Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (148 page)

“Dick has not yet come home — nearly eight o’clock. Veronica is supposed to be in bed, but I can hear things falling. Poor boy! I expect he’ll be tired; but to-day is an exception. Three hundred sheep have had to be brought all the way from Ilsley, and must be ‘herded’ — I fancy it is called — before anybody can think of supper. I saw to it that he had a good dinner.

“And now to come to business. Young Bute has been here all day, and has only just left. He is coming down again on Friday — which, by the way, don’t forget is Mrs. St. Leonard’s ‘At Home’ day. She hopes she may then have the pleasure of making your acquaintance, and thinks that possibly there may be present one or two people we may like to know. From which I gather that half the neighbourhood has been specially invited to meet you. So mind you bring a frock-coat; and if Little Mother can put her hand easily on my pink muslin with the spots — it is either in my wardrobe or else in the bottom drawer in Veronica’s room, if it isn’t in the cardboard box underneath mother’s bed — you might slip it into your bag. But whatever you do don’t crush it. The sash I feel sure mother put away somewhere herself. He sees no reason — I’m talking now about young Bute, — if you approve his plans, why work should not be commenced immediately. Shall I write old Slee to meet you at the house on Friday? From all accounts I don’t think you’ll do better. He is on the spot, and they say he is most reasonable. But you have to get estimates, don’t you? He suggests — Mr. Bute, I mean — throwing what used to be the dairy into the passage, which will make a hall big enough for anything. We might even give a dance in it, he thinks. But all this you will be able to discuss with him on Friday. He has evidently taken a great deal of pains, and some of his suggestions sound sensible. But of course he must fully understand that it is what we want, not what he thinks, that is important. I told him you said I could have my room exactly as I liked it myself; and I have explained to him my ideas. He seemed at first to be under the impression that I didn’t know what I was talking about, so I made it quite clear to him that I did, with the result that he has consented to carry out my instructions, on condition that I put them down in black and white — which I think just as well, as then there can be no excuse afterwards for argument. I like him better than I did the first time. About everything else he can be fairly amiable. It is when he talks about ‘frontal elevations’ and ‘ground plans’ that he irritates me. Tell Little Mother that I’ll write her to-morrow. Couldn’t she come down with you on Friday? Everything will be ship-shape by then; and—”

The remainder was of a nature more private. She concluded with a postscript, which also I did not read to Ethelbertha.

“Thought I had finished telling you everything, when quite a stylish rat-tat sounded on the door. I placed an old straw hat of Dick’s in a prominent position, called loudly to an imaginary ‘John’ not to go without the letters, and then opened it. He turned out to be the local reporter. I need not have been alarmed. He was much the more nervous of the two, and was so full of excuses that had I not come to his rescue I believe he would have gone away forgetting what he’d come for. Nothing save an overwhelming sense of duty to the Public (with a capital P) could have induced him to inflict himself upon me. Could I give him a few details which would enable him to set rumour right? I immediately saw visions of headlines: ‘Domestic Tragedy!’ ‘Eminent Author blown up by his own Daughter!’ ‘Once Happy Home now a Mere Wreck!’ It seemed to me our only plan was to enlist this amiable young man upon our side; I hope I did not overdo it. My idea was to convey the impression that one glance at him had convinced me he was the best and noblest of mankind; that I felt I could rely upon his wit and courage to save us from a notoriety that, so far as I was concerned, would sadden my whole life; and that if he did so eternal gratitude and admiration would be the least I could lay at his feet. I can be nice when I try. People have said so. We parted with only a pressure of the hand, and I hope he won’t get into trouble, but I see
The Berkshire Courier
is going to be deprived of its prey. Dick has just come in. He promises to talk when he has finished eating.”

Dick’s letter, for which Ethelbertha seemed to be strangely impatient, reached us on Wednesday morning.

“If ever you want to find out, Dad, what hard work really means, you try farming,” wrote Dick; “and yet I believe you would like it. Hasn’t some old Johnny somewhere described it as the poetry of the ploughshare? Why did we ever take to bothering about anything else — shutting ourselves up in stuffy offices, worrying ourselves to death about a lot of rubbish that isn’t any good to anybody? I wish I could put it properly, Dad; you would see just what I mean. Why don’t we live in simply-built houses and get most everything we want out of the land: which we easily could? You take a dozen poor devils away from walking behind the plough and put them down into coal-mines, and set them running about half-naked among a lot of roaring furnaces, and between them they turn out a machine that does the ploughing for them. What is the sense of it? Of course some things are useful. I would like a motor-car, and railways and steamboats are all right; but it seems to me that half the fiddle-faddles we fancy we want we’d be just as well, if not better, without, and there would be all that time and energy to spare for the sort of things that everybody ought to have. It’s everywhere just like it was at school. They kept us so hard at it, studying Greek roots, we hadn’t time to learn English grammar. Look at young Dennis Yewbury. He’s got two thousand acres up in Scotland. He could lead a jolly life turning the place into some real use. Instead of which he lets it all run to waste for nothing but to breed a few hundred birds that wouldn’t keep a single family alive; while he works from morning till night at humbugging people in a beastly hole in the City, just to fill his house with a host of silly gim-cracks and dress up himself and his women-folk like peacocks. Of course we would always want clever chaps like you to tell us stories; and doctors we couldn’t do without, though I guess if we were leading sensible lives we’d be able to get along with about half of them. It seems to me that what we want is a comfortable home, enough to eat and drink, and a few fal-lal sort of things to make the girls look pretty; and that all the rest is rot. We would all of us have time then to think and play a bit, and if we were all working fairly at something really useful and were contented with our own share, there’d be enough for everybody.

“I suppose this is all nonsense, but I wish it wasn’t. Anyway, it’s what I mean to do myself; and I’m awfully much obliged to you, Dad, for giving me this chance. You’ve hit the right nail on the head this time. Farming was what I was meant for; I feel it. I would have hated being a barrister, setting people by the ears and making my living out of other people’s troubles. Being a farmer you feel that in doing good to yourself you are doing good all round. Miss Janie agrees with all I say. I think she is one of the most sensible girls I have ever come across, and Robin likes her awfully. So is the old man: he’s a brick. I think he has taken a liking to me, and I know I have to him. He’s the dearest old fellow imaginable. The very turnips he seems to think of as though they were so many rows of little children. And he makes you see the inside of things. Take fields now, for instance. I used to think a field was just a field. You scraped it about and planted it with seeds, and everything else depended on the weather. Why, Dad, it’s alive! There are good fields that want to get on — that are grateful for everything you do for them, and take a pride in themselves. And there are brutes of fields that you feel you want to kick. You can waste a hundred pounds’ worth of manure on them, and it only makes them more stupid than they were before. One of our fields — a wizened-looking eleven-acre strip bordering the Fyfield road — he has christened Mrs. Gummidge: it seems to feel everything more than any other field. From whatever point of the compass the wind blows that field gets the most harm from it. You would think to look at it after a storm that there hadn’t been any rain in any other field — that that particular field must have got it all; while two days’ sunshine has the effect upon it that a six weeks’ drought would on any other field. His theory (he must have a theory to account for everything; it comforts him. He has just hit upon a theory that explains why twins are born with twice as much original sin as other children, and doesn’t seem to mind now what they do) is that each odd corner of the earth has gained a character of its own from the spirits of the countless dead men buried in its bosom. ‘Robbers and thieves,’ he will say, kicking the sod of some field all stones and thistles; ‘silly fighting men who thought God built the world merely to give them the fun of knocking it about. Look at them, the fools! stones and thistles — thistles and stones: that is their notion of a field.’ Or, leaning over the gate of some field of rich-smelling soil, he will stretch out his arms as though to caress it: ‘Brave lads!’ he will say; ‘kindly honest fellows who loved the poor peasant folk.’ I fancy he has not got much sense of humour; or if he has, it is a humour he leaves you to find out for yourself. One does not feel one wants to laugh, listening even to his most whimsical ideas; and anyhow it is a fact that of two fields quite close to one another, one will be worth ten pounds an acre and the other dear at half a crown, and there seems to be nothing to explain it. We have a seven-acre patch just halfway up the hill. He says he never passes it without taking off his hat to it. Whatever you put in it does well; while other fields, try them with what you will, it is always the very thing they did not want. You might fancy them fractious children, always crying for the other child’s bun. There is really no reason for its being such a good field, except its own pluck. It faces the east, and the wood for half the day hides it from the sun; but it makes the best of everything, and even on the greyest day it seems to be smiling at you. ‘Some happy-hearted Mother Thing — a singer of love songs the while she toiled,’ he will have it, must lie sleeping there. By-the-bye, what a jolly field Janie would make! Don’t you think so, Dad?

“What the dickens, Dad, have you done to Veronica? She wanders about everywhere with an exercise book in her hand, and when you say anything to her, instead of answering you back, she sits plump down wherever she is and writes for all she’s worth. She won’t say what she’s up to. She says it’s a private matter between you and her, and that later on things are going to be seen in their true light. I told her this morning what I thought of her for forgetting to feed the donkey. I was prepared, of course, for a hundred explanations: First, that she had meant to feed the donkey; secondly, that it wasn’t her place to feed the donkey; thirdly, that the donkey would have been fed if circumstances over which she had no control had not arisen rendering it impossible for her to feed the donkey; fourthly, that the morning wasn’t the proper time to feed the donkey, and so on. Instead of which, out she whips this ridiculous book and asks me if I would mind saying it over again.

“I keep forgetting to ask Janie what it is he has been accustomed to. We have tried him with thistles, and we’ve tried him with hay. The thistles he scratches himself against; but for the hay he appears to have no use whatever. Robin thinks his idea is to save us trouble. We are not to get in anything especially for him — whatever we may happen to be having ourselves he will put up with. Bread-and-butter cut thick, or a slice of cake with an apple seems to be his notion of a light lunch; and for drink he fancies tea out of a slop-basin, with two knobs of sugar and plenty of milk. Robin says it’s waste of time taking his meals out to him. She says she is going to train him to come in when he hears the gong. We use the alarm clock at present for a gong. I don’t know what I shall do when the cow goes away. She wakes me every morning punctually at half-past four, but I’m in a blue funk that one of these days she will oversleep herself. It is one of those clocks you read about. You wrote something rather funny about one once yourself, but I always thought you had invented it. I bought it because they said it was an extra loud one, and so it is. The thing that’s wrong about it is that, do what you will, you can’t get it to go off before six o’clock in the morning. I set it on Sunday evening for half-past four — we farmers do have to work, I can tell you. But it’s worth it. I had no idea that the world was so beautiful. There is a light you never see at any other time, and the whole air seems to be full of fluttering song. You feel — but you must get up and come out with me, Dad. I can’t describe it. If it hadn’t been for the good old cow, Lord knows what time I’d have been up. The clock went off at half-past four in the afternoon, just as they were sitting down to tea, and frightened them all out of their skins. We have fiddled about with it all we know, but there’s no getting it to do anything between six p.m. and six am. Anything you want of it in the daytime it is quite agreeable to. But it seems to have fixed its own working hours, and isn’t going to be bustled out of its proper rest. I got so mad with it myself I wanted to pitch it out of the window, but Robin thought we ought to keep it till you came, that perhaps you might be able to do something with it — writing something about it, she means. I said I thought alarm clocks were pretty well played out by this time; but, as she says, there is always a new generation coming along to whom almost everything must be fresh. Anyhow, the confounded thing cost seven and six, and seems to be no good for anything else.

“Whatever was it that you really did say to Robin about her room? Young Bute came round to me on Monday quite upset about it. He says it is going to be all windows, and will look, when finished, like an incorrect copy of the Eddystone lighthouse. He says there will be no place for the bed, and if there is to be a fireplace at all it will have to be in the cupboard, and that the only way, so far as he can see, of her getting in and out of it will be by a door through the bathroom. She said that you said she could have it entirely to her own idea, and that he was just to carry out her instructions; but, as he points out, you can’t have a room in a house as if the rest of the house wasn’t there, even if it is your own room. Nobody, it seems, will be able to have a bath without first talking it over with her, and arranging a time mutually convenient. I told him I was sure you never meant him to do anything absurd; and that his best plan would be to go straight back to her, explain to her that she’d been talking like a silly goat — he could have put it politely, of course — and that he wasn’t going to pay any attention to her. You might have thought I had suggested his walking into a den of lions and pulling all their tails. I don’t know what Robin has done to him, but he seems quite frightened of her. I had to promise that I would talk to her. He’d better have done it himself. I only told her just what he said, and off she went in one of her tantrums. You know her style: If she liked to live in a room where she could see to do her hair that was no business of his, and if he couldn’t design a plain, simple bedroom that wasn’t going to look ridiculous and make her the laughing-stock of all the neighbourhood, then the Royal Institute of British Architects must have strange notions of the sort of person entitled to go about the country building houses; that if he thought the proper place for a fire was in a cupboard, she didn’t; that his duty was to carry out the instructions of his employers, and if he imagined for a moment she was going to consent to remain shut up in her room till everybody in the house had finished bathing it would be better for us to secure the services of somebody possessed of a little commonsense; that next time she met him she would certainly tell him what she thought of him, also that she should certainly decline to hold any further communication with him again; that she doesn’t want a bedroom now of any sort — perhaps she may be permitted a shakedown in the pantry, or perhaps Veronica will allow her an occasional night’s rest with her, and if not it doesn’t matter. You’ll have to talk to her yourself. I’m not going to say any more.