Джером К. Джером
Paul Kelver
“I prefer the dolls,” concluded Dr. Florret.
“I admit they are pretty,” answered Washburn.
“I remember,” said my father, “the first masked ball I ever went to when I was a student in Paris. It struck me just as you say, Hal; everybody was so exactly alike. I was glad to get out into the street and see faces.”
“But I thought they always unmasked at midnight,” said the second Mrs. Teidelmann in her soft, languid tones.
“I did not wait,” explained my father.
“That was a pity,” she replied. “I should have been interested to see what they were like, underneath.”
“I might have been disappointed,” answered my father. “I agree with Dr. Florret that sometimes the mask is an improvement.”
Barbara was right. She was a beautiful woman, with a face that would have been singularly winning if one could have avoided the hard cold eyes ever restless behind the half-closed lids.
Always she was very kind to me. Moreover, since the disappearance of Cissy she was the first to bestow again upon me a good opinion of my small self. My mother praised me when I was good, which to her was the one thing needful; but few of us, I fear, child or grown-up, take much pride in our solid virtues, finding them generally hindrances to our desires: like the oyster’s pearl, of more comfort to the world than to ourselves. If others there were who admired me, very guardedly must they have kept the secret I would so gladly have shared with them. But this new friend of ours – or had I not better at once say enemy – made me feel when in her presence a person of importance. How it was accomplished I cannot explain. No word of flattery nor even of mere approval ever passed her lips. Her charm to me was not that she admired me, but that she led me by some mysterious process to admire myself.
And yet in spite of this and many lesser kindnesses she showed to me, I never really liked her; but rather feared her, dreading always the sudden raising of those ever half-closed eyelids.
She sat next to my father at the corner of the table, her chin resting on her long white hands, her sweet lips parted, and as often as his eyes were turned away from her, her soft low voice would draw them back again. Once she laid her hand on his, laughing the while at some light jest of his, and I saw that he flushed; and following his quick glance, saw that my mother’s eyes were watching also.
I have spoken of my father only as he then appeared to me, a child – an older chum with many lines about his mobile mouth, the tumbled hair edged round with grey; but looking back with older eyes, I see him a slightly stooping, yet still tall and graceful man, with the face of a poet – the face I mean a poet ought to possess but rarely does, nature apparently abhorring the obvious – with the shy eyes of a boy, and a voice tender as a woman’s. Never the dingiest little drab that entered the kitchen but adored him, speaking always of “the master” in tones of fond proprietorship, for to the most slatternly his “orders” had ever the air of requests for favours. Women, I so often read, can care for only masterful men. But may there not be variety in women as in other species? Or perhaps – if the suggestion be not over-daring – the many writers, deeming themselves authorities upon this subject of woman, may in this one particular have erred? I only know my father spoke to few women whose eyes did not brighten. Yet hardly should I call him a masterful man.
“I think it’s all right,” whispered Hasluck to my father in the passage – they were the last to go. “What does she think of it, eh?”
“I think she’ll be with us,” answered my father.
“Nothing like food for bringing people together,” said Hasluck. “Good-night.”
The door closed, but Something had crept into the house. It stood between my father and mother. It followed them silently up the narrow creaking stairs.
CHAPTER VII.
OF THE PASSING OF THE SHADOW
Better is little, than treasure and trouble therewith. Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. None but a great man would have dared to utter such a glaring commonplace as that. Not only on Sundays now, but all the week, came the hot joint to table, and on every day there was pudding, till a body grew indifferent to pudding; thus a joy-giving luxury of life being lost and but another item added to the long list of uninteresting needs. Now we could eat and drink without stint. No need now to organise for the morrow’s hash. No need now to cut one’s bread instead of breaking it, thinking of Saturday’s bread pudding. But there the saying fails, for never now were we merry. A silent unseen guest sat with us at the board, so that no longer we laughed and teased as over the half pound of sausages or the two sweet-scented herrings; but talked constrainedly of empty things that lay outside us.
Easy enough would it have been for us to move to Guilford Street. Occasionally in the spiritless tones in which they now spoke on all subjects save the one, my mother and father would discuss the project; but always into the conversation would fall, sooner or later, some loosened thought to stir it to anger, and so the aching months went by, and the cloud grew.
Then one day the news came that old Teidelmann had died suddenly in his counting house.
“You are going to her?” said my mother.
“I have been sent for,” said my father; “I must – it may mean business.”
My mother laughed bitterly; why, at the time, I could not understand; and my father flung out of the house. During the many hours that he was away my mother remained locked in her room, and, stealing sometimes to the door, I was sure I heard her crying; and that she should grieve so at old Teidelmann’s death puzzled me.
She came oftener to our house after that. Her mourning added, I think, to her beauty, softening – or seeming to soften – the hardness of her eyes. Always she was very sweet to my mother, who by contrast beside her appeared witless and ungracious; and to me, whatever her motive, she was kindness itself; hardly ever arriving without some trifling gift or plan for affording me some childish treat. By instinct she understood exactly what I desired and liked, the books that would appeal to me as those my mother gave me never did, the pleasures that did please me as opposed to the pleasures that should have pleased me. Often my mother, talking to me, would chill me with the vista of the life that lay before me: a narrow, viewless way between twin endless walls of “Must” and “Must not.” This soft-voiced lady set me dreaming of life as of sunny fields through which one wandered laughing, along the winding path of Will; so that, although as I have said, there lurked at the bottom of my thoughts a fear of her; yet something within me I seemed unable to control went out to her, drawn by her subtle sympathy and understanding of it.
“Has he ever seen a pantomime?” she asked of my father one morning, looking at me the while with a whimsical screwing of her mouth.
My heart leaped within me. My father raised his eyebrows: “What would your mother say, do you think?” he asked. My heart sank.
“She thinks,” I replied, “that theatres are very wicked places.” It was the first time that any doubt as to the correctness of my mother’s judgments had ever crossed my mind.
Mrs. Teidelmann’s smile strengthened my doubt. “Dear me,” she said, “I am afraid I must be very wicked. I have always regarded a pantomime as quite a moral entertainment. All the bad people go down so very straight to – well, to the fit and proper place for them. And we could promise to leave before the Clown stole the sausages, couldn’t we, Paul?”
My mother was called and came; and I could not help thinking how insignificant she looked with her pale face and plain dark frock, standing stiffly beside this shining lady in her rustling clothes.
“You will let him come, Mrs. Kelver,” she pleaded in her soft caressing tones; “it’s Dick Whittington, you know – such an excellent moral.”
My mother had stood silent, clasping and unclasping her hands, a childish trick she had when troubled; and her lips were trembling. Important as the matter loomed before my own eyes, I wondered at her agitation.
“I am very sorry,” said my mother, “it is very kind of you. But I would rather he did not go.”
“Just this once,” persisted Mrs. Teidelmann. “It is holiday time.”
A ray of sunlight fell into the room, lighting upon her coaxing face, making where my mother stood seem shadow.
“I would rather he did not go,” repeated my mother, and her voice sounded harsh and grating. “When he is older others must judge for him, but for the present he must be guided by me – alone.”
“I really don’t think there could be any harm, Maggie,” urged my father. “Things have changed since we were young.”
“That may be,” answered my mother, still in the same harsh voice; “it is long ago since then.”
“I didn’t intend it that way,” said my father with a short laugh.
“I merely meant that I may be wrong,” answered my mother. “I seem so old among you all – so out of place. I have tried to change, but I cannot.”
“We will say no more about it,” said Mrs. Teidelmann, sweetly. “I merely thought it would give him pleasure; and he has worked so hard this last term, his father tells me.”
She laid her hand caressingly on my shoulder, drawing me a little closer to her; and it remained there.
“It was very kind of you,” said my mother, “I would do anything to give him pleasure, anything – I could. He knows that. He understands.”
My mother’s hand, I knew, was seeking mine, but I was angry and would not see; and without another word she left the room.
My mother did not allude again to the subject; but the very next afternoon she took me herself to a hall in the neighbourhood, where we saw a magic-lantern, followed by a conjurer. She had dressed herself in a prettier frock than she had worn for many a long day, and was brighter and gayer in herself than had lately been her wont, laughing and talking merrily. But I, nursing my wrongs, remained moody and sulky. At any other time such rare amusement would have overjoyed me; but the wonders of the great theatre that from other boys I had heard so much of, that from gaudy-coloured posters I had built up for myself, were floating vague and undefined before me in the air; and neither the open-mouthed sleeper, swallowing his endless chain of rats; nor even the live rabbit found in the stout old gentleman’s hat – the last sort of person in whose hat one would have expected to find such a thing – could draw away my mind from the joy I had caught a glimpse of only to lose.
So we walked home through the muddy, darkening streets, speaking but little; and that night, waking – or rather half waking, as children do – I thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed. I must have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say whether the intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to see it still there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose from her knees.
She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. “It was a silly dream I had,” she explained “I must have been thinking of the conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you away from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world.”
She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus we remained until again I must have fallen asleep.
It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton. She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say good-bye to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across the table to my father.
“Of course you will go,” said my father. “Poor girl, I wonder what the cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the kind.”
“Do you think it well for me to go?” said my mother. “What can she have to say to me?”
“Oh, just to say good-bye,” answered my father. “It would look so pointed not to go.”
It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin’s cave. Old Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his treasures, now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped there in curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood propped against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched unframed across the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a few of the statues were, I remember, the only things out of the entire collection that Mrs. Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings, embroideries, priceless china, miniatures framed in gems, illuminated missals and gorgeously bound books crowded the room. The ugly little thick-lipped man had surrounded himself with the beauty of every age, brought from every land. He himself must have been the only thing cheap and uninteresting to be found within his own walls; and now he lay shrivelled up in his coffin, under a monument by means of which an unknown cemetery became quite famous.
Instructions had been given that my mother was to be shown up into Mrs. Teidelmann’s boudoir. She was lying on a sofa near the fire when we entered, asleep, dressed in a loose lace robe that fell away, showing her thin but snow-white arms, her rich dark hair falling loose about her. In sleep she looked less beautiful: harder and with a suggestion of coarseness about the face, of which at other times it showed no trace. My mother said she would wait, perhaps Mrs. Teidelmann would awake; and the servant, closing the door softly, left us alone with her.
An old French clock standing on the mantelpiece, a heart supported by Cupids, ticked with a muffled, soothing sound. My mother, choosing a chair by the window, sat with her eyes fixed on the sleeping woman’s face, and it seemed to me – though this may have been but my fancy born of after-thought – that a faint smile relaxed for a moment the sleeping woman’s pained, pressed lips. Neither I nor my mother spoke, the only sound in the room being the hushed ticking of the great gilt clock. Until the other woman after a few slight movements of unrest began to talk in her sleep.
Only confused murmurs escaped her at first, and then I heard her whisper my father’s name. Very low – hardly more than breathed – were the words, but upon the silence each syllable struck clear and distinct: “Ah no, we must not. Luke, my darling.”
My mother rose swiftly from her chair, but she spoke in quite matter-of-fact tones.
“Go, Paul,” she said, “wait for me downstairs;” and noiselessly opening the door, she pushed me gently out, and closed it again behind me.
It was half an hour or more before she came down, and at once we left the house, letting ourselves out. All the way home my mother never once spoke, but walked as one in a dream with eyes that saw not. With her hand upon the lock of our gate she came back to life.
“You must say nothing, Paul, do you understand?” she said. “When people are delirious they use strange words that have no meaning. Do you understand, Paul; you must never breathe a word – never.”
I promised, and we entered the house; and from that day my mother’s whole manner changed. Not another angry word ever again escaped her lips, never an angry flash lighted up again her eyes. Mrs. Teidelmann remained away three months. My father, of course, wrote to her often, for he was managing all her affairs. But my mother wrote to her also – though this my father, I do not think, knew – long letters that she would go away by herself to pen, writing them always in the twilight, close to the window.
“Why do you choose this time, just when it’s getting dark, to write your letters,” my father would expostulate, when by chance he happened to look into the room. “Let me ring for the lamp, you will strain your eyes.” But my mother would always excuse herself, saying she had only a few lines to finish.
“I can think better in this light,” she would explain.
And when Mrs. Teidelmann returned, it was my mother who was the first to call upon her; before even my father knew that she was back. And from thence onward one might have thought them the closest of friends, my mother visiting her often, speaking of her to all in terms of praise and liking.
In this way peace returned unto the house, and my father was tender again in all his words and actions towards my mother, and my mother thoughtful as before of all his wants and whims, her voice soft and low, the sweet smile ever lurking around her lips as in the old days before this evil thing had come to dwell among us; and I might have forgotten it had ever cast its blight upon our life but that every day my mother grew feebler, the little ways that had seemed a part of her gone from her.
The summer came and went – that time in towns of panting days and stifling nights, when through the open window crawls to one’s face the hot foul air, heavy with reeking odours drawn from a thousand streets; when lying awake one seems to hear the fitful breathing of the myriad mass around, as of some over-laboured beast too tired to even rest; and my mother moved about the house ever more listlessly.
“There’s nothing really the matter with her,” said Dr. Hal, “only weakness. It is the place. Cannot you get her away from it?”
“I cannot leave myself,” said my father, “just yet; but there is no reason why you and the boy should not take a holiday. This year I can afford it, and later I might possibly join you.”
My mother consented, as she did to all things now, and so it came about that again of afternoons we climbed – though more slowly and with many pauses – the steep path to the ruined tower old Jacob in his happy foolishness had built upon the headland, rested once again upon its topmost platform, sheltered from the wind that ever blew about its crumbling walls, saw once more the distant mountains, faint like spectres, and the silent ships that came and vanished, and about our feet the pleasant farm lands, and the grave, sweet river.
We had taken lodgings in the village: smaller now it seemed than previously; but wonderful its sunny calm, after the turmoil of the fierce dark streets. Mrs. Fursey was there still, but quite another than the Mrs. Fursey of my remembrance, a still angular but cheery dame, bent no longer on suppressing me, but rather on drawing me out before admiring neighbours, as one saying: “The material was unpromising, as you know. There were times when I almost despaired. But with patience, and – may I say, a natural gift that way – you see what can be accomplished!” And Anna, now a buxom wife and mother, with an uncontrollable desire to fall upon and kiss me at most unexpected moments, necessitating a never sleeping watchfulness on my part, and a choosing of positions affording means of ready retreat. And old Chumbley, still cobbling shoes in his tiny cave. On the bench before him in a row they sat and watched him while he tapped and tapped and hammered: pert little shoes piping “Be quick, be quick, we want to be toddling. You seem to have no idea, my good man, how much toddling there is to be done.” Dapper boots, sighing: “Oh, please make haste, we are waiting to dance and to strut. Jack walks in the lane, Jill waits by the gate. Oh, deary, how slowly he taps.” Stout sober boots, saying: “As soon as you can, old friend. Remember we’ve work to do.” Flat-footed old boots, rusty and limp, mumbling: “We haven’t much time, Mr. Chumbley. Just a patch, that is all, we haven’t much further to go.” And old Joe, still peddling his pack, with the help of the same old jokes. And Tom Pinfold, still puzzled and scratching his head, the rejected fish still hanging by its tail from his expostulating hand; one might almost have imagined it the same fish. Grown-up folks had changed but little. Only the foolish children had been playing tricks; parties I had left mere sucking babes now swaggering in pinafore or knickerbocker; children I had known now mincing it as men and women; such affectation annoyed me.
One afternoon – it was towards the close of the last week of our stay – my mother and I had climbed, as was so often our wont, to the upper platform of old Jacob’s tower. My mother leant upon the parapet, her eyes fixed dreamingly upon the distant mountains, and a smile crept to her lips.
“What are you thinking of?” I asked.
“Oh, only of things that happened over there” – she nodded her head towards the distant hills as to some old crony with whom she shares secrets – “when I was a girl.”
“You lived there, long ago, didn’t you, when you were young?” I asked. Boys do not always stop to consider whether their questions might or might not be better expressed.
“You’re very rude,” said my mother – it was long since a tone of her old self had rung from her in answer to any touch; “it was a very little while ago.”
Suddenly she raised her head and listened. Perhaps some twenty seconds she remained so with her lips parted, and then from the woods came a faint, long-drawn “Coo-ee.” We ran to the side of the tower commanding the pathway from the village, and waited until from among the dark pines my father emerged into the sunlight.
Seeing us, he shouted again and waved his stick, and from the light of his eyes and his gallant bearing, and the spring of his step across the heathery turf, we knew instinctively that trouble had come upon him. He always rose to meet it with that look and air. It was the old Norse blood in his veins, I suppose. So, one imagines, must those godless old Pirates have sprung to their feet when the North wind, loosed as a hawk from the leash, struck at the beaked prow.
We heard his quick step on the rickety stair, and the next moment he was between us, breathing a little hard, but laughing.
He stood for awhile beside my mother without speaking, both of them gazing at the distant hills among which, as my mother had explained, things had happened long ago. And maybe, “over there,” their memories met and looked upon each other with kind eyes.
“Do you remember,” said my father, “we climbed up here – it was the first walk we took together after coming here. We discussed our plans for the future, how we would retrieve our fortunes.”
“And the future,” answered my mother, “has a way of making plans for us instead.”
“It would seem so,” replied my father, with a laugh. “I am an unlucky beggar, Maggie. I dropped all your money as well as my own down that wretched mine.”
“It was the will – it was Fate, or whatever you call it,” said my mother. “You could not help that, Luke.”
“If only that damned pump hadn’t jambed,” said my father.
“Do you remember that Mrs. Tharand?” asked my mother.
“Yes, what of her?”
“A worldly woman, I always thought her. She called on me the morning we were leaving; I don’t think you saw her. ‘I’ve been through more worries than you would think, to look at me,’ she said to me, laughing. I’ve always remembered her words: ‘and of all the troubles that come to us in this world, believe me, Mrs. Kelver, money troubles are the easiest to bear.’”
“I wish I could think so,” said my father.
“She rather irritated me at the time,” continued my mother. “I thought it one of those commonplaces with which we console ourselves for other people’s misfortunes. But now I know she spoke the truth.”
There was silence between them for awhile. Then said my father in a cheery tone:
“I’ve broken with old Hasluck.”
“I thought you would be compelled to sooner or later,” answered my mother.
“Hasluck,” exclaimed my father, with sudden vehemence, “is little better than a thief; I told him so.”
“What did he say?” asked my mother.
“Laughed, and said that was better than some people.”
My father laughed himself.
I wish to do the memory of Noel Hasluck no injustice. Ever was he a kind friend to me; not only then, but in later years, when, having come to learn that kindness is rarer in the world than I had dreamt, I was glad of it. Added to which, if only for Barbara’s sake, I would prefer to write of him throughout in terms of praise. Yet even were his good-tempered, thick-skinned ghost (and unless it were good-tempered and thick-skinned it would be no true ghost of old Noel Hasluck) to be reading over my shoulder the words as I write them down, I think it would agree with me – I do not think it would be offended with me (for ever in his life he was an admirer and a lover of the Truth, being one of those good fighters capable of respecting even his foe, his enemy, against whom from ten to four, occasionally a little later, he fought right valiantly) for saying that of all the men who go down into the City each day in a cab or ‘bus or train, he was perhaps one of the most unprincipled: and whether that be saying much or little I leave to those with more knowledge to decide.
To do others, as it was his conviction, right or wrong, that they would do him if ever he gave them half a chance, was his notion of “business;” and in most of his transactions he was successful. “I play a game,” he would argue, “where cheating is the rule. Nine out of every ten men round the table are sharpers like myself, and the tenth man is a fool who has no business to be there. We prey upon each other, and the cutest of us is the winner.”
“But the innocent people, lured by your fine promises,” I ventured once to suggest to him, “the widows and the orphans?”
“My dear lad,” he said, with a laugh, laying his fat hand upon my shoulder, “I remember one of your widows writing me a pathetic letter about some shares she had taken in a Silver Company of mine. Lord knows where the mine is now – somewhere in Spain, I think. It looked as though all her savings were gone. She had an only son, and it was nearly all they possessed in the world, etc., etc. – you know the sort of thing. Well, I did what I’ve often been numskull enough to do in similar cases, wrote and offered to buy her out at par. A week later she answered, thanking me, but saying it did not matter. There had occurred a momentary rise, and she had sold out at a profit – to her own brother-in-law, as I discovered, happening to come across the transfers. You can find widows and orphans round the Monte Carlo card tables, if you like to look for them; they are no more deserving of consideration than the rest of the crowd. Besides, if it comes to that, I’m an orphan myself;” and he laughed again, one of his deep, hearty, honest laughs. No one ever possessed a laugh more suggestive in its every cadence of simple, transparent honesty. He used to say himself it was worth thousands to him.
Better from the Moralists’ point of view had such a man been an out-and-out rogue. Then might one have pointed, crying: “Behold: Dishonesty, as you will observe in the person of our awful example, to be hated, needs but to be seen.” But the duty of the Chronicler is to bear witness to what he knows, leaving Truth with the whole case before her to sum up and direct the verdict. In the City, old Hasluck had a bad reputation and deserved it; in Stoke-Newington – then a green suburb, containing many fine old houses, standing in great wooded gardens – he was loved and respected. In his business, he was a man void of all moral sense, without bowels of compassion for any living thing; in retirement, a man with a strong sense of duty and a fine regard for the rights and feelings of others, never happier than when planning to help or give pleasure. In his office, he would have robbed his own mother. At home, he would have spent his last penny to add to her happiness or comfort. I make no attempt to explain. I only know that such men do exist, and that Hasluck was one of them. One avoids difficulties by dismissing them as a product of our curiously complex civilisation – a convenient phrase; let us hope the recording angel may be equally impressed by it.
Casting about for some reason of excuse to myself for my liking of him, I hit upon the expedient of regarding him as a modern Robin Hood, whom we are taught to admire without shame, a Robin Hood up to date, adapted to the changed conditions of modern environment; making his living relieving the rich; taking pleasure relieving the poor.
“What will you do?” asked my mother.
“I shall have to give up the office,” answered my father. “Without him there’s not enough to keep it going. He was quite good-tempered about the matter – offered to divide the work, letting me retain the straightforward portion for whatever that might be worth. But I declined. Now I know, I feel I would rather have nothing more to do with him.”
“I think you were quite right,” agreed my mother.
“What I blame myself for,” said my father, “is that I didn’t see through him before. Of course he has been making a mere tool of me from the beginning. I ought to have seen through him. Why didn’t I?”
They discussed the future, or, rather, my father discussed, my mother listening in silence, stealing a puzzled look at him from time to time, as though there were something she could not understand.
He would take a situation in the City. One had been offered him. It might sound poor, but it would be a steady income on which we must contrive to live. The little money he had saved must be kept for investments – nothing speculative – judicious “dealings,” by means of which a cool, clear-headed man could soon accumulate capital. Here the training acquired by working for old Hasluck would serve him well. One man my father knew – quite a dull, commonplace man – starting a few years ago with only a few hundreds, was now worth tens of thousands. Foresight was the necessary qualification. You watched the “tendency” of things. So often had my father said to himself: “This is going to be a big thing. That other, it is no good,” and in every instance his prognostications had been verified. He had “felt it;” some men had that gift. Now was the time to use it for practical purposes.
