied up and dismissed from his mind. It was the future, its coming problems, its possibilities, its new developments, about which he seemed eager to talk. One might have imagined him a young man with the years before him.
One evening – it was near the end – we were alone together. The woodcutter and his wife had gone down into the valley to see their children, and the nurse, leaving him in my charge, had gone for a walk. We had carried him round to his favourite side of the hut facing the towering mass of the Jungfrau. As the shadows lengthened it seemed to come nearer to us, and there fell a silence upon us.
Gradually I became aware that his piercing eyes were fixed on me, and in answer I turned and looked at him.
"I wonder if we shall meet again," he said, "or, what is more important, if we shall remember one another."
I was puzzled for the moment. We had discussed more than once the various religions of mankind, and his attitude towards the orthodox beliefs had always been that of amused contempt.
"It has been growing upon me these last few days," he continued. "It flashed across me the first time I saw you on the boat. We were fellow-students. Something, I don't know what, drew us very close together. There was a woman. They were burning her. And then there was a rush of people and a sudden darkness, and your eyes close to mine."
I suppose it was some form of hypnotism, for, as he spoke, his searching eyes fixed on mine, there came to me a dream of narrow streets filled with a strange crowd, of painted houses such as I had never seen, and a haunting fear that seemed to be always lurking behind each shadow. I shook myself free, but not without an effort.
"So that's what you meant," I said, "that evening in the Goortgasse. You believe in it?"
"A curious thing happened to me," he said, "when I was a child. I could hardly have been six years old. I had gone to Ghent with my parents. I think it was to visit some relative. One day we went into the castle. It was in ruins then, but has since been restored. We were in what was once the council chamber. I stole away by myself to the other end of the great room and, not knowing why I did so, I touched a spring concealed in the masonry, and a door swung open with a harsh, grinding noise. I remember peering round the opening. The others had their backs towards me, and I slipped through and closed the door behind me. I seemed instinctively to know my way. I ran down a flight of steps and along dark corridors through which I had to feel my way with my hands, till I came to a small door in an angle of the wall. I knew the room that lay the other side. A photograph was taken of it and published years afterwards, when the place was discovered, and it was exactly as I knew it with its way out underneath the city wall through one of the small houses in the Aussermarkt.
"I could not open the door. Some stones had fallen against it, and fearing to get punished, I made my way back into the council room. It was empty when I reached it. They were searching for me in the other rooms, and I never told them of my adventure."
At any other time I might have laughed. Later, recalling his talk that evening, I dismissed the whole story as mere suggestion, based upon the imagination of a child; but at the time those strangely brilliant eyes had taken possession of me. They remained still fixed upon me as I sat on the low rail of the veranda watching his white face, into which the hues of death seemed already to be creeping.
I had a feeling that, through them, he was trying to force remembrance of himself upon me. The man himself – the very soul of him – seemed to be concentrated in them. Something formless and yet distinct was visualising itself before me. It came to me as a physical relief when a spasm of pain caused him to turn his eyes away from me.
"You will find a letter when I am gone," he went on, after a moment's silence. "I thought that you might come too late, or that I might not have strength enough to tell you. I felt that out of the few people I have met outside business, you would be the most likely not to dismiss the matter as mere nonsense. What I am glad of myself, and what I wish you to remember, is that I am dying with all my faculties about me. The one thing I have always feared through life was old age, with its gradual mental decay. It has always seemed to me that I have died more or less suddenly while still in possession of my will. I have always thanked God for that."
He closed his eyes, but I do not think he was sleeping; and a little later the nurse returned, and we carried him indoors. I had no further conversation with him, though at his wish during the following two days I continued to read to him, and on the third day he died.
I found the letter he had spoken of. He had told me where it would be. It contained a bundle of banknotes which he was giving me – so he wrote – with the advice to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
"If I had not loved you," the letter continued, "I would have left you an income, and you would have blessed me, instead of cursing me, as you should have done, for spoiling your life."
This world was a school, so he viewed it, for the making of men; and the one thing essential to a man was strength. One gathered the impression of a deeply religious man. In these days he would, no doubt, have been claimed as a theosophist; but his beliefs he had made for, and adapted to, himself – to his vehement, conquering temperament. God needed men to serve Him – to help Him. So, through many changes, through many ages, God gave men life: that by contest and by struggle they might ever increase in strength; to those who proved themselves most fit the sterner task, the humbler beginnings, the greater obstacles. And the crown of well-doing was ever victory. He appeared to have convinced himself that he was one of the chosen, that he was destined for great ends. He had been a slave in the time of the Pharaohs; a priest in Babylon; had clung to the swaying ladders in the sack of Rome; had won his way into the councils when Europe was a battlefield of contending tribes; had climbed to power in the days of the Borgias.
To most of us, I suppose, there come at odd moments haunting thoughts of strangely familiar, far-off things; and one wonders whether they are memories or dreams. We dismiss them as we grow older and the present with its crowding interests shuts them out; but in youth they were more persistent. With him they appeared to have remained, growing in reality. His recent existence, closed under the white sheet in the hut behind me as I read, was only one chapter of the story; he was looking forward to the next.
He wondered, so the letter ran, whether he would have any voice in choosing it. In either event he was curious of the result. What he anticipated confidently were new opportunities, wider experience. In what shape would these come to him?
The letter ended with a strange request. It was that, on returning to England, I should continue to think of him: not of the dead man I had known, the Jewish banker, the voice familiar to me, the trick of speech, of manner – all such being but the changing clothes – but of the man himself, the soul of him, that would seek and perhaps succeed in revealing itself to me.
