Джером К. Джером
Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green
THE MAN WHO WOULD MANAGE
It has been told me by those in a position to know – and I can believe it – that at nineteen months of age he wept because his grandmother would not allow him to feed her with a spoon, and that at three and a half he was fished, in an exhausted condition, out of the water-butt, whither he had climbed for the purpose of teaching a frog to swim.
Two years later he permanently injured his left eye, showing the cat how to carry kittens without hurting them, and about the same period was dangerously stung by a bee while conveying it from a flower where, as it seemed to him, it was only wasting its time, to one more rich in honey-making properties.
His desire was always to help others. He would spend whole mornings explaining to elderly hens how to hatch eggs, and would give up an afternoon’s black-berrying to sit at home and crack nuts for his pet squirrel. Before he was seven he would argue with his mother upon the management of children, and reprove his father for the way he was bringing him up.
As a child nothing could afford him greater delight than “minding” other children, or them less. He would take upon himself this harassing duty entirely of his own accord, without hope of reward or gratitude. It was immaterial to him whether the other children were older than himself or younger, stronger or weaker, whenever and wherever he found them he set to work to “mind” them. Once, during a school treat, piteous cries were heard coming from a distant part of the wood, and upon search being made, he was discovered prone upon the ground, with a cousin of his, a boy twice his own weight, sitting upon him and steadily whacking him. Having rescued him, the teacher said:
“Why don’t you keep with the little boys? What are you doing along with him?”
“Please, sir,” was the answer, “I was minding him.”
He would have “minded” Noah if he had got hold of him.
He was a good-natured lad, and at school he was always willing for the whole class to copy from his slate – indeed he would urge them to do so. He meant it kindly, but inasmuch as his answers were invariably quite wrong – with a distinctive and inimitable wrongness peculiar to himself – the result to his followers was eminently unsatisfactory; and with the shallowness of youth that, ignoring motives, judges solely from results, they would wait for him outside and punch him.
All his energies went to the instruction of others, leaving none for his own purposes. He would take callow youths to his chambers and teach them to box.
“Now, try and hit me on the nose,” he would say, standing before them in an attitude of defence. “Don’t be afraid. Hit as hard as ever you can.”
And they would do it. And so soon as he had recovered from his surprise, and a little lessened the bleeding, he would explain to them how they had done it all wrong, and how easily he could have stopped the blow if they had only hit him properly.
Twice at golf he lamed himself for over a week, showing a novice how to “drive”; and at cricket on one occasion I remember seeing his middle stump go down like a ninepin just as he was explaining to the bowler how to get the balls in straight. After which he had a long argument with the umpire as to whether he was in or out.
He has been known, during a stormy Channel passage, to rush excitedly upon the bridge in order to inform the captain that he had “just seen a light about two miles away to the left”; and if he is on the top of an omnibus he generally sits beside the driver, and points out to him the various obstacles likely to impede their progress.
It was upon an omnibus that my own personal acquaintanceship with him began. I was sitting behind two ladies when the conductor came up to collect fares. One of them handed him a sixpence telling him to take to Piccadilly Circus, which was twopence.
“No,” said the other lady to her friend, handing the man a shilling, “I owe you sixpence, you give me fourpence and I’ll pay for the two.”
The conductor took the shilling, punched two twopenny tickets, and then stood trying to think it out.
“That’s right,” said the lady who had spoken last, “give my friend fourpence.”
The conductor did so.
“Now you give that fourpence to me.”
The friend handed it to her.
“And you,” she concluded to the conductor, “give me eightpence, then we shall be all right.”
The conductor doled out to her the eightpence – the sixpence he had taken from the first lady, with a penny and two halfpennies out of his own bag – distrustfully, and retired, muttering something about his duties not including those of a lightning calculator.
“Now,” said the elder lady to the younger, “I owe you a shilling.”
I deemed the incident closed, when suddenly a florid gentleman on the opposite seat called out in stentorian tones: —
“Hi, conductor! you’ve cheated these ladies out of fourpence.”
“’Oo’s cheated ’oo out ’o fourpence?” replied the indignant conductor from the top of the steps, “it was a twopenny fare.”
“Two twopences don’t make eightpence,” retorted the florid gentleman hotly. “How much did you give the fellow, my dear?” he asked, addressing the first of the young ladies.
“I gave him sixpence,” replied the lady, examining her purse. “And then I gave you fourpence, you know,” she added, addressing her companion.
“That’s a dear two pen’oth,” chimed in a common-looking man on the seat behind.
“Oh, that’s impossible, dear,” returned the other, “because I owed you sixpence to begin with.”
“But I did,” persisted the first lady.
“You gave me a shilling,” said the conductor, who had returned, pointing an accusing forefinger at the elder of the ladies.
The elder lady nodded.
“And I gave you sixpence and two pennies, didn’t I?”
The lady admitted it.
“An’ I give ’er” – he pointed towards the younger lady – “fourpence, didn’t I?”
“Which I gave you, you know, dear,” remarked the younger lady.
“Blow me if it ain’t me as ’as been cheated out of the fourpence,” cried the conductor.
“But,” said the florid gentleman, “the other lady gave you sixpence.”
“Which I give to ’er,” replied the conductor, again pointing the finger of accusation at the elder lady. “You can search my bag if yer like. I ain’t got a bloomin’ sixpence on me.”
By this time everybody had forgotten what they had done, and contradicted themselves and one another. The florid man took it upon himself to put everybody right, with the result that before Piccadilly Circus was reached three passengers had threatened to report the conductor for unbecoming language. The conductor had called a policeman and had taken the names and addresses of the two ladies, intending to sue them for the fourpence (which they wanted to pay, but which the florid man would not allow them to do); the younger lady had become convinced that the elder lady had meant to cheat her, and the elder lady was in tears.
The florid gentleman and myself continued to Charing Cross Station. At the booking office window it transpired that we were bound for the same suburb, and we journeyed down together. He talked about the fourpence all the way.
At my gate we shook hands, and he was good enough to express delight at the discovery that we were near neighbours. What attracted him to myself I failed to understand, for he had bored me considerably, and I had, to the best of my ability, snubbed him. Subsequently I learned that it was a peculiarity of his to be charmed with anyone who did not openly insult him.
Three days afterwards he burst into my study unannounced – he appeared to regard himself as my bosom friend – and asked me to forgive him for not having called sooner, which I did.
“I met the postman as I was coming along,” he said, handing me a blue envelope, “and he gave me this, for you.”
I saw it was an application for the water-rate.
“We must make a stand against this,” he continued. “That’s for water to the 29th September. You’ve no right to pay it in June.”
I replied to the effect that water-rates had to be paid, and that it seemed to me immaterial whether they were paid in June or September.
“That’s not it,” he answered, “it’s the principle of the thing. Why should you pay for water you have never had? What right have they to bully you into paying what you don’t owe?”
He was a fluent talker, and I was ass enough to listen to him. By the end of half an hour he had persuaded me that the question was bound up with the inalienable rights of man, and that if I paid that fourteen and tenpence in June instead of in September, I should be unworthy of the privileges my forefathers had fought and died to bestow upon me.
He told me the company had not a leg to stand upon, and at his instigation I sat down and wrote an insulting letter to the chairman.
The secretary replied that, having regard to the attitude I had taken up, it would be incumbent upon themselves to treat it as a test case, and presumed that my solicitors would accept service on my behalf.
When I showed him this letter he was delighted.
“You leave it to me,” he said, pocketing the correspondence, “and we’ll teach them a lesson.”
I left it to him. My only excuse is that at the time I was immersed in the writing of what in those days was termed a comedy-drama. The little sense I possessed must, I suppose, have been absorbed by the play.
The magistrate’s decision somewhat damped my ardour, but only inflamed his zeal. Magistrates, he said, were muddle-headed old fogies. This was a matter for a judge.
The judge was a kindly old gentleman, and said that bearing in mind the unsatisfactory wording of the sub-clause, he did not think he could allow the company their costs, so that, all told, I got off for something under fifty pounds, inclusive of the original fourteen and tenpence.
Afterwards our friendship waned, but living as we did in the same outlying suburb, I was bound to see a good deal of him; and to hear more.
At parties of all kinds he was particularly prominent, and on such occasions, being in his most good-natured mood, was most to be dreaded. No human being worked harder for the enjoyment of others, or produced more universal wretchedness.
One Christmas afternoon, calling upon a friend, I found some fourteen or fifteen elderly ladies and gentlemen trotting solemnly round a row of chairs in the centre of the drawing-room while Poppleton played the piano. Every now and then Poppleton would suddenly cease, and everyone would drop wearily into the nearest chair, evidently glad of a rest; all but one, who would thereupon creep quietly away, followed by the envying looks of those left behind. I stood by the door watching the weird scene. Presently an escaped player came towards me, and I enquired of him what the ceremony was supposed to signify.
“Don’t ask me,” he answered grumpily. “Some of Poppleton’s damned tomfoolery.” Then he added savagely, “We’ve got to play forfeits after this.”
The servant was still waiting a favourable opportunity to announce me. I gave her a shilling not to, and got away unperceived.
After a satisfactory dinner, he would suggest an impromptu dance, and want you to roll up mats, or help him move the piano to the other end of the room.
He knew enough round games to have started a small purgatory of his own. Just as you were in the middle of an interesting discussion, or a delightful tête-à-tête with a pretty woman, he would swoop down upon you with: “Come along, we’re going to play literary consequences,” and dragging you to the table, and putting a piece of paper and a pencil before you, would tell you to write a description of your favourite heroine in fiction, and would see that you did it.
He never spared himself. It was always he who would volunteer to escort the old ladies to the station, and who would never leave them until he had seen them safely into the wrong train. He it was who would play “wild beasts” with the children, and frighten them into fits that would last all night.
So far as intention went, he was the kindest man alive. He never visited poor sick persons without taking with him in his pocket some little delicacy calculated to disagree with them and make them worse. He arranged yachting excursions for bad sailors, entirely at his own expense, and seemed to regard their subsequent agonies as ingratitude.
He loved to manage a wedding. Once he planned matters so that the bride arrived at the altar three-quarters of an hour before the groom, which led to unpleasantness upon a day that should have been filled only with joy, and once he forgot the clergyman. But he was always ready to admit when he made a mistake.
At funerals, also, he was to the fore, pointing out to the grief-stricken relatives how much better it was for all concerned that the corpse was dead, and expressing a pious hope that they would soon join it.
The chiefest delight of his life, however, was to be mixed up in other people’s domestic quarrels. No domestic quarrel for miles round was complete without him. He generally came in as mediator, and finished as leading witness for the appellant.
As a journalist or politician his wonderful grasp of other people’s business would have won for him esteem. The error he made was working it out in practice.
THE MAN WHO LIVED FOR OTHERS
The first time we met, to speak, he was sitting with his back against a pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe. He smoked it very slowly, but very conscientiously. After each whiff he removed the pipe from his mouth and fanned away the smoke with his cap.
“Feeling bad?” I asked from behind a tree, at the same time making ready for a run, big boys’ answers to small boys’ impertinences being usually of the nature of things best avoided.
To my surprise and relief – for at second glance I perceived I had under-estimated the length of his legs – he appeared to regard the question as a natural and proper one, replying with unaffected candour, “Not yet.”
My desire became to comfort him – a sentiment I think he understood and was grateful for. Advancing into the open, I sat down over against him, and watched him for a while in silence. Presently he said: —
“Have you ever tried drinking beer?”
I admitted I had not.
“Oh, it is beastly stuff,” he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.
Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the past, he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.
“Do you often drink it?” I inquired.
“Yes,” he replied gloomily; “all we fellows in the fifth form drink beer and smoke pipes.”
A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.
He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge. Before he reached it, however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.
“If you follow me, young ’un, or look, I’ll punch your head,” he said swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.
He left at the end of the terms and I did not see him again until we were both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey.
I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed. During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this, but his relatives – a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in India – were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.
In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject.
“What’s the matter with him?” I said. “Is he ill?”
The old lady chuckled.
“You’ll be like that one day,” she whispered gleefully.
“When,” I asked, not unnaturally alarmed.
“When you’re in love,” she answered.
“Is he in love?” I inquired after a pause.
“Can’t you see he is?” she replied somewhat scornfully.
I was a young man, and interested in the question.
“Won’t he ever eat any dinner till he’s got over it?” I asked.
She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was only foolish.
“You wait till your time comes,” she answered, shaking her curls at me. “You won’t care much about your dinner – not if you are really in love.”
In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought, footsteps in the passage, and creeping to the door and opening it I saw the figure of my friend in dressing-gown and slippers, vanishing down the stairs. My idea was that, his brain weakened by trouble, he had developed sleep-walking tendencies. Partly out of curiosity, partly to watch over him, I slipped on a pair of trousers and followed him.
He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for the pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds of cold beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I came away, leaving him fumbling for pickles.
I assisted at his wedding, where it seemed to me he endeavoured to display more ecstasy than it was possible for any human being to feel; and fifteen months later, happening to catch sight of an advertisement in the births column of The Times, I called on my way home from the City to congratulate him. He was pacing up and down the passage with his hat on, pausing at intervals to partake of an uninviting-looking meal, consisting of a cold mutton chop and a glass of lemonade, spread out upon a chair. Seeing that the cook and the housemaid were wandering about the house evidently bored for want of something to do, and that the dining-room, where he would have been much more out of the way, was empty and quite in order, I failed at first to understand the reason for his deliberate choice of discomfort. I, however, kept my reflections to myself, and inquired after the mother and child.
“Couldn’t be better,” he replied with a groan. “The doctor said he’d never had a more satisfactory case in all his experience.”
“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” I answered; “I was afraid you’d been worrying yourself.”
“Worried!” he exclaimed. “My dear boy, I don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels” (he gave one that idea). “This is the first morsel of food that’s passed my lips for twenty-four hours.”
At this moment the nurse appeared at the top of the stairs. He flew towards her, upsetting the lemonade in his excitement.
“What is it?” he asked hoarsely. “Is it all right?”
The old lady glanced from him to his cold chop, and smiled approvingly.
“They’re doing splendidly,” she answered, patting him on the shoulder in a motherly fashion. “Don’t you worry.”
“I can’t help it, Mrs. Jobson,” he replied, sitting down upon the bottom stair, and leaning his head against the banisters.
“Of course you can’t,” said Mrs. Jobson admiringly; “and you wouldn’t be much of a man if you could.” Then it was borne in upon me why he wore his hat, and dined off cold chops in the passage.
The following summer they rented a picturesque old house in Berkshire, and invited me down from a Saturday to Monday. Their place was near the river, so I slipped a suit of flannels in my bag, and on the Sunday morning I came down in them. He met me in the garden. He was dressed in a frock coat and a white waistcoat; and I noticed that he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and that he seemed to have a trouble on his mind. The first breakfast bell rang, and then he said, “You haven’t got any proper clothes with you, have you?”
“Proper clothes!” I exclaimed, stopping in some alarm. “Why, has anything given way?”
“No, not that,” he explained. “I mean clothes to go to church in.”
“Church,” I said. “You’re surely not going to church a fine day like this? I made sure you’d be playing tennis, or going on the river. You always used to.”
“Yes,” he replied, nervously flicking a rose-bush with a twig he had picked up. “You see, it isn’t ourselves exactly. Maud and I would rather like to, but our cook, she’s Scotch, and a little strict in her notions.”
“And does she insist on your going to church every Sunday morning?” I inquired.
“Well,” he answered, “she thinks it strange if we don’t, and so we generally do, just in the morning – and evening. And then in the afternoon a few of the village girls drop in, and we have a little singing and that sort of thing. I never like hurting anyone’s feelings if I can help it.”
I did not say what I thought. Instead I said, “I’ve got that tweed suit I wore yesterday. I can put that on if you like.”
He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows. He seemed to be recalling it to his imagination.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m afraid it would shock her. It’s my fault, I know,” he added, remorsefully. “I ought to have told you.”
Then an idea came to him.
“I suppose,” he said, “you wouldn’t care to pretend you were ill, and stop in bed just for the day?”
I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to such deception
“No, I thought you wouldn’t,” he replied. “I must explain it to her. I think I’ll say you’ve lost your bag. I shouldn’t like her to think bad of us.”
Later on a fourteenth cousin died, leaving him a large fortune. He purchased an estate in Yorkshire, and became a “county family,” and then his real troubles began.
From May to the middle of August, save for a little fly fishing, which generally resulted in his getting his feet wet and catching a cold, life was fairly peaceful; but from early autumn to late spring he found the work decidedly trying. He was a stout man, constitutionally nervous of fire-arms, and a six-hours’ tramp with a heavy gun across ploughed fields, in company with a crowd of careless persons who kept blazing away within an inch of other people’s noses, harassed and exhausted him. He had to get out of bed at four on chilly October mornings to go cub-hunting, and twice a week throughout the winter – except when a blessed frost brought him a brief respite – he had to ride to hounds. That he usually got off with nothing more serious than mere bruises and slight concussions of the spine, he probably owed to the fortunate circumstances of his being little and fat. At stiff timber he shut his eyes and rode hard; and ten yards from a river he would begin to think about bridges.
Yet he never complained.
“If you are a country gentleman,” he would say, “you must behave as a country gentleman, and take the rough with the smooth.”
As ill fate would have it a chance speculation doubled his fortune, and it became necessary that he should go into Parliament and start a yacht. Parliament made his head ache, and the yacht made him sick. Notwithstanding, every summer he would fill it with a lot of expensive people who bored him, and sail away for a month’s misery in the Mediterranean.
During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling scandal. He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and knew nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of the story, referred casually to the yacht as a “floating hell,” and The Police News awarded his portrait the place of honour as the chief criminal of the week.
Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped undergraduate. His favourite literature had hitherto been of the Corelli and Tit-Bits order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow book, and tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he subscribed to the Independent Theatre, and fed “his soul,” on Dutch Shakespeares. What he liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-door with an eligible young man in the background, or a child and a dog doing something funny. They told him these things were wrong and made him buy “Impressions” that stirred his liver to its deepest depths every time he looked at them – green cows on red hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired corpses with three feet of neck.
He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered that nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist saw things like that, and that whatever an artist saw – no matter in what condition he may have been when he saw it – that was art.
They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones’s private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen’s plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people’s enjoyments.
One morning I met him coming down the steps of the Arts Club. He looked weary. He was just off to a private view at the New Gallery. In the afternoon he had to attend an amateur performance of “The Cenci,” given by the Shelley Society. Then followed three literary and artistic At Homes, a dinner with an Indian nabob who couldn’t speak a word of English, “Tristam and Isolde” at Covent Garden Theatre, and a ball at Lord Salisbury’s to wind up the day.
I laid my hand upon his shoulder.
“Come with me to Epping Forest,” I said. “There’s a four-horse brake starts from Charing Cross at eleven. It’s Saturday, and there’s bound to be a crowd down there. I’ll play you a game of skittles, and we will have a shy at the cocoa-nuts. You used to be rather smart at cocoa-nuts. We can have lunch there and be back at seven, dine at the Troc., spend the evening at the Empire, and sup at the Savoy. What do you say?”
He stood hesitating on the steps, a wistful look in his eyes.
His brougham drew up against the curb, and he started as if from a dream.
“My dear fellow,” he replied, “what would people say?” And shaking me by the hand, he took his seat, and the footman slammed the door upon him.
