Jerome K. Jerome

“ From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan's thick, rancorous voice raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the man's savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would flag for a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting: “Bravo! Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to hear you,” applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.
“What a beast of a man,” said my mother.
“He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,” explained my father. ”

“ I concluded her to be Miss Gutton.
“It doesn't seem to me,” said Aunt Gutton from the other end of the table, “that gentlemen are as keen on marrying nowadays as they used to be.”
“Got to know a bit about it, I expect,” sounded the small, shrill voice of the unseen Joseph.
“To my thinking,” exclaimed a hatchet-faced gentleman, “one of the evils crying most loudly for redress at the present moment is the utterly needless and monstrous expense of legal proceedings.” He spoke rapidly and with warmth. “Take divorce. At present, what is it? The rich man's luxury.” ”

“ I shower my thoughts over our Paul, Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep, original. The young beggar swallows them, forgets them. They were rubbish. Then I say something that dwells with him, that grows. Ah, that was alive, that was a seed. The waiting earth, it can make use only of what is true.”
“You should marry, Hal,” my mother would say. It was her panacea for all mankind.
“I would, Mrs. Kelver,” he answered her on one occasion, “I would to-morrow if I could marry half a dozen women. I should make an ideal husband for half a dozen wives. ”

“ Chief among the pictures that I see is that of my aunt Fan, crouching over the kitchen fire; her skirt and crinoline rolled up round her waist, leaving as sacrifice to custom only her petticoat. Up and down her body sways in rhythmic motion, her hands stroking affectionately her own knees; the while I, with paper knife for sword, or horse of broomstick, stand opposite her, flourishing and declaiming. Sometimes I am a knight and she a wicked ogre. She is slain, growling and swearing, and at once becomes the beautiful princess that I secure and bear away with me upon the prancing broomstick. ”

“ Thinking of her fair, sweet face, I hated him for his mocking laugh. But the next moment, looking into his deep eyes, seeing the pain that dwelt there, my pity was for him. A smile came to his ugly mouth.
“You have been on the stage, Paul; you must have heard the saying often: 'Ah, well, the curtain must come down, however badly things are going.' It is only a play, Paul. We do not choose our parts. I did not even know I was the villain, till I heard the booing of the gallery. I even thought I was the hero, full of noble sentiment, sacrificing myself for the happiness of the heroine. ”

“ And wearily to and fro its sunless passages trudged with heavy steps a weary people, coarse-clad, and with dull, listless faces. And London, I knew, was the city of the gnomes who labour sadly all their lives, imprisoned underground; and a terror seized me lest I, too, should remain chained here, deep down below the fairy city that was already but a dream.
We stopped at last in a long, unfinished street. I remember our pushing our way through a group of dirty urchins, all of whom, my aunt remarked in passing, ought to be skinned. ”

“ The bird-like gentleman in his glass cage was fluttering, agitated. The hands of the stage carpenters putting the finishing touches to the scenery were trembling, their voices passionate with anxiety; the fox-terrier-like call-boy was pale with sense of responsibility.
I made my way to the dressing-room—a long, low, wooden corridor, furnished from end to end with a wide shelf that served as common dressing-table, lighted by a dozen flaring gas-jets, wire-shielded. Here awaited us gentlemen of the chorus the wigmaker's assistant, whose duty it was to make us up. ”

“ But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known no other prayer to teach me than the childish cry, “God help me to be good!” I had wished to be a great man, but it was to have been a great good man. ”

“ My love was a woman. She lies dead. They have mocked her white sweet limbs with rags and tatters, but they cannot cheat love's eyes. God knows I loved her in all purity! Only with false love we love the false. Beneath the unclean clinging garments she sleeps fair.
My tale finished, “Now I will tell you mine,” she said. “I am going to be married soon. I shall be a Countess, Paul, the Countess Huescar—I will teach you how to pronounce it—and I shall have a real castle in Spain. You need not look so frightened, Paul; we shall not live there. ”

“ Kelver. There is one of me must worship, adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous, cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature, one whose face would light at my coming, cloud at my going; one to whom I should be a god. There is a third I, a child of Pan—an ugly little beast, Mrs. Kelver ”

“ Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly? Children! poor babies they were, both of them.”
“Tell me,” I say—for at such times all my stock of common sense is not sufficient to convince me that the old House is but clay. From its walls so full of voices, from its floors so thick with footsteps, surely it has learned to live; as a violin, long played on, comes to learn at last a music of its own. ”

“ Since I have come to know myself better, I perceive that she stood to me not as a living woman, but as a symbol; not a fellow human being to be walked with through life, helping and to be helped, but that impalpable religion of sex to which we raise up idols of poor human clay, alas, not always to our satisfaction, so that foolishly we fall into anger against them, forgetting they were but the work of our own hands; not the body, but the spirit of love.
I allowed a week to elapse after receiving old Hasluck's letter before presenting myself at Stamford Hill. ”

“ She was now a faded, watery-eyed little woman, prone on the slightest provocation to sit down suddenly on the nearest chair and at once commence a history of her troubles. Quite unconscious of this failing, it was an idea of hers that she was an exceptionally cheerful person.
“But there, fretting's no good. We must grin and bear things in this world,” she would conclude, wiping her eyes upon her apron. “It's better to laugh than to cry, I always say.” And to prove that this was no mere idle sentiment, she would laugh then and there upon the spot. ”

“ Kelver,” he would say, lighting his pipe and sinking down into the deep leathern chair that always waited for him in our parlour. “Your even voice, your soft eyes, your quiet hands, they soothe me.”
“It is good for a man,” he would say, looking from one to the other of us through the hanging smoke, “to test his wisdom by two things: the face of a good woman, and the ear of a child—I beg your pardon, Paul—of a young man. A good woman's face is the white sunlight. Under the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? ”

“ A little later we were conspirators; our stage manager, with the help of a tablecloth, showed us how to conspire. Next we were a mob, led by the sentimental baritone; our stage manager, ruffling his hair, expounded to us how a mob led by a sentimental baritone would naturally behave itself. The act wound up with a fight. Our stage manager, minus his coat, demonstrated to us how to fight and die, the dying being a painful and dusty performance, necessitating, as it did, much rolling about on the stage. The fishy-eyed young gentleman throughout the whole of it was again the centre of attraction. ”

“ It was a long, narrow room, divided into wooden compartments, after the old coffee-house plan, a gangway down the centre. Now we should call it a dismal hole, and closing the door hasten away. But to Adam, Eve in her Sunday fig-leaves was a stylishly dressed woman; and to my eyes, with its gilded mirrors and its flaring gas, the place seemed a palace.
Barbara ordered oysters, a fish that familiarity with its empty shell had made me curious concerning. Truly no spot on the globe is so rich in oyster shells as the East End of London. ”

“ But Dr. “Fighting Hal” was no gentle warbler of thought. Vehement, direct, indifferent, he swept through all polite argument as a strong wind through a murmuring wood, carrying his partisans with him further than they meant to go, and quite unable to turn back; leaving his opponents clinging desperately—upside down, anyhow—to their perches, angry, their feathers much ruffled.
“Life!” flung out Washburn—Dr. Florret had just laid down unimpeachable rules for the conduct of all mankind on all occasions—“what do you respectable folk know of life? You are not men and women, you are marionettes. ”

“ From the tawdry decorations of the auditorium to the childish make-belief littered around on the stage, I saw the Theatre a painted thing of shreds and patches—the grown child's doll's-house. The Drama may improve us, elevate us, interest and teach us. I am sure it does; long may it flourish! But so likewise does the dressing and undressing of dolls, the opening of the front of the house, and the tenderly putting of them away to bed in rooms they completely fill, train our little dears to the duties and the joys of motherhood. Toys! what wise child despises them? ”

“ I began to wish that nature had bestowed upon me a noisier temperament.
“Anybody could see you was a gentleman,” continued Miss Sellars. “Heaps and heaps of hoffers I've had—hundreds you might almost say. But what I've always told 'em is, 'I like you very much indeed as a friend, but I'm not going to marry any one but a gentleman.' Don't you think I was right?” ”

“ But for Bohemians to worry among themselves which is the greatest, is utterly without reason. The story-teller, the musician, the artist, the clown, we are members of a sharing troupe; one, with the ambition of the fat boy in Pickwick, makes the people's flesh creep; another makes them hold their sides with laughter. The tragedian, soliloquising on his crimes, shows us how wicked we are; you, looking at a pair of lovers from under a scratch wig, show us how ridiculous we are. ”

“ Do you hear me, Paul?—quite rightly—that you still respect me and honour me. He could not help me. As his wife, I should be less even than I am, a mere rich nobody, giving long dinner-parties to other rich nobodies, living amongst City men, retired trades-people; envied only by their fat, vulgarly dressed wives, courted by seedy Bohemians for the sake of my cook; with perhaps an opera singer or an impecunious nobleman or two out of Dad's City list for my show-guests. Is that the court, Paul, where you would have your queen reign?”
“Is he so commonplace a man,” I answered, “the man you love? ”

“ Men who had come, men who were coming, met there on equal footing. Among them, as years ago among my schoolmates, I found my place—somewhat to my dissatisfaction. I amused. Much rather would I have shocked them by the originality of my views, impressed them with the depth of my judgments. They declined to be startled, refused to be impressed; instead, they laughed. Nor from these men could I obtain sympathy in my disappointment.
“What do you mean, you villain!” roared Deleglise's caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. ”

“ I cannot believe it.”
“He is not commonplace,” she answered. “It is I who am commonplace. The things I desire, they are beneath him; he will never trouble himself to secure them.”
“Not even for love of you?”
“I would not have him do so even were he willing. He is great, with a greatness I cannot even understand. He is not the man for these times. In old days, I should have married him, knowing he would climb to greatness by sheer strength of manhood. But now men do not climb; they crawl to greatness. He could not do that. I have done right, Paul.” ”

“ The Signora, the tears streaming down her pretty face, would declare herself a wicked, wicked woman; she had dragged down into shame the most blameless, the most virtuous of men. Emptying her glass, she would bury her face in her hands, and with her elbows on her knees, in an agony of remorse, sit rocking to and fro. The O'Kelly, throwing himself at her feet, would passionately abjure her to “look up.” ”