Jerome K. Jerome

“ THE WOOING OF TOM SLEIGHT'S WIFE It's competition,” replied Henry, “that makes the world go round. You never want a thing particularly until you see another fellow trying to get it; then it strikes you all of a sudden that you've a better right to it than he has. Take barmaids: what's the attraction about 'em? In looks they're no better than the average girl in the street; while as for their temper, well that's a bit above the average—leastways, so far as my experience goes. ”

“ She explained to him how an accomplished and experienced woman could help a man to gain admittance into the tiptop circles, which, according to her, were just thirsting for him. As a waiter, he had his share of brains, and it’s a business that requires more insight than perhaps you’d fancy, if you don’t want to waste your time on a rabbit-skin coat and a paste ring, and give the burnt sole to the real gent. ”

“ I never see a youngster hanging up in the refrigerator, as one may put it, but I says to myself: 'Now I wonder what the cook is going to make of you! Will you be minced and devilled and fricasseed till you are all sauce and no meat? Will you be hammered tender and grilled over a slow fire till you are a blessing to mankind? Or will you be spoilt in the boiling, and come out a stringy rag, an immediate curse, and a permanent injury to those who have got to swallow you?'
“There was a youngster I knew in my old coffee-shop days,” continued Henry, “that in the end came to be eaten by cannibals. ”

“ He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a fool would do. And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as they came out—you know the sort I mean,—where everybody snaps everybody else's head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them about the hotels when they've done with them, and one gets into the habit of dipping into them when one's nothing better to do. ”

“ He always came into the shop at the same time—half-past two; he always sat in the seat next the window; and three days out of six, he would order the same dinner: a fourpenny beef-steak pudding—we called it beef-steak, and, for all practical purposes, it was beef-steak—a penny plate of potatoes, and a penny slice of roly-poly pudding—'chest expander' was the name our customers gave it—to follow. That showed sense, I always thought, that dinner alone; a more satisfying menu, at the price, I defy any human being to work out. He always had a book with him, and he generally read during his meal ”

“ I says, “I suppose you'll be bossing that bar in Capetown now before long?”
“Talk sense,” she answers. “How can the Marchioness of Appleford marry a hotel keeper?”
“Why not,” I says, “if she fancies him? What's the good of being a Marchioness if you can't do what you like?”
“That's just it,” she snaps out; “you can't. It would not be doing the straight thing by the family. No,” she says, “I've spent their money, and I'm spending it now. They don't love me, but they shan't say as I have disgraced them. They've got their feelings same as I've got mine.” ”

“ Sometimes she’d leave off to take a customer’s money, and sometimes she wouldn’t. I’ve been to some rummy places in my time; and a waiter ain’t the blind owl as he’s supposed to be. But never in my life have I seen so much love-making, not all at once, as used to go on in that place. It was a dismal, gloomy sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed to scent it out by instinct, and would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry. “Idyllic,” some folks would have thought it: I used to get the fair dismals watching it. ”

“ He slipped going round the bend of the stairs, and knocked his head a rattling good thump against the balustrade; but he never let go that hamper—only swore and plunged on. I could see he was nervous and excited, but one gets used to nervous and excited people in hotels. Whether a man's running away from a thing, or running after a thing, he stops at a hotel on his way; and so long as he looks as if he could pay his bill one doesn't trouble much about him. ”

“ Put 'em behind a row of tumblers and a shilling's-worth of stale pastry, and nothing outside a Lincoln and Bennett is good enough for 'em. It's the competition that's the making of 'em.
“Now, I'll tell you a story,” continued Henry, “that bears upon the subject. It's a pretty story, if you look at it from one point of view; though my wife maintains—and she's a bit of a judge, mind you—that it's not yet finished, she arguing that there's a difference between marrying and being married. You can have a fancy for the one, without caring much about the other. ”

“ Marie always appeared delighted to see him, and pouted when he left; but what puzzled me at the time was, that though she fooled him to the top of his bent, she flirted every bit as much, if not more, with her other customers—leastways with the nicer ones among them. There was one young Frenchman in particular—a good-looking chap, a Monsieur Flammard, son of the painter. Up till then he’d been making love pretty steadily to Miss Marie, as, indeed, had most of ’em, without ever getting much forrarder ”

“ The baby was quiet now, gnawing the dog-biscuit. The old lady looked at the child, then turned and hid her face against the chambermaid's bosom.
“What is it?” she says, speaking in an awed voice. “The thing in the hamper?”
“It's a baby, Ma'am,” says the maid.
“You're sure it ain't a dog?” says the old lady. “Look again.”
The girl began to feel nervous, and to wish that she wasn't alone with the old lady.
“I ain't likely to mistake a dog for a baby, Ma'am,” says the girl. “It's a child—a human infant.”
The old lady began to cry softly. “It's a judgment on me,” she says. ”

“ One American drink, as they used to concoct it in that bar, was generally enough for most of our customers, but he, before he left, contrived to put away three; also contriving, during the same short space of time, to inform 'Mam'sel Marie' that Paris, since he had looked into her eyes, had become the only town worth living in, so far as he was concerned, throughout the whole universe. He had his failings, had Master Tom Sleight, but shyness wasn't one of them. She gave him a smile when he left that would have brought a less impressionable young man than he back again to that Cafe ”

“ I thought if you were a married man you would be able to understand the thing better. Have you got an intelligent woman in the house?”
“We've got women,” I says. “As to their intelligence, that's a matter of opinion; they're the average sort of women. Shall I call the chambermaid?” ”

“ I'm Susan to my friends, not to every broken-down tramp looking for a job.'
“'Ain't I your husband?' says he, trying a bit of dignity.
“She got up and took a glance through the glass-door to see that nobody was there to overhear her.
“'For the first and last time,' says she, 'let you and me understand one another. I've been eleven years without a husband, and I've got used to it. I don't feel now as I want one of any kind, and if I did it wouldn't be your sort. ”

“ I says. “By a coincidence this dog was being taken to Birmingham, packed in a hamper exactly similar to the one you put your baby in. You've got this man's bull-pup, he's got your baby; and I wouldn't like to say off-hand at this moment which of you's feeling the madder. As likely as not, he thinks you've done it on purpose.”
He leant his head against the bed-post and groaned. “Milly may be here at any moment,” says he, “and I'll have to tell her the baby's been sent by mistake to a Dog Show! I daresn't do it,” he says, “I daresn't do it.” ”

“ Each woman felt sure she was the mother of the one that was crowing at the moment, and when it yelled she was positive it was no child of hers. They thought they would trust to the instinct of the children. ”

“ The girl hadn’t a relative or friend in the town, all her folks being French Canadians. She’d got her pride, and she’d got a sense of humour not common in a woman. I was with her at the Grand Central for over a year, and came to know her pretty well. She didn’t choose to advertise the fact that her husband had run away from her, as she thought, an hour after he had married her. She knew he was a gentleman with rich relatives somewhere in England; and as the months went by without bringing word or sign of him, she concluded he’d thought the matter over and was ashamed of her. ”

“ Up in the morning, do your bit of work, drink your glass of beer, and to bed in the evening; nothing to excite you, nothing to rouse you. Why, it's a mere animal existence.'
“He was a rum sort of chap, always thought things out from his own point of view as it were.”
“Yes, a curious case,” I remarked to Henry; “not the sort of story to put about, however. It might give women the idea that nagging is attractive, and encourage them to try it upon husbands who do not care for that kind of excitement.”
“Not much fear of that,” replied Henry. “The nagging woman is born, as they say, not made ”

“ A pretty, gentle-looking little thing she was, with big childish eyes, and a voice like the pouring out of water. They are strange things, women; one can never tell what they are made of from the taste of them. ”

“ I thought young Milberry would have fallen upon the boy’s neck and kissed him. With the boy to help us, we started among the cabmen. Old ladies with dog-baskets ain’t so difficult to trace. She had gone to a small second-rate hotel in the Aston Road. I heard all particulars from the chambermaid, and the old girl seems to have had as bad a time in her way as my gent had in his. They couldn’t get the hamper into the cab, it had to go on the top. The old lady was very worried, as it was raining at the time, and she made the cabman cover it with his apron. ”

“ Joe sits down and stares at the old gent, and the old gent looks him back.
“'It's a dangerous station,' says the old gent. 'Two of our people have lost their lives there. It wants a man there—a man who will do something besides preach, who will save these poor people we have gathered together there from being scattered and lost, who will be their champion, their protector, their friend.'
“In the end, Joe took on the job, and went out with his wife. A better missionary that Society never had and never wanted. ”

“ I took it to be a bull-pup of about nine months old, and a fine specimen for its age.
“My child!” he shrieks, with his eyes starting out of his head, “That thing isn't my child. What's happened? Am I going mad?”
“You're on that way,” I says, and so he was. “Calm yourself,” I says; “what did you expect to see?”
“My child,” he shrieks again; “my only child—my baby!”
“Do you mean a real child?” I says, “a human child?” Some folks have such a silly way of talking about their dogs—you never can tell.
“Of course I do,” he says ”

“ I shouldn't have got rid of you for my pleasure, and I'm not going to do it for yours. You can live like a decent man, and I'll go on putting up with you; or you can live like a fool, and I shan't stand in your way. ”

“ If anybody was eaten, it was more likely the cannibal. But that is neither here nor there. What I am thinking of is what happened before he and the cannibals ever got nigh to one another. He was fourteen when I first set eyes on him—Mile End fourteen, that is; which is the same, I take it, as City eighteen and West End five-and-twenty—and he was smart for his age into the bargain: a trifle too smart as a matter of fact. ”

“ They up and give the old woman a friendly clump, just as you or me would swear at the missus, or fling a boot-jack at her. They don't mean anything more.
I left the coffee shop later on for a place in the city, and saw nothing more of them for five years. When I did it was at a restaurant in Oxford Street—one of those amatoor shows run by a lot of women, who know nothing about the business, and spend the whole day gossiping and flirting—“love-shops,” I call 'em. ”

“ I know I started with a bulldog, and somehow or other it's got turned into that.”
“Somebody's put it there,” says the chambermaid; “somebody as wanted to get rid of a child. They've took your dog out and put that in its place.”
“They must have been precious smart,” says the old lady; “the hamper hasn't been out of my sight for more than five minutes, when I went into the refreshment-room at Banbury for a cup of tea.” ”

“ It shows you’re the sort of woman he’ll always be falling in love with.’
“She laughed at that, but the next moment she was serious again. ‘A man’s got to fall out of love before he falls into it again,’ she replied. ‘I want a man that’ll stop there. Besides,’ she goes on, ‘a woman isn’t always young and pretty: we’ve got to remember that. ”

“ Business is business; and I ain't going to queer 'er pitch for 'er.”
I've often wondered what she'd a' said, if he'd up and put the case to her plain, for she was a good sort; but, naturally enough, her head was a bit swelled, and she'd read so much rot about herself in the papers that she'd got at last to half believe some of it. The thought of her connection with the well-known judge seemed to hamper her at times, and she wasn't quite so chummy with “Kipper” as used to be the case in the Mile-End Road days, and he wasn't the sort as is slow to see a thing. ”

“ What I tell her is that a boy isn't a man, and a man isn't a boy. Besides, it's five years ago now, and nothing has happened since: though of course one can never say.”
“I would like to hear the story,” I ventured to suggest; “I'll be able to judge better afterwards.”
“It's not a long one,” replied Henry, “though as a matter of fact it began seventeen years ago in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He was a wild young fellow, and always had been.”
“Who was?” I interrupted.
“Tom Sleight,” answered Henry, “the chap I'm telling you about. ”