Jerome K. Jerome

“ An old man enters—an old, bent, withered man—holding a lamp above his head, and I look at his face, and it is my own face. And another enters, and he also is myself. Then more and more, till the room is thronged with faces, and the stair-way beyond, and all the silent house. Some of the faces are old and others young, and some are fair and smile at me, and many are foul and leer at me. And every face is my own face, but no two of them are alike. ”

“ Jephson possessed the robuster philosophy that enabled him to enjoy his during their actual progress. He arrived drenched to the skin, chuckling hugely at the idea of having come down on a visit to a houseboat in such weather.
Under his warming influence, the hard lines on our faces thawed, and by supper time we were, as all Englishmen and women who wish to enjoy life should be, independent of the weather.
Later on, as if disheartened by our indifference, the rain ceased, and we took our chairs out on the deck, and sat watching the lightning, which still played incessantly. ”

“ She was a fragile, delicate girl, whom he had married in obedience to that instinct of attraction towards the opposite which Nature, for the purpose of maintaining her average, has implanted in our breasts—a timid, meek-eyed creature, one of those women to whom death is less terrible than danger, and fate easier to face than fear. Such women have been known to run screaming from a mouse and to meet martyrdom with heroism. They can no more keep their nerves from trembling than an aspen tree can stay the quivering of its leaves. ”

“ I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse. If a nurse in fair practice does not know more about human nature—does not see clearer into the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little Bookland put together—it must be because she is physically blind and deaf. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to be. ”

“ He was either an exceptionally mean or an exceptionally noble character, according to how one views the matter. He worshipped his wife—as men with big hearts and weak brains often do worship such women—with dog-like devotion. His only dread was lest the scandal should reach proportions that would compel him to take notice of it, and thus bring shame and suffering upon the woman to whom he would have given his life. That a man who saw her should love her seemed natural to him; that she should have grown tired of himself, a thing not to be wondered at. ”

“ From that day till the hour she died, I don’t believe that cat was ever once quite sober. Her days she passed in a drunken stupor before the kitchen fire. Her nights she spent in the beer cellar.
My grandmother, shocked and grieved beyond expression, gave up her barrel and adopted bottles. The cat, thus condemned to enforced abstinence, meandered about the house for a day and a half in a disconsolate, quarrelsome mood. Then she disappeared, returning at eleven o’clock as tight as a drum. ”

“ In another dream that I remember, an angel (or a devil, I am not quite sure which) has come to a man and told him that so long as he loves no living human thing—so long as he never suffers himself to feel one touch of tenderness towards wife or child, towards kith or kin, towards stranger or towards friend, so long will he succeed and prosper in his dealings—so long will all this world’s affairs go well with him; and he will grow each day richer and greater and more powerful. ”

“ The world is so busy reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking. You’ll tell me, of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon of the Press. You come out here, old man, and sit as I do sometimes for days and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an upheaved island of earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky, and you will know that they are not. ”

“ It was a noisy, crowded street in the daytime; but a silent, lonesome street at night, when the gas-lights, few and far between, partook of the character of lighthouses rather than of illuminants, and the tramp, tramp of the policeman on his long beat seemed to be ever drawing nearer, or fading away, except for brief moments when the footsteps ceased, as he paused to rattle a door or window, or to flash his lantern into some dark passage leading down towards the river. ”

“ Now, her timidity and nervousness, which at home had been a butt for mere chaff, became, under the new circumstances of their life, a serious annoyance to the man. A woman who seemed unable to repress a scream whenever she turned and saw in the gloom a pair of piercing eyes looking out at her from a dusky face, who was liable to drop off her horse with fear at the sound of a wild beast’s roar a mile off, and who would turn white and limp with horror at the mere sight of a snake, was not a companionable person to live with in the neighbourhood of Indian jungles. ”

“ I leave Piccadilly an unhealthy, unwholesome prig. At Charing Cross I begin to feel my blood stir in my veins. From Ludgate Circus to Cheapside I am a human thing with human feeling throbbing in my heart, and human thought throbbing in my brain—with fancies, sympathies, and hopes. At the Bank my mind becomes a blank. As I walk on, my senses grow coarse and blunted ”

“ Our virtues are taught to us as a branch of ‘Deportment’; our vices are the recognised vices of our reign and set. Our religion hangs ready-made beside our cradle to be buttoned upon us by loving hands. Our tastes we acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we learn by rote. At cost of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey and cigars, high art and classical music. In one age we admire Byron and drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable to prefer Shelley, and we like our champagne dry. ”

“ The man’s face has grown a little older, but it is still young and fair, and when the woman’s eyes rest upon it there comes a glory into her face so that it is like the face of an angel. But at times the woman is alone, and then I see the old evil look struggling back. ”

“ She is beautiful, and she is good, and she is my choice.’
“‘She’s a jolly enough little girl,’ I replied, ‘and, I should say, affectionate; but have you considered, Smythe, whether she is quite—what shall we say—quite as intellectual as could be desired?’
“‘Really, to tell the truth, I have not troubled myself much about her intellect,’ he replied, with one of his sneering smiles. ‘I have no doubt that the amount of intellect absolutely necessary to the formation of a British home, I shall be able to supply myself. I have no desire for an intellectual wife. ”

“ Nowadays ‘slumming’ is the most applauded virtue, and so all our best heroines go slumming, and are ‘good to the poor.’”
“How useful ‘the poor’ are,” remarked MacShaughnassy, somewhat abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with hopeful interest. “I don’t think we scribbling fellows ever fully grasp how much we owe to ‘the poor.’ Where would our angelic heroines and our noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for ‘the poor’? We want to show that the dear girl is as good as she is beautiful. ”

“ The world is very cruel to those that have not yet conquered it, and, though we keep a careless face, our young hearts are scored with wrinkles. Often we grow weary and faint-hearted. Is it not so, my friend? No one has faith in us, and in our dark hours we doubt ourselves. ”

“ I say selfishness—bad selfishness—is the root of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me.”
“Not always,” persisted Jephson; “I’ve known selfishness—selfishness according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term—to be productive of good actions. I can give you an instance, if you like.”
“Has it got a moral?” asked MacShaughnassy, drowsily,
Jephson mused a moment. “Yes,” he said at length; “a very practical moral—and one very useful to young men.”
“That’s the sort of story we want,” said the MacShaughnassy, raising himself into a sitting position. “You listen to this, Brown.” ”

“ It seemed to me that for any human being to light a fire, laid as that fire was laid, would be a feat to be proud of. To light a fire even under ordinary circumstances is not too easy a task: to do so, handicapped by MacShaughnassy’s rules, would, I felt, be an achievement pleasant to look back upon. My idea, had I succeeded, would have been to go round the neighbourhood and brag about it.
However, I did not succeed. I lit various other things, including the kitchen carpet and the cat, who would come sniffing about, but the materials within the stove appeared to be fire-proof. ”

“ My dear Brown, we writers—novelists, dramatists, poets—we fatten on the misery of our fellow-creatures. God created man and woman, and the woman created the literary man when she put her teeth into the apple. We came into the world under the shadow of the serpent. We are special correspondents with the Devil’s army. We report his victories in our three-volume novels, his occasional defeats in our five-act melodramas.”
“All of which is very true,” remarked Jephson; “but you must remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune. ”

“ So I slip on a few clothes, and go down to the kitchen on a foraging expedition.
It is said that dreams are momentary conglomerations of thought, centring round the incident that awakens us, and, as with most scientific facts, this is occasionally true. There is one dream that, with slight variations, is continually recurring to me. Over and over again I dream that I am suddenly called upon to act an important part in some piece at the Lyceum. That poor Mr. Irving should invariably be the victim seems unfair, but really it is entirely his own fault. It is he who persuades and urges me. ”

“ But if ever he let one kindly thought for living thing come into his heart, in that moment all his plans and schemes will topple down about his ears; and from that hour his name will be despised by men, and then forgotten.
And the man treasures up these words, for he is an ambitious man, and wealth and fame and power are the sweetest things in all the world to him. ”

“ That he loved her passionately, in his way, as a thing belonging to himself, there can be no doubt, but it was with the love that such men have for the dog they will thrash, the horse they will spur to a broken back. To consult her on the subject never entered his head. He informed her one day of his decision and of the date of their sailing, and, handing her a handsome cheque, told her to purchase all things necessary to her, and to let him know if she needed more; and she, loving him with a dog-like devotion that was not good for him, opened her big eyes a little wider, but said nothing. ”

“ In the bedroom there was a washing-stand, and on the washing-stand there stood a jug and basin, and in the jug there was real water. But all this was as nothing. I have known mere ordinary, middle-class dolls’ houses in which you might find washing-stands and jugs and basins and real water—ay, and even soap. But in this abode of luxury there was a real towel; so that a body could not only wash himself, but wipe himself afterwards, and that is a sensation that, as all dolls know, can be enjoyed only in the very first-class establishments. ”

“ I always feel inside a sick-room as if I were behind the scenes of life. The people come and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient’s eyes, and you just know that it’s all a play.”
The incident that Jephson’s remark had reminded me of, she told me one afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a glass of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I did not like it. ”

“ For the poor themselves—I do not mean the noisy professional poor, but the silent, fighting poor—one is bound to feel a genuine respect. One honours them, as one honours a wounded soldier.
In the perpetual warfare between Humanity and Nature, the poor stand always in the van. They die in the ditches, and we march over their bodies with the flags flying and the drums playing. ”

“ Ethelbertha looked puzzled. “But what has digestion got to do with it?” she asked.
“A pretty good deal, mum,” answered Amenda, “when you’re thinking of marrying a man as can’t make a sausage fit to eat.”
“But, surely,” exclaimed Ethelbertha, “you don’t mean to say you’re breaking off the match because you don’t like his sausages!”
“Well, I suppose that’s what it comes to,” agreed Amenda, unconcernedly.
“What an awful idea!” sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause. “Do you think you ever really loved him?” ”

“ A numerous company of rats and mice, remarkably fond of physical exercise, had fitted the place up as a gymnasium for themselves; and our kitchen, after ten o’clock, was turned into a blackbeetles’ club. They came up through the floor and out through the walls, and gambolled there in their light-hearted, reckless way till daylight.
The rats and mice Amenda did not object to. She said she liked to watch them. But against the blackbeetles she was prejudiced. Therefore, when my wife informed her that MacShaughnassy’s aunt had given us an infallible recipe for their annihilation, she rejoiced. ”

“ Each night, when all else in the house sleeps, the door of that room opens noiselessly, and the man enters and closes it behind him. Each night he draws away the white sheet, and takes the small dead body in his arms; and through the dark hours he paces softly to and fro, holding it close against his breast, kissing it and crooning to it, like a mother to her sleeping baby. ”

“ Brown expostulated with MacShaughnassy. “You speak,” he said, “as though literature were the parasite of evil.”
“And what else is she?” replied the MacShaughnassy, with enthusiasm. “What would become of literature without folly and sin? What is the work of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the dust-heap of human woe? Imagine, if you can, a perfect world—a world where men and women never said foolish things and never did unwise ones; where small boys were never mischievous and children never made awkward remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never screeched ”

“ I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge, drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements I saw, looking out at me, a face. It stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.
“That woman’s face reminded me of the incident. It was an angel’s face, until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.
“That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt. Vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them. ”

“ Now a cat, she’s got her own opinion about human beings. She don’t say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it. The consequence is, we says a cat’s got no intelligence. That’s where we let our prejudice steer our judgment wrong. In a matter of plain common sense, there ain’t a cat living as couldn’t take the lee side of a dog and fly round him. Now, have you ever noticed a dog at the end of a chain, trying to kill a cat as is sitting washing her face three-quarters of an inch out of his reach? ”